Reviews of 6/2 books

Right, so, as always very little time - Ben and Tzipora are out at the playground, so we do this in what would be, in any decent and just universe, my videogame time. But it's not a just universe, so how about some reviews, instead? FIRESTORM #14: I know they put the "America's #1 Nuclear Powered Hero!" on the cover as code that this was a good "jumping on" point, as Stuart Moore's first issue, but god, how tacky was that? Also, it was on the wrong side of the cover. Most stores either rack left-to-right overlapping, or top-to-bottom overlapping, and the blurb is barely visible from the latter and INvisible from the former. Ah, well, that's what the ivory tower brings you. Actually, in a world with a smart marketing department, they would have waited a year and let the series go fallow until it could be fully relaunched. This said as a man who despises "fake" #1s. Thing is, this may as well have been a brand new #1 -- while (2? 3?) of the characters are the same, it is a whole new rethinking. That might have even worked had the bait-and-switch of "Ronnie's back!" not just happened, surely leaving "original Firestorm" readers even colder than they were to begin with. Ultimately, I can't see much of a new audience coming in for #14 as they've had 2 chances to jump on now, with this being try #3 in around a year. Now, having said that, I thought this issue worked pretty well -- solid setup and new status quo. The art is competent, and the writing solid. In fact, I can fairly easily give this a low GOOD -- I just don't think it will make any difference.

HOUSE OF M #1: Certainly there's plenty of crisp writing here, with good character voices and POVs. It's also pretty slow, and not much of anything happens until that last page. Sales were slow this weekend -- probably running around half of what I expected, and I think one of the problems is no one really knows what the series is ABOUT. There's been a lot of vagueness, and promotional tools like the sketchbook were so intensely underwhelming, I don't think anyone feels impelled to add another mini-series. On the plus side, that should mean I'm stocked just fine when #8 comes out, something that is always hard to say with Marvel comics. I can imagine what I THINK this mini-series might and should end up doing (changing reality organically to make some of the universe-backstory start making sense once more. [example: Magneto is anchored to WW2. The time differential is starting to cause problems]), but who knows if I'm right or wrong? Not enough to tell from this first issue at least. In addition, I was faintly shocked that in all of the conversation of "how do we stop our crazy friend with God-powers?" at no time did any X-Man bring up Jean Grey. Pregnant pause in the middle of the comic for this reader at least. Hard to rate this, really, not enough occurred, but I can go with, I guess, a low GOOD.

JSA #74: I just want to say that the new DC logo looks pretty good when rendered in a variety of colors. There's an exception though: JSA *just* got a new logo, one that extends out to the edges of the cover, and the DC logo looks like complete ass, sitting on top of it. The new logo also looks like shit on the Johnny DC books -- the recently redesigned trade dress is artistically opposed to the "now!" of the new DC logo. As for JSA itself, I don't have much to say - there's good character moments in every scene, but there's so much Boom! Boom! in every issue, I'm starting to long for a quieter arc soon. Again, a low GOOD.

LAST HERO STANDING #1: What's odd is that I can't even give away SPIDER-GIRL. I have one subscription customer for it, but most of the time when I buy a rack copy, it ends up in the dollar box. We even had a subscriber add it to her list, trying to support titles with a female lead, but she dropped it 2 months later. "Wow, that's really awful!" she laughed. I don't know WHY I decided to order 5 copies of this SPIDER-GIRL "spinoff" -- certainly, it wasn't the SAFE move, and, especially when it's a weekly mini-series, which means order adjustments, the norm on Marvel books, become practically meaningless, and reorders will run a week behind (I'll be able to restock #1, if they have any to sell, when #3 is released). It's really the kind of book stores HATE to order, yet I gave it some support -- and we sold all of them by day #2. So, that's why retail can drive you crazy some days. Now, it is possible that people didn't REALIZE it was a SPIDER-GIRL "spin off" (that cover DOES mostly feature contemporary-looking characters), but, I dunno. Anyway, typical Tom DeFalco comic, in the "classic Marvel Style". I didn't care ABOUT any of it, set in the possible-future as it is, but I was entertained enough as I read it. Pure cotton candy, and probably worth an EH.

NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET #1: I like Ryp's artwork a whole lot, and I have a weird fascination with Freddy (I've seen each installment in the theatre -- even when I had to go to the seedy, sticky-floored, smell-emporium down on Market st. for it. It was never worth it, really), so I'm altogether too biased. But I thought Pulido did a pretty good job on this one: good use of "getting killed by what you think makes you you", and there was almost a point to the story (as opposed to a scenerio just to kill people) -- unlike TEXAS CHAINSAW MASACRE #1, also this week, with which I was completely befuddled, as it didn't go at all with my recollection of the (original) film. This was not high art, by any means, but for a licensed comic, it held a high standard, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of the same. I'm surprised too, I'm giving it a GOOD. (TCM #1 gets an AWFUL)

ORORO BEFORE THE STORM #1: Action packed street-urchin adventure! Which is about as exciting as it sounds. Filled with kids who talk like adults, this might have been a better fit in the ADVENTURES line, though I wonder how good it really is to sell kids a role model who is a pickpocket and a thief? A big EH.

SEVEN SOLDIERS ZATANNA #2: Liekd it much better than #1, and I might have even liked it better than GUARDIAN #2. If all American comics were this smart and crisp, this blog would be called THE RAINBOW CRITIC. Great terrific fun, and VERY GOOD.

SON OF VULCAN #1: Didn't really like the ameri-manga art. And I thought the use and explanation for Woodrue was pretty babble-tastic. And I really don't at all remember the original Son Of Vulcan (Charlton character -- maybe some sort of sword-and-sorcery thing, maybe?), and yet I thought this was kinda fun. "What if Batman was killed on Robin's first day out?" could be the one-line high concept. I thought the minuses (esp the art) will keep it down to an OK, but I'll be keeping one eye on this series as the next issues develop.

SUPER FUCKERS #1: James Kochalka's ode to the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES (pretty much), and it perversely wants me to see him do it straight. I got some grins and giggles, but I think it was probably priced too high for its content, so I'll go with a very low GOOD.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #20: Like many people, I now wish I hadn't read Jeph Loeb's interview on Newsarama -- I might have missed some of the specific jabs. All of that is unnecessary. Hand to God, "friendly rivalry" is a wonderful thing between 2 publishers. It's sorta charming, even. This jarring and personal trash-talking that's going on these days? It doesn't make me like comics any better, kids. I liked the lunacy of some of this -- I thought Bat-zarro's captions mirroring his words was the most perfectly-perfect idea in perfect idea land, for example -- but wtf was up with Superman pretty casually murdering another character? I hate shit like that, it doesn't make me long for the next issue so we can see what kind of dream hoax or imaginary story it might have been -- it makes me think, "How could you possibly be so irresponsible as to show Superman murder someone, regardless of the context?" So continues my love/hate relationship with SUPERMAN/BATMAN. A very splitting-the-difference OK.

That's it, sick of writing. Not many books, but much longer entries this time.

Obviously, my PICK OF THE WEEK is ZATANNA #2. I'm going to skip the WEAK this week because I didn't bother to write it up. Maybe you could try and guess?

As for BOOK/TP OF THE WEEK, I have 2 entries for you -- MIRRORMASK ILLUSTRATED SCRIPT HC, which is Neil Gaiman's script, and Dave McKean's storyboards, for their, I-hope-it-will-be-released film. I haven't read the guts of the book yet, so I can't say whether or not it is any good, but I really liked the introductions, and the 2 outroductions, and the book looks well worth it.

I can also strongly recommend Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's WE 3 TP -- what an astonishingly good story, even if it is 25% more expensive than the serialization (!!). It's also selling like a MONSTER -- without one single doubt our largest dollar SKU of June, even with 24 days to go in the month.

So that's it, what did YOU think?

-B

Groggy Morning Breakdown: A Few Reviews from 6/1 Comics.

Guh. I'd planned to wait one more week before diving back into the funnybook game but since Hibbs is apparently an even lazier bastard than me, lemme eke out just a review or two.... AQUAMAN #31: I flipped through this pretty fast, but I get the sense the writer wrote it slightly faster. We get flashbacks to Aquagirl getting her ass beat by the serial killer and then disappearing (thus creating whatever actual tension the issue has) and then at the end of the comic she just pops up, safe and unharmed. Why and how? Oh, because the issue's over? Oh, okay. Awful.

EMO BOY #1: Wrong cover if you ask me, because it suggests we should take Emo Boy and his emoness somewhat compassionately, something the cartoonist has no interest in doing whatsoever. I guess if you really, really hate yourself some emo, you'll like this, but I usually like my "ha ha ha, everyone sucks" humor to either have more compassion or more obvious talent, which is why I find, say, Clowes' takedowns to be brilliant, and this to be merely Eh.

EXILES #65: Clever, but there better be a clever "similar but different" change-up in the next issue or this book'll have no reason to exist. Hibbs and I spent an absurdly long amount of time as to whether "lost and get home" series (Lost In Space, Quantum Leap, Sliders, etc.) really work for longer than three years before everyone loses interest. He says yes, I say hell, no. Either way, though, these guys may have clevered themselves out of a job unless they have a dynamite follow-up. OK.

HOUSE OF M #1: Bendis' most accomplished big hero spectacular to date, which is mighty faint praise, I know. It's more or less a very accomplished issue of Secret Wars II (all the superheroes get together to debate whether an unstable person with reality-changing powers should be iced) with a last page twisteroo that made me yawn. But Xavier and Magneto at least sound like themselves and not like David Mamet, and the art is pretty so what the hell? A very high OK, I guess.

INCREDIBLE HULK #82: A fill-in issue with really pretty art. Nothing more, nothing less and on its own terms, Good.

SEVEN SOLDIERS ZATANNA #2: I'm more or less underwhelmed--although this wasn't terrible or anything. Art's good; dialogue is witty; and I guess it's kind of clever that there's an Emily The Strange analog running around, but there's some crucial way I'm not connecting with the material I can't quite figure out--I guess I kinda can't figure out what Zatanna's whole deal is here. A lowish Good because it's still pretty good compared to what's out there this week but I have me some reservations, yessir.

SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #5: Yes, yes, dinosaurs, boobies, "Holy Buckets," got it. If I was ten years old, or it turned out Frank Cho was, maybe I'd be thrilled. On the other hand, if I was ten, I'd probably still be wondering why this was seven issues instead of two. My disgruntlement inclines me toward Awful.

STRANGE #6: Well, at least Clea turned out to be from another dimension after all. So I guess there's that but the rest of it stank pretty heavily. As long as all involved pretend to forget it ever happened, I'm willing to let it off with an Awful.

SUPER FUCKERS #1: If this had been $2.95, no problem: it's a cute little spin on The Legion of Superheroes, if they had really acted like teenagers. But seven-fuckin'-bucks? I can't wrap my head around why this book has to cost that much. The price tag makes it Awful.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #20: Loeb's bizarro dialogue really hurt my head, but Batzarro was really fuckin' hilarious regardless. But the real problem was the rest of the book--it seems to be working up to a critique of the Ultimates approach to grim and gritty rebootings of classic superheroes, a position Loeb would be better suited to criticize if he hadn't just had an arc where Superman strangled Wonder Woman with her golden lasso and other creepy shit. On the other hand, Loeb is such a lunatic when it comes to plotting, who can really say where this'll end up? A very high OK just for Batzarro alone.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE #1: Like this week's Nightmare book, a much better representation of the films than the previous Friday the 13th one-shot, although this suffers from being tied to the recent remake and its cast of thousands approach. Burrows' art is also surprisingly perfunctory in a lot of places, although his gore is as nasty-looking as ever. OK.

WALKING DEAD #19: The book I liked the best this week although I also have some quibblage about it. (Those zombies from Block A sure arrived at one hell of a convenient time, didn't they?) Still, let's call it a Good and hope the pacing evens out a little--I feel like Kirkman is driven to produce bigger and bigger shocks each issue and that may end up missing some good character beats. But somewhere between Good and Very Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK: King Crabbypants liked Walking Dead #19, but what the hell do I know? I spent most of this weekend reading Sgt. Frog, Vol. 2.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Shanna The She-Devil #5 and Strange #6 are so much less than the sum of their parts, I'll give it to both of them.

TRADE PICK: WE3, no question. Don't know why the higher price point than Seaguy (yes, yes, nice paperstock and all, but...why?) but so darn lovely I guess I don't care. The one to get.

A handful of reviews of 5/25 books

Even less time than normal this week -- have to get the order form done, and the next month’s sub set up, plus it's a holiday weekend, and the store has been rocking. Jeff's out of town, so this is all the Critic you get this week. I'm barely halfway through this week's books, but I was writing as I was reading, and if I don;t post this now, I don't know when I would. We're pretty purely mainstream stuff this week as a result

Evidently, I was also extra-cranky this week...

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #640: I very much liked the formal experiment (the top 2/3rds was completely told in pictures -- from a scrapbook, or a magazine, or a broadcast -- if you didn't notice), and the story was very well crafted, but that big reveal seems pretty preposterous to me. OK

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #520: Probably this should be called "The Avenging Spider-Man", since it's all-Avengers, all the time. As an issue of Spider-Man, I didn't care for it, but as an issue of Avengers it entertained me more than the recent stuff, so I can go with OK, I guess.

BATMAN #640: Effective art, and the Red Hood sequences were clever enough, but, man, that Superman/Batman scene was pretty damn pointless, wasn't it? A mild OK from me.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #6: Perfectly strong issue, I guess (though the last page undercut the Big Reveal -- sorta like how the season ender of LOST undercut itself by not ending one commercial earlier), though it seems to me that it would be difficult for it to be The Actual Bucky. He'd be in his 70s or 80s now then, right? Brube's point of B's death being a retcon is stictly true, but he's going to have to work really hard to make this new story make more "sense" then the 30 years of "Dead means dead" we've grown up with. I, personally, do rather hope this is a feint. A strong OK.

DAY OF VENGEANCE #2: None of these characters are remotely in what I'd consider to be "in character", and much of this don't make no sense (magic in the DCU seldom does), and yet it was breezy enough with fun dialogue and nice art, that I'll go with OK.

DC SPECIAL THE RETURN OF DONNA TROY #1: Um... what? How was Donna brought back? Just a quick "I was resurrected" in the middle of the data dump with no explanation? Then page after page of "Who's he?" and "I don't care" fighting and blah blah blah. I never liked the "New Titans" idea in the first place. This is clunky stuff, and hardly what I'd want to present as my first impression to DC. Since it is the "collector's item" first appearance of the new DC logo, and all. Garcia Lopez and Perez's art (both of whom I love individually) really doesn't gel very well here -- GL was always about the fluidity of line for me, and Perez about the obsessive doodling, together it "hardens" GLs line to me and looks blocky and too heavy. Or something, I don't have the vocabulary to properly discuss art. This is one of the places where the usual critic scale fails me -- it's worse than "EH", but "AWFUL" seems to harsh.

FANTASTIC FOUR #527: well-written, pretty to look at, and some solid ideas. Won't win an Eisner, but it's a GOOD issue of FF. The copy machine joke died, though -- Nick just had said only 2 copies were allowed.

FLASH #222: Still suffering a bit from the Too Many Characters and Too Many Plans syndrome, and the Let's Space out the Reveal on Boomerang's Mom Some More annoyed the piss out of me, but good solid action comic here, alright. a strong OK.

GIRLS #1: I thought ULTRA was keen from the first issue -- this grabbed me much less, what with the "get me wet" and "squeeze my melons" and the other "we're aiming lower than we might" stuff. While it's hard to judge from one issue, my first instinct is "Sophomore Slump". Looks pretty, though. OK.

GREEN LANTERN #1: I hate to say it -- I mean, I REALLY hate to say it because there's not a bigger Hal fan than me -- but this was pretty dull. Crafted well enough, but I would have expected a much bigger opening and scope. Coast City really seems weird and creepy, too, and I can't imagine anyone living there -- that could actually be a clever little running backstory, but it doesn't feel like one that fits in a GL comic. Plus, whatever happened to "Haven", the crashed alien ship/city thing? There was a quick line in REBIRTH that they vanished, but you'd think that space-savvy Hal would make that a top priority. Well, sure, it was never a good idea to begin with (do you remember the initial press, about how this would be a major facet of the DCU and lots of writers were planning on touching upon it, and yadda?), but it seems like a pretty major thing to just leave hanging. Anyway, glad to see Hal back, but I don't really care about pilots and piloting very much. Sadly, a very low OK.

INCREDIBLE HULK #81: Meh: was it real or not? I mean, he "rides off" at the end -- but if it was all a nightmare, as it were, then where the hell is he riding TO? And the coda was really unnecessary. Nice cover, though. OK

JLA #114: Buh? Look when you start changing costumes and all that it, then set it in a pitched space battle, it becomes pretty damn confusing who is who and doing what and how. Plus, I think I can speak for everyone who is me and say "No, we don't want them to TEAM UP, sheesh!" The Construct angle was clunkily resolved, and I really really didn't buy any of the last page of League speechifying about why the let the CSA get away. Having said all that, I think I'd be interested in reading a Busiek CSA book that stayed 100% in the evil universe -- he throws out lots of cute little bits throughout the issue and arc. Still, this individual comic was pretty incoherent, so: AWFUL.

MACHINE TEEN #1: Slow slow slow; especially since the Big Reveal is sorta spoiled by the TITLE of the book. What surprised me was the art -- it simply doesn't look polished enough for a Marvel title, does it. A great big whopping EH from me.

NEW X-MEN HELLIONS #1: really horrendously long way to go to get that set-up together. And it feels kinda awkward and clunky at that. There's really no reason this shouldn't have just be an arc in the regular title rather than its own mini-series, or, in fact, even had to be a "Hellions" story. A big fat OK.

OMAC PROJECT #2: I liked the first couple of pages, though was frustrated when they cut away because the rest has to happen in another comic book. Don't really care much about the Machiavellian goings on in Checkmate, so most of the rest of the issue was wasted on me. I'll go with OK, though I basically Don't Care.

OUTSIDERS #24: Man, you'd think they'd put a cover blurb on this that says "INSIDERS 2 of 4!" or something so that all of the people who don't religiously follow comic news sites and buy both titles would know they're walking in the middle of a crossover. I feel sorry for the poor shmuck who just reads OUTSIDERS and not TITANS who reads #23 then reads this. "Wait, what now?" Then the rest just devolves into a dumb fight scene, and you're left wondering, "Why didn't she just kill them all, ESPECIALLY after announcing that she had an advantage they didn't -- they had no idea who she was or what she could do" "This has all been part of a plan" is fine, I guess, if the plan is any good. This is not. AWFUL.

RUNAWAYS #4: Kind of a wasted issue -- extraordinarily little happens in the first half, while the second half is yet another "let's walk through the possibilities". The last page fills me with a smidge of hope, though I will gently observe that DD already has/had an heir, so it feels like treading back over ground we've seen before.

SLEEPER SEASON TWO #12: satisfying wrap-up, yes. Successfully went both ways and ate some cake, too. I can give this a VERY GOOD.

ULTIMATE IRON MAN #2: Again, not any Iron Man I've ever read before, but, judging on it's own merits this is solid enough comics. Big quibble in the "tape dissolves, but he can still wear shoes" thing, but, whatever, I'll go with a muted and mild GOOD.

ULTIMATES 2 #6: Nice idea of using "The Defenders" as they did -- that worked really well, I thought. Wish the last page had been a smidge more specific: NO ONE would say "We crippled a nation this morning", they'd say, "We crippled France", or whatever. Other than that, a solid VERY GOOD.

PICK OF THE WEEK: SLEEPER v2 #12

PICK OF THE WEAK: From what I've read so far, OUTSIDERS #24.

BOOK / TP oF THE WEEK: either GOTHAM CENTRAL HALF A LIFE TP, TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD VOL 2THIS ONE GOES TO 11 TP, or WRATH OF THE SPECTRE TP -- all three are great books

Jeff's Reviews on 5/18 Books

Oh, that Hibbs. He manages to coax more responses out of you guys than we've ever gotten, knocks a couple reviews out of the park, than tells me he probably won't post until Monday at the earliest because of some crazy shit like, "It's going to be a beautiful weekend and we have plans on both days to take Ben somewhere new. Just post something whenever you can, and I'll follow up. Maybe." Gee, thanks, Mr. Sinatra. I'll be more than happy to warm up the crowd for a few hours until you feel like coming on stage... Oh, and somehow this wasn't supposed to be umpteen million words of blabbity-blab. It just ended up that way.

BATMAN DARK DETECTIVE #2: I liked everything up until the patented "Scarecrow gives Batman a hallucinatory freak-out scene" and even that was crafted in such a way (once Bruce figures out the Scarecrow's responsible, he has to figure out if that means Scarecrow is actually in the batcave with him and Silver) as to add some secondary suspense. If I have anything close to a major complaint, it's that "Hush" has turned every Batman arc into The Love Boat. Look, it's The Joker and Two-Face! And Scarecrow and Penguin! And Tom Bosley and Bea Arthur! I can understand it with this team since they're doing the equivalent of a greatest hits tour, but it's really undercut by having it happen in every other Batman book, all the time, and for a few years now. OK.

BIRDS OF PREY #82: I didn't really see much point to the repetition of those captions about Ted Grant's boxing career other than the second time through I realized how well written they were. Things like that and some of the bits throughout (I liked the litte factoid about fighting on sand) and some super-nice art make me wanna give this a Good, but I really have to qualify it: there's still some kinks in the pacing (Barbara's scenes felt tacked on; a story about breaking up a drug ring is becoming a story about Diana and Ted's fight to not compromise their ethics--which is laudable (and arguably more dramatic)--but also points out what a poor match they were for the assignment in the first place) that keep me from being genuinely enthusiastic about it. A wishy-washy Good vote from me, I guess.

BLACK PANTHER #4: The best of the issues by far and Hudlin has a genuinely interesting idea here (the nationality of the invading villains reflect the countries that colonized and plundered Africa, giving the story an almost allegorical resonance and tension) but the execution is still lacking--like many other filmmakers who've come to comics, he seems reluctant to edit anything out or tighten anything up--and none of it is half as interesting or thought-provoking as his response on a letter page to an accusation of racial bias. Taken in tandem though, I'd give this a very high OK.

CABLE DEADPOOL #15: I felt a few self-conscious twinges when Rob L'Heureux mentioned this book specifically as an example of crap in our comments section because, against all odds, Fabian Nicieza has made this book I enjoy reading simply by showing a degree of intelligence and craft that I wouldn't expect from the material. It's a pretty trashy pleasure and I do my best to qualify it as such, but for what it sets out to do, it does it well. There. With that shiningly qualified defense of Cable Deadpool put forward, let me say this issue didn't work for me at all (cue the guy going "wah-wahhhh" on the trombone). Deadpool wasn't particularly funny, the fight scenes weren't particularly interesting, and oh sweet Jebus, that recent Age of Apocalypse thingy makes me never want to see that setting again. It's an Eh issue, but I'll still see where it's at next ish.

CHEMISTRY ONE-SHOT: Steve Peters has a fine drawing line, a weakness for magical thinking, and a tendency to overanalyze things to within an inch of their life. This one-shot, drawn at the rate of a panel a day, starts as a stream of consciousness adventure that becomes an allegorical analysis of a relationship's failings and it alternately charmed and alienated me. It's charming because the facile line art is strikingly detailed and clean, and Peters seems like a sweet guy capable of injecting humor and insight into his narrative. It's alienating because, like a religious zealot or a guy whacked out on drugs or someone with mild Asperger's, he takes something relatively obvious and, incapable of seeing it, keeps insisting it's something complex and oblique. Chemistry looks at a rebound relationship that didn't work out and examines every possible reason it didn't work out (bad karma, self-sabotage, premonitions of emotional dishonesty) except the most obvious one--the girl was looking for a light, fun fling and Steve couldn't bring the light and fun. Although it can take a certain amount of time for something like that to sink in (and such a problem is certainly a fertile ground for great art), Chemistry made me anxious and depressed, in the same way being trapped in a conversation with the zealot, the stoner or the Asperger's person can, as the obsessiveness of its approach goes on to yield no greater insight. Chemistry actually gets an OK from me because I kept reading it, and there were parts of it I found greatly enjoyable. If you like work that honestly communicates how someone else's mind works, you'll like Chemistry. If you like thinking about why a piece of art works and why it doesn't, you'll like Chemistry (particularly if you've read Geoffrey Brown's stuff which covers very similar ground in utterly dissimilar ways). But if you're the type of person who wants to help people fix their problems, or even see them solve their problems themselves, caveat emptor in a very big way.

DAREDEVIL #73: Changes up what seemed like the rules of the arc and that's likely a good thing, but I'm going to miss the modular done-in-one approach. Made it very easy to review. Now, I have to give this a high OK because where it goes from here will tell whether this issue worked at all or not. Maleev's art is fucking rad, though: this issue's art really knocked me out.

DESOLATION JONES #1: Yeah, came out last week, but I just wanted to say that double-page spread where Jones gouges that guy's eye out should go in The Double-Page Spread Hall of Fame. I'm just in awe of it--it gave me that same giddy nauseous brain-slap I got when Sonny Chiba breaks that guy's skull in x-ray during The Streetfighter, and may well work as both brilliant impressionistic storytelling and wicked pop art meta-commentary. No matter how you slice it (and I think Jones is actually an evolution, not a retread, of the classic Ellis character), that spread alone is worth your dollars. Very Good.

EX MACHINA #11: You know when you're in a plane and it loses altitude and your ears pop? Kinda how I felt this issue as Vaughan really changes up his pacing, drops any B story (after ten issues of scrupulously working the A-B story format), and focuses all of his scenes on Tony's drive to close down New York's fortune tellers. On the one hand, the story shot ahead like a rocket and it felt like a shitload happened. On the other hand, none of it really connected with me emotionally which made it even harder for me to buy the premise. Throw in some outrageously bad body language in the opening scenes (it looks like the police commissioner is communicating to Tony strictly through the medium of interpretative dance) and you've got your first Eh issue of this book. Considering how little I liked the wrap-up of the last arc, I hope that's not an indicator of things to come. Fingers are officially crossed.

EXILES #64: Boy, I really miss Mike McKone's art on this book: that guy can really sell a scene, you know? The plot and the writing are fine--in fact, it's pretty good despite some quibblage--but the art has kept everything at the same pitch for the last three arcs: it's the Exiles versus unstoppable bad guy Hyperion, who seems just like unstoppable bad guy Armageddon, who seems just like unstoppable bad guy Sasquatch god. There's always a danger of things flattening out when the storytellers keep going over the top again and again, but I think the art has really abetted that here. I feel like I'm right at the moment I get with a decent pop song on a radio--where the repetition drives me from really liking it to never wanting to hear it again. Call that a very manic OK.

FRIDAY THE 13TH #1: I think this tongue-in-cheek one-shot really misunderstands the nature of the Friday the 13th films which mercilessly exploit teens' fascination and disgust with bodies and their functions--the body's desire to have sex; its ability to break, crack and spurt, all viewed and tested by a brutal, unthinking puritan (by which I mean not only Jason, but also the mindset of a pre-teen child which still lingers in the thinking of a teenger). So, cleaving a body in half with a machete so the insides can be examined like a medical dummy (as happens on page 2): On target. Jason hitting people so hard their heads come out their asses: Very deeply off-target (really, it sounds so much better than it is). Throw in two oblivious teens having sex in a way that parodies all those other oblivious teens having sex and you have a Friday the 13th one-shot perfect for people who really don't like Friday the 13th movies. I say Awful, but I could well be so high on my artsy-fartsy crackpot theories I'm completely off-base.

GOON #12: Mmmm. Goon. The last two issues have really used the coloring to take things to a whole 'nother level, haven't they? And that boxing match with the robot was just a thing of sheer and simple beauty. The story, by its nature, feels a bit redundant but all the little touches more than make up for it. Very Good.

GREEN LANTERN SECRET FILES 2005: That lead story was a little too crafted (the third time someone said "You've never flown with me," I double-checked the credits to see if it'd been based on a Harry Chapin song or something) but undeniably gorgeous-looking, and I thought Cooke switching his typical Toth-based style to a Kane-influenced style in that middle section was clever and audacious. The second story read like a pile of script outtakes from Rebirth and seemed like the sort of thing you'd show people coming on to acid to guarantee that they'd have a really shitty trip. Considering I hardly like Secret Files issues (and I guess really hate people coming on to acid), that all adds up to Good, believe it or not.

HAWKMAN #40: My hope is there's some very clever bait-and-switch going on with the funeral thing, but either way, I just didn't like this issue very much. It's just--I dunno. It reads like a deliberate mimicing of Geoff Johns' patented Classic Character Dogpile, but it lacks Johns' ability to indicate what makes each character in the dogpile unique. The art's darn pretty, but barely rates an Eh.

HERCULES #2: Okay, so much for all the good will I granted Frank Tieri last issue. He's got a good idea he has no interest in actually executing: He's only got three issues left and Hercules hasn't started any of his twelve labors yet! Are we going to get five pages per labor? Perhaps part of the problem is that Tieri is writing this as a comedy, and he and I have two very different ideas about how comedy should work--I think it should be funny, and he doesn't. Awful.

JANES WORLD #19: Pleasant enough soap opera, and the humor runs the gamut from witty to overdone (I really liked the sports bra joke before it was run straight into the ground). But it feels like Braddock is still learning her craft--very solid cartooning chops, but the writing frequently clunks, and an inability to speed up the storytelling leads to a really high pagecount. Said count may explain the $5.95 price tag but that just seems way too high a price for a book this emotionally slight (at least in a comic book store; it may sell just fine on the racks of a GLBT bookstore). Pricing and other problems drops it to Eh for me, but this was actually a very pleasant little read.

LIVEWIRES #4: This book is drenched in clever touches but I think it's not enough for me: a scene like the discussion of the emotion hack should feel like a clever bit of tantalization, but I read it annoyed that it didn't actually reveal anything. I really like Adam Warren's work a lot but somehow this all went wrong somewhere (I guess that really wheel-spinning second issue) and I'm just not with the program. Eh.

MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #14: Starts with a really lousy scene--Spidey flips out because Wolverine cuts him, to the point he actually passes out from blood loss, but at no point do the artist or the colorist feel any urge to put, oh, you know, blood, anywhere in the scene--and pretty much goes downhill from there. Initial amusement over the Clark Kent analogue shoving Peter Parker into a supply closet turned to utter incredulity as the analogue apparently convinces Peter to pray(!) so he can conveniently heal him with his Sentryvision or something. My hope is Hibbs gets some really pointy sticks installed in the store so I can just stab myself in the head with them instead of reading the next issue. It would be much less painful. Awful.

PLASTIC MAN #16: Spins its wheels and vamps, even by the standard set by previous issues: I get the sense Baker has fun thinking of some of this stuff, and takes almost no pleasure drawing it--the tip-off being how the quality of art shifts so dramatically upward whenever he's drawing a female character. As a kid's book, Good, as my book that I'm paying $2.99 for: Eh.

ROBIN #138: Some really interesting art here with fight scenes where the panel borders disappear entirely (a pretty neat trick). But I just couldn't get through the book to save my life. Look, I don't have the faintest god-damn opinion on how a Robin book should read or look, but every page of this oozed wrongness. Either I'm a cranky opinionated bastard (guilty) or this book has seriously got to get its shit together. Or both. Awful.

SEVEN SOLDIERS GUARDIAN #2: If you liked last issue mainly because of the pirate stuff, you'll like this issue even more. If you liked last issue because of the superhero stuff, you'll like this issue at least a little less (Guardian maybe does more than jumps from one subway car to the next, but I don't remember it). The pirate subway stuff is so much fun (and is that an oblique connection to Klarion The Witch Boy on one page?), I gotta go with Very Good.

SIMPSONS COMICS #106: What should have been a solid gold idea--crossing The Simpsons with those old musical parodies you used to see in Mad Magazine--falls astonishingly flat, mainly because the songs are set to tunes like "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover." I'm not sure if the editors insisted that the songs be stuff little kids would recognize or what, but it and the weird "we can't be authentic anymore because we're putting it all out on stage" angle just did not work for me at all. Disappointingly Eh.

SPIDER-MAN HUMAN TORCH #4: Well-crafted and if the intention was to create an issue as visually boring as the books from the era in which it was set, mission accomplished. OK, but nothing to write home about.

STRANGE EGGS #1: Starts off with a lot of charm and snap, then suffers a real case of the Shared Universe Anthology Blues--a significant chunk of the cartoonists seem to not care about (or completely loathe) the given constraints and just do what they want. Kind of a shame the whole project ended up as corporate roadkill, but pretty understandable. Eh.

SUPERMAN #217: The first half made no sense but I kind of liked it anyway (Lois had been wiped into the negative zone for the better part of a year, then when she returns, Superman disappears for seven weeks? Ms. Lane, you should file for divorce now: your husband HATES you.) I really hated the second half and realized the first half only existed to give the second half some impact, so I now hate the first half, too. A low Eh, because it's still an improvement over "For Tomorrow."

TEEN TITANS #24: Effective but I'm pretty shocked Winick let Johns use that last page reveal--it really, really belongs in The Outsiders. I also worry that Judd and Geoff will reinforce each other's worst impulses on this upcoming crossover, but I hope I'm wrong. Good.

UNCANNY X-MEN #459: Jesus. Here's a storyline with a intelligent superpowered dinosaurs, the Savage Land, a third faction of supervillains, and it still wraps up in the dullest way possible. And what kind of dinosaur decides to wipe out the rest of the Earth with a new ice age when some judicious overheating would render the rest of the world ready for its culture's repopulation? I'm almost glad Alan Davis is leaving the book: this way I won't feel his skills are being squandered when Nightcrawler and X-23 face off against the Sh'iar Empire in a brutal Pictionary showdown. Sumptious looking but Awful.

WOLVERINE #28: I have no idea what Mark Millar was trying to accomplish with this issue. In fact, I don't think he had any idea either. Is he trying to show he's not homophobic by having Evil Northstar and his team of zombie ninjas run around killing rednecks and gaybashers? What kind of evil master plan does Hydra have going when there's an explanation like: "Well, SHIELD's in ruins and the superheroes are in a panic, so we thought we'd have some fun killing off rednecks?" My mind is still reeling from it. Throw in a really dumb Sentinel sequence (presumably after Romita refused to accept any more pages from Millar that read like: "Pgs. 14-21: Wolverine kills everyone in sight. Really let yourself go on this one, J!") and you've got full-on Eh or lower.

YOUNG AVENGERS #4: As (almost) always, the time travel stuff makes not a lick of sense (and frankly, wouldn't it be cooler if Kang had set the whole thing in motion because he wants his younger self to be an Avenger and thus give his older self insider knowledge that could help beat the team?) But I liked all the other stuff a lot. There's a good balance of revealing bits and pieces about the various members and continuing to add characters to the team. So even without the sense-licking, I'm calling this Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Pretty easy. Either Goon #12 or Guardian #2. I'll go with Guardian #2, just because.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Hercules #2 because I was dumb enough to give Frank Tieri the benefit of the doubt last issue. That'll learn me.

TRADE OF THE WEEK: God damn Marvel's greedy eyes: you cannot tell me there was any reason Giant-Size Marvel needed to be twenty-four fucking ninety-nine. This could have been a great breezy read filled with lots of fun stories, a real snapshot of the age. Instead, it's an overpriced vial of Marvel Zombie crack cocaine, and I barely escaped buying it and letting myself be robbed. (Secondary eye-damning goes to DC for making the cover of their Teen Titans trade look like the animated series in the hopes some kids will actually pick it up and be scarred by the Beast Boy vivisection story.) The trade I went home with is Vol. 3 of Walking Dead, so I guess that's my pick.

So there you have it. Don't leave me hanging: what'd you think?

"Why are you always so negative?"

Got a comment in the Talk Back of last week’s reviews that I thought might be bigger consideration than just responding there were no one would see it. A “Brian” (no last name) wrote: "Whew! Thanks for telling me what stinks, guys! Now I know I don't need to come into your shop and spend any money!”

Which, while fabulous in its snarkiness, actually does bring up something I get a lot: “Why are you so negative all of the time?”

So, let’s go over some of the reasons you’ll find negative reviews here.

First, and foremost, I usually hear it from people who say some variant of “You’re a retailer, your job is to sell.” But, here’s the thing: I don’t see my job as being that specifically limited – my job is to sell, sure, but I see that over the long run, not the short run.

It is like with Variant Covers: some retailers adore the things because “It is like getting a free $100 bill!” Which, of course, it is. But I believe that in the long run taking that $100 can cost you THOUSANDS of dollars in sales as we drive people away from the entire hobby.

In exactly the same way, my job isn’t “just to sell” – it’s to sell QUALITY MATERIAL. If I can discourage someone from buying a shitty-ass comic, then it is at least marginally more likely they’ll buy something good; something that puts the burning need to buy MORE comics within their heart.

What you have to understand is that there’s a fine line here that I constantly try to be smart about. What you see in cold hard type isn’t the same thing you’d necessarily hear on the sales floor – I try very hard to remain positive in the store because a customer there may or may not be interested in my opinion. However, if you’re here, on this website, you CLEARLY WANT my opinion.

On the sales floor, I won’t offer my opinion UNLESS it is solicited, and even then, I tend to try and remain neutral in my phrasing (“It isn’t really my kind of book,” that sort of thing)

There seems to be a supposition that what is said here has direct influence upon the sales floor. After 16 years of selling comics for a living, and more than a decade of internet reviewing, I think I can laugh pretty hard at any connection.

Some of the worst reviewed comics here are the tip-toppest sellers in the store. Look at something like Bendis’ AVENGERS: I absolutely think it is pure crap on a stick, but it has steadily been our #1, 2, or 3 Marvel seller each and every month it has been released.

Understand: most (60-90%) periodical comics are sold by the end of the first weekend. It is incredibly rare that Jeff or I get reviews up in time to influence periodical buying.

Further, every effort I’ve ever made to study it shows that negative reviews simply do not impact even upon our long-term sales of periodical comics. People buy what they want, and reviews have only the most minor of impacts upon those choices.

Ultimately, post-Wednesday reviews have almost no impact upon initial sales – at best, they can be addative to the NEXT time you go into a store. But if you’ve already decided to not buy NEW AVENGERS, I’m not going to make you buy it less.

Another key factor for me, at least, is that negative reviews illuminate the interests of the reviewer AT LEAST as much as positive reviews. If you like all of the books that I hate, then you’re going to approach my positive reviews differently than you would otherwise.

Personally, I HATE reviewers that only give positive reviews – this seems intellectually dishonest to me, and “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” is really only helpful if you’re trying to catch flies.

What I think is that by being HONEST about my opinions, even if it COULD cost me a sale, means that you’re going to value my recommendations all that more. You know I’m not trying to sell you a bill of goods, or whatever happens to be “hot” or whatever.

Further, judging from my email (though seldom the “Talk Backs”), comics professionals generally “appreciate” a negative review more than positive ones. Quite often I’ll get the “Yeah, it’s flawed, and here’s the behind-the-scenes bit you didn’t know”. Joe Casey, not withstanding. Kurt, Sean, Ed, Warren, etc. all of you read my reviews on a semi-regular basis, maybe you could post in the Talk Back if there’s any value to you in here?

Now, if the criticism is that we (well, mostly I) don’t do a good enough job OF explaining WHY I don’t like something, that one is probably valid. I like to think I bat at least .400 though.

Finally, and the point that really trumps any other one: Jeff and I post largely for ourselves. We make no money from this website. There are no banner ads, this is not a profit-making affair (quite the opposite, in fact). I post on MY time (barring the weird odd occasion like this one where I use the AlphaSmart from the counter), time away from playing video games or hanging out with the family or whatever. We don’t get paid for this, barring an incredibly rare PayPal donation or something, so what I’m hoping for is that I’ll make someone (usually Jeff) laugh.

That’s much easier to do in a negative review than a positive one. When was the last time you laughed when I said for the 86th time “USAGI YOJIMBO is an excellent comic that everyone should be buying”? Yeah, exactly.

This is the internet; people LIKE rants. We get thousands of hits, and are usually featured at or near the top of many “blog rolls” every week because of that. It seems to me we must be doing SOMEthing right.

I’m certainly willing to have a rational conversation about the pros and the cons of the approach we take here – please feel free to use the Talk Back to tell me I’m right or wrong, and I listen to all of it. Though I listen far more to people who sign their full name to their opinions…

What do you think?

-B

EDIT after I wrote that: there's a message that follows "Brian"'s, from "Rob L'Heureux" which I thought should also be put on the front page. Here's the whole thing:

" I usually agree with your reviews and pick up your recommendations that I haven't read and sometimes drop titles if I agree with your criticism. But occasionally I think you just miss the mark, the latest two examples being the ASTONISHING X-MEN and FABLES. The art on both titles is exceptional, well above the current standard and using the medium to advantage ( especially FABLES ), and I always enjoy the storytelling. A book like ASTONISHING, where everything seems to have been done with the characters and the writer has to handle these ‘moneymakers’ so gingerly, I mean, this is a monthly serial but the writer still finds fresh material and presents it in an entertaining fashion.

These books haven’t changed my life but I really think a serious critic ( and retailer ) would encourage this level of work. Readers should be encouraged to support these titles, creators should be encouraged to strive for this level of storytelling ( or better ), and publishers should be encouraged to promote and produce more in kind. All of which would help the comic industry.

Sometimes you seem to hold some titles / creators to a higher standard and I hate you. "

I'm curious as to what other people think, though I will note that I gave ASTONISHING an "OK" and FABLES a "GOOD" (!) Am I TOO harsh?

-B

5/11 reviews by Hibbs!

Still haven't QUITE finished all this week's comics (have about 15 or so to go), but there's enough done to make a stab at this. Jeff Lester tenders his regrets, but he says he'll be unable to review this weekend, so it's just you and me baby!

Speaking of babies, have I told you about Ben's newest tactic? That's right, the little fella is now trying emotional blackmail! He'll want us to do something -- lift him up, get something for him, whatever, and if we won't do it right away, he'll say "I la!", which is Ben-ese for "I love you!" "I la!" I la!" (*makes kissy lip smacking noises*) "I la!"

It doesn't work, of course, but the power of the boy's brain continues to impress the crap out of me.

Anyway, comics:

ACTION COMICS #827: Me, I'm kinda thunderstruck that the return of John Byrne to Superman got about... well, NO marketing behind it whatever. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Byrne's MAN OF STEEL was the highest selling comic that DC had in like 30 years until they killed ol' Supey. Certainly, it sold 8-10 times better than IDENTITY CRISIS. More people read that than know what a "Sue Dibney" is. So why not trumpet it? Is it just me, or does that seem mental? And, the craziest part was this was easily the best Superman comic book I've read in a long-ass time (2 years? 3?) -- fun action, good Lois & Clark scenes, nice use of the worldwide power of Superman, awareness of the universe he's in, yet not bogging down on too many cast members, a fairly strong twist at the end. Good solid craftsmanship all around by Byrne, Simone, and Nelson, if one regarded this as "minimum base quality" for Superman, maybe the character'd sell 100,000 copies an issue again. I'm going to go with VERY GOOD (though the "very" could be a reaction to the last [2 years? 3?] of Superman comics...)

ADAM STRANGE #8: *shrug* I guess the series was fine -- the art was certainly sharp, and the plot was inventive enough. It was probably twice as long as it *needed* to be, what with the Omega Men-this and the Vril Dox-that, and I'm kind of pissed off that the end wasn't exactly an end, but more of a "Hey, now go buy this!", so that's while I'll give this one an EH.

AQUAMAN #30: "Sub Diego" is a decent enough idea -- I do especially like the stabs they're trying to make at showing how the undersea community is trying to cope, the scrabble board idea was fun, although it seems to me that the tiles would just float off -- but it's missing a few things, it seems to me: impact, scope, and a through-line. For the first two, just think what would happen if San Diego cracked in half and fell into the sea. That would be huge, it would be a huger incident than the Towers falling, by far. The effects of such a catastrophe would be enormous -- the economic impact alone to California... such an event should have been touched upon in every DCU book, y'know? I don't think it's ever even been MENTIONED anywhere else. By through-line, I mean, right, so where are you GOING with this? In a lot of way this looks like recognition that "Aquaman in Atlantis is kinda dull", but then you run up against, "well, wait, he's underwater guy, now what?" so they needed to build him Atlantis II. Problem is, unless you actually DO something with it, you're back to "Aquaman in Atlantis is kinda dull". Problem #2 is that a lot of what COULD be neat about rebuilding a city, dealing with the issues involved, don't really work right in a comic. That's an idea probably better suited for a novel. This actual issue of the comic itself, was perfectly OK, but I've come to think the very premise is misguided.

ARANA HEART OF THE SPIDER #4: That's kind of not the advice that I'd see Spidey giving to a little scared girl on a rooftop at night, but, whatever. Otherwise pedestrian: EH.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #10: See, maybe I wouldn't mind this as much if the issues were coming out monthly like they did in the beginning, but with that kind of a wait, part 2 of "fighting the Danger Room", came down to 2 good beats, both revolving around Emma, and a lot of, well... fighting. Extraordinarily well drawn fighting, yes, but it wasn't half as clever as it needed to be to make a middle sequence work. The best I can muster for this is a piece of serialization is an OK

BATMAN LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #191: A tidy enough one off Mr. Freeze story, though I was kinda shocked that no remorse was spoken for all of the dead murdered innocents in the explosion. A solid OK.

CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON #14: Sure, Captain America can just get up from a bullet in the head cuz, cuz, cuz... well, just because, OK?!? Then, just like it never happened, he gets up and enters major combat. Sweet! As for the Falcon... well, dunno. He's not in the issue. His costume is, though -- in just about the most strangely ambiguous ending I've seen lately. Are we to assume that's he's quit? Or maybe he's dead. Or kidnapped, even. No way to know, except to wait for the I guess forthcoming FALCON mini? 14 issues of build-up leads to zero emotional pay-off. Sorry, cholly, I gotta go with AWFUL.

CITY OF HEROES #1: Sure, that was fine, I guess -- a little more backstory for the NPCs of the MMOG is fine. And if you don't play the game, this might have seemed intriguing. Did you know that the character of Statesman, the lead main bad-ass guy, isn't even actually in the game? There's even a mission of "rescue Statesman" but you at no point see him. You just get a little piece of text saying he got away safely. Woo! Anyway, a perfectly OK comic.

DESOLATION JONES #1: Great start to this new bi-monthly ongoing from Warren Ellis and JH Williams III. Imaginative locale, great Ellisian characters, all in all terrific stuff. If you find yourself missing TRANSMETROPOLITAN, this hits a similar vein. VERY GOOD.

DESPERADOES BANNERS OF GOLD #5: I feel like I missed something here: how are they tipping over coal cars and such exactly? Ending the story so the supernatural elements are more the focus than the emotional ones is a real wrong turn. This is the first "Desperadoes" storyline that utterly missed the mark for me. Ow, and $4 each? Sorry: AWFUL.

EXCALIBUR #13: Speaking of Awful, from comics very first "mega crossovers" we've had fans lamenting about "Red Sky crossovers" -- books would say "CRISIS crossover!" on the cover, and inside there'd be a panel of someone saying "Hey, look, the sky is red. Wonder what that's about?" End crossover. Creators and publishers HAVE to know that that kind of thing pisses people off, right? So, when it says "HOUSE OF M prelude" on the cover, I think the thing should probably have more than 3 pages, all three of which were more properly a prelude to the prelude. INCREDIBLE HULK #180 may well have been the first appearance of Wolverine, but the comic that people WANT is #181. Particularly as the VERY FIRST SHOWING of the "House of M" branding, I think this was a serious lost opportunity. On the other hand, I was going to give it an "Awful", until Lester pointed something out that I missed my first read. Charles visits Dr. Strange in his Astral form, right? Then how the hell is he KNOCKING ON THE DOOR? Normally, that would lower a grade, but it made me laugh so hard (and, again, right now when thinking about it!), that I've going to actually raise the grade to an EH.

FABLES #37: I like reading about Fabletown. It feels like it's been six months since we've been there. This is quite good, too, but it's not what I've come to want from the title. A muted GOOD.

FANTASTIC FOUR #526: Clearing the old fill-in drawer out, or so it felt. Extremely EH.

FINDER #36: Terrific stuff. I can't always remember who is who from the delays between issues, to Speed's sometimes fragmentary approach to forward narrative, but the characters were well-drawn (er, not in the illustrative sense, though they are that, too) enough that it didn't matter, I got up to speed fast enough, with the honest emotions on display. Nothing less than VERY GOOD.

GAMBIT #10: Very very cute, though irresponsible enough to publish without a warning for certain communities. "It's OK to lie and steal as long as you're learning! (and leering at topless Storm)" cuz, like, knowing is half the battle or something. Liked it though: on the low side of GOOD.

GOTHAM CENTRAL #31: This arc has felt a little drawn out, but it has still been enjoyable. OK

GREEN ARROW #50: Absolutely fine, the Riddler was even used to good effect. GOOD.

GREEN LANTERN REBIRTH #6: Did what it needed to, put all of the pieces back on the board and in play again, showed Hal's badder than Guy, differentiated between the GLs nicely. Can't fault this comic for much other than a bit of late shipping. VERY GOOD.

JSA #73: Nice new logo. Very nice. Solid enough guts, call it GOOD.

MAN WITH THE SCREAMING BRAIN #1: Liked this quite a bit. Probably liked it more than I would as the movie it will be. Terrific art, funny stuff, VERY GOOD.

MARVEL NEMESIS IMPERFECTS #1: Based on a video game or something? Nothing special, nothing shitty, kinda just there. Only one beat really worked for me, Elektra's "You had me at 'hello'", other than that, extremely EH. We got the newest PREVIEWS advance photocopy yesterday, and I can already tell you the comic of the year is coming from Marvel: MARVEL MEGA MORPHS, based on the new toy line. Seems Tony Stark has invented suits of giant mecha robot armor, and they're to be piloted by Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and the Hulk... sounds GLORIOUS! This video game/toy crossover was textbook EH

MARVEL TEAM-UP #8: You'd think a team-up of Blade and the Punisher would have lots action in it. You'd be wrong. Instead, they pretty much stand on a roof glaring at each other for most of the 22 pages. ACTION! EH.

MNEMOVORE #2: No, still a Sci-Fi channel movie. EH.

NIGHTWING #108: Maybe it's just me but it seems... ill advised, perhaps? for the super-karate using scion of Bruce Wayne to be so open about who he is and what he can do when dealing with mobsters? Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying this story so far, but it seems to me there's no way this can't fuck up at the end. OK.

OUTSIDERS #23: Um, that was an interesting piece of deductive reasoning, there. You'd think Dick would have something to say, wouldn't you? Plus, where did ol' Roy gain the ability to reprogram a robot from the future again? So, EH.

PUNISHER #21: Pretty brutal stuff there, a good strong issue. GOOD.

PUNISHER CELL ONE SHOT: Not at all sure why this isn't just another pair of issues of Punisher -- not out of tone or place in the normal run. Solid stuff here, too: GOOD.

PVP #17: I'm really glad it went back to "standard" formatting -- that should help sell the book, and avoid all of the rack damage copies took from falling over. A typically funny issue: GOOD.

RANN THANAGAR WAR #1: Well, it's selling great, which sort of surprises me. For me, I don't really care about "Rann" OR "Thanagar" especially -- in 40 years of their history, it's not like anything particularly memorable has happened in either place, with the possible sole exception of the HAWKWORLD run(s). To me, both planets have historically be portrayed as full of unpleasant and unlikable beings (Like: Who'd ever want to hang out with Sardath?), so if they go to war, I'm not sure why I should really carry, other than "war is wrong". It is competently written, and very nicely drawn, but I didn't care even a tiny little smidge, so: EH.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #77: Finally, it is over, hooray! Now, let's get back the forward momentum! EH.

USAGI YOJIMBO #83: I've never read an issue I didn't find to be VERY GOOD, and the use of time in this story proved no exception.

WONDER WOMAN #216: Lalalala, get to it already, would you? OK.

No "Excellents" this week, but a pack of "Very Goods" -- ACTION #827, DESOLATION JONES #1, FINDER #36, GREEN LANTERN REBIRTH #6, MAN WITH THE SCREAMING BRAIN #1, and USAGI YOJIMBO #83. You really can't go wrong with any of them. But you're going to make me pick, aren't you? Well, since I expected the least from it, I'll say the PICK OF THE WEEK is THE MAN WITH THE SCREAMING BRAIN #1. Hurray for Bruce Campbell!

For the PICK OF THE WEAK, I'll go with CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON #14 for the weakest cliffhanger resolution in the history of comic books, and for not bothering to address "What's up with Falc?!?" after building the shit up for more than a year. Sheesh!

My pick for BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK is STRAY BULLETS VOL 2 SOMEWHERE OUT WEST 10TH ANN TP, and while there wasn't much competition this week, this Lapham material is prime prime work. Snap up a copy!

That's what I thought, how about you?

(And, seriously, putting ANY kinda comment in the talkback is welcome -- hits aren't the same as discussion!)

-B

Coming Up From The Crack Pipe: Reviews of 5/4 Comics

I'm sure Hibbs will be around sooner rather than later (I'm betting Free Comic Book Day followed by Mother's Day put him on the ropes, but not down for the count), but here's how things stand with me. After three months of staying away from video games, I fired up the PS2 again. So maybe the books this week didn't wow me because my brain was on God of War, the game I can only describe as a Ray Harryhausen movie on crack—highly recommended for those who would enjoy such a thing. And speaking of crack, I owe a big ol' debt of gratitude to Rob Bennett for turning me on to The Wire. Not quite done with Season One, but the first four discs have some of the best TV I've seen in a while. If you like crime novels that also do the heavy lifting of character studies and social analysis, this is the show for you. It's really, really fucking good. (Oh, and I'd like to re-use that God of War excuse, please, to aplogize for not commenting on the ol' Haloscan this week. Normally, I try not to leave anyone who makes a comment dangling but when you're stuck getting your ass beat by a unending wave of fire-breathing three-headed hell hounds, it gets way too easy to let time get away from you…)

So. Now that you know where my brain is at, here's some comic book reviews:

AMAZING FANTASY #8: Picked this up because I kinda liked last issue and, surprise, I kinda liked this issue. A lot of the little traps that Arana fell into are neatly avoided here: rather than just being the dutiful agent with the all-knowing back-up team, Scorpion has her own agenda and knowledge base that she’s willing to work with. Yeah, there were the occasional head-scratchers here and there, but very highly OK.

BATMAN DARK DETECTIVE #1: My expectations were not high, so it’s not surprising this managed to more or less clear them. Marshall Rogers is one strange artist—great design sense, nice attention to detail, passable body language, and then suddenly there’ll be a panel or two where everything is utterly lifeless—it’s like an illustration of two mannequins facing each other. Very odd. As for Englehart, I was (and am) a huge fan of his '70s Marvel work but remember work in the '80s and '90s that! became! a! little! heavy! on!--well, you get the idea. Fortunately, people here do more than exclaim, and I like his take on The Joker. Is the whole thing still a bit anachronistic and limp? Yes, and yet I would again throw this on the high side of OK because I enjoyed reading it.

BLOOD OF THE DEMON #3: Oy, this issue. I don't even know where to begin. The capper for me, however, was Batman refusing to get the League involved because Gotham is his city (lame, but in character, I'd say), Zatanna deciding he's mismatched and contacting the League anyway (okay, gotcha), and then a page showing Zatanna seeing that all the members of the League are fighting menaces of their own. Great. Does Zatanna then go on to help anyone? Take the three minutes to help each hero, get the JLA together, and then transport them to help Batman? No, Zatanna apparently decides to go back to bed, or check her email, or something. So why was it brought up? Because Byrne only wanted the scene to appease crotchety guys who go apeshit when it's not explained why Batman doesn't call the League—people, in short, like John Byrne. In the store, Hibbs seemed to think it was OK, I definitely thought it was Awful.

CONCRETE HUMAN DILEMMA #5: Plot-hammered, badly paced, and Chadwick runs a letter in the back that really seems to take the piss out of the sterilization arguments used in the series: in short, not really what I would call a return to form. Weirdly, I find I still have some emotional connection to the characters (I was a very casual Concrete reader at best, way back when) so I sorta hope Chadwick tries again soon—maybe more time at the drawing board will shake off a lot of those faults. 'Til then—Very low Eh.

DETECTIVE COMICS #806: Obviously, I missed an issue. Or two. And yet, I can't guarantee that this would have made any sense at all even if I had read them. I thought this arc was going to be Batman meets Bonfire of the Vanities; it seems, instead, a bit more like Batman meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers via some of the more boring stretches of The Godfather. Or something. Take the word Eh, reverse it, and you've got the first two letters of "Help!"

EMBROIDERIES OGN: After two exceptionally strong volumes of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi follows up with an exceptionally well-written, crudely drawn quasi-sequel, as a group of Iranian women trade stories of love and sex. The book's gotten some guff because of the art, and rightly so: the visual-verbal blend is outrageously out of whack; anatomy's off kilter; page layouts are cramped; the women hold their heads up at weird angles and seem to talk out of their throats—everything about it suggests either a book that was rushed to market or an artist whose range of talent is dramatically limited. But, honestly? I don't read Jules Feiffer's work for the art either: I read it for the keen sense of character, irony and insight into the condition of a gender and a culture. (For ten points of extra credit, compare and contrast Feiffer's neurotically anxious and arrogant men with Satrapi's scathingly candid and jocular women. Pick up your papers and begin.) Admittedly, my employee discount might have taken the sting out of this, but if money matters to you, wait for the softcover and/or check it out of a library. You should like it fine. Good.

ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS VOL. 1 TPB: Thanks to this, along with the reprint of Tuk The Cave Boy that also came out this week, I am absolutely convinced the Marvel Reprint Department runs on a series of dares and wagers. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the third consecutive Essential to include The Incredible Hulk #126, a hat trick I can see no other explanation for save mischievousness. While this material really shows how far the mainstream's come in more than thirty years (Hibbs was reading some of this stuff aloud in the store on Friday, to hilarious effect), it also shows us how much ground comics book stories themselves used to be able to cover—a Lovecraft derived Dr. Strange story becomes a series of interlocking one-shots spread across three different titles to create a brisk little mini-epic while still juggling a subplot or two from each book. I'm also a sucker for how Marvel books were much more eager to throw their influences into the mix (superheroes fighting Lovecraftian Undying Ones? It'd be awesome if only the artists' interpretation of the latter didn't resemble deformed cat people…) While you have to have a strong constitution (or stronger predisposition) to handle so many pages written in faux Stanglish, I'm enjoying this alot. Good, but surely not for everyone.

FELT TRUE TALES OF UNDERGROUND HIP HOP ONE SHOT: I made it about a third of the way through. Although I love Mahfood's work, a lack of familiarity with the main characters really hindered this for me—considering that they are "two of the hottest rappers in the underground hip hop scene today," I don't feel like I can merely chalk this up to me being a fogey ("two of the hottest rappers in the underground hip hop scene today" is kinda like saying "well, they're big in Japan…") There are some transcendent points in the book (like all of Mahfood's loving portraits of women for the section "Dirty Girls") but mainly, this seems like the ultimate CD pack-in transmuted into unsuccessful rack fodder. Damn shame, too. Eh.

GLA #2: Humor is not easy: some of the riffs in this I thought were very clever (comparing the superhero loner speech to the "it's not you, it's me" speech, the Magnolia soundtrack gag) and some I thought were very, very lame (that two or three page rejection grid might have worked without the ads breaking it up—maybe—but it sure felt like super-dull filler to me). I actually thought this was more miss than hit, myself, but part of why humor isn't easy is because it's so subjective. A high Eh.

LEX LUTHOR MAN OF STEEL #3: What's really maddening about this is that the scenes between Lex and Bruce were so good. In fact, those may have been some of the best "Bruce Wayne, Playboy" scenes I think I've ever read—Azzarello and Bermejo totally sold me on them. But the rest of the issue, putting aside continuity concerns, was both baffling and/or plain ol' Out Of Character. Batman gets kryptonite so Superman beats the crap out of him and takes it? Winner of this week's "Uhhhh…what?" award. If it hadn't been for those scenes between Bruce and Lex, I'd insist that the DCU file a restraining order on Brian Azzarello. But with those scenes: a very frustrated Eh. (The Shrew has an interesting take on the whole thing, by the way, which may just show me up as a DC dilettante, a title I'd be glad to wear if it meant this stuff could make any sense.)

MATADOR #1: A lot of ground covered in the first issue, which is all to the good, and the art team is having fun playing with the reader's expectations. Can't put my finger on my misgivings—things happen so quickly they're a little flat, maybe, but that's counterbalanced by not being really sure where it's going to go from here—so let's go with a cautious Good.

SEA OF RED #2: Not exactly subtle, is it? What started as kinda clever quickly became kinda obnoxiously dumb. All the smirky in-jokey elements work against, not with, the seriousness of the lead character, and yet nothing ever gets entertainingly insane, the way it might in, say, Eric Powell's hands. I'm at Eh, and ready for things to not get any better, but we'll see.

SEVEN SOLDIERS SHINING KNIGHT #2: First issue didn't work for me, and this didn't either—I still have no sense of who the title character is (even with a character named Guilt working him over), the horse didn't get to talk enough, and the rest of it seemed a mess. Sure, the art was pretty but give the knight a rack and this could have been a Top Cow comic. I'm calling it Awful until I get convinced otherwise.

SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #4: Cho deliberately chose to make this uninteresting by not being arsed to give anyone apart from the narrator any personality (and that's hardly more than him saying "Holy buckets!" over and fucking over again). And since one or more of these guys dies gorily every issue, it's becoming really, really tedious, too. Although there's nothing in the story that's remotely similar to The Phantom Menace, there's something eerily familiar in paying to watch someone with talent squander tons of pulpy potential. Awful.

SHARKNIFE VOL. 1 OGN: When cornered, I tend to slip in to a high concept babble. For example, I might describe Sharknife as "OMAC meets Iron Wok Jan by way of a Paul Pope influenced graffiti tagger,:" but that certainly wouldn't tell you whether it's good or not. And that's because, frankly, I just don't know. The parts of it I liked, I really liked a lot: its premise is deeply whimsical without, I think, being ironic; the simple giddiness of a fight where finishing moves are performed with hammerhead sharks is infectious; and Corey Lewis does a great job pulling new surprises out of his sleeve just when things might start to feel stale. I couldn't tell a fucking thing that was going on in the fight scenes and yet the sheer kineticism of the design conveyed all the tension and impact needed. But, in the end, it felt a bit like watching three episodes of a giddy Saturday morning cartoon in a row—or maybe like being trapped on a tilt-a-whirl operated by a grinning carnie who didn't much care if I was enjoying myself or not. Sharknife is a helluva ride, but even by the end of its first volume, it's too soon to tell if there's anything more resonant than watching an emerging talent take pleasure in the powers at his command. Good.

SUPERMAN #216: Clearly, this was supposed to come out before Day of Vengeance #1, and, clearly, it would have stunk, anyway. But it might have stunk a little less—the Jean Loring thing, in particular—if DC'd had their scheduling a little more together. And does the Spectre decide to destroy all magic because he gets in a pissing match with Shazam? He's the Spirit of Vengeance, not the Spirit of Pettiness… Throw in a ending where Superman is apparently a mindless husk on an iceberg (making him a fine reader surrogate), and you've got the makings of an Awful little issue.

SWAMP THING #15: I had no idea what was going on, or what the threat might be (giant amoebas that can use refrigerators?), but I liked the struggling guy with the stroke who shirked Linda Holland way back when—it seems like a good direction to go in, although the execution of the rest of this issue suggests an inability to get there (or anywhere) in any coherent fashion. Kinda Awful.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #18: Seemed like a pretty half-hearted attempt to capture the glories of widescreen action (it never got better than that beautiful double-page spread of the shuttle being chased across the desert by that big-ass thing) and/or wrap up the script in about ten minutes. I pretty much blame Kubert, who either thought it'd be funny to put Jawas into script (with gaffi sticks, to boot!) or was on too tight a deadline to design anything new. There were some great little sequences in this arc, but this wrap-up left a bit of a bad taste. Eh.

ULTRA VOL 1 SEVEN DAYS TPB: After enjoying the first two issues of the mini, I decided to wait for the trade and I'm glad I did. This was a strong fun read about three friends dealing with their careers and their love lives after their fortunes are read—that the three friends are superheroines is kind of an odd twist, but one that ends up working out in the long run. It's a quick, slick way to ruminate on class differences and the complexity added to romance as a result of female empowerment in our culture. It's not a particularly deep rumination, mind you, but it helps undercut the occasionally calculated feeling the project sometimes has (probably my own biases). If you're a fan of Bendis's lighter work, you should pick this up. Good.

VILLAINS UNITED #1: I never should have bought the transformation of Catman into a potentially interesting character, and yet I did, which is a testament to Simone's, Eaglesham's and Von Grawbadger's talents. If it wasn't for that, I don't think I could continue to suspend enough disbelief to keep the whole venture going. ("If we succeed, Cheshire, you will get Asia." Wha? All 1.3 billion people are just gonna go along with anything she says or something?) Interesting enough to make me come back for the second issue. OK.

Y THE LAST MAN #33: Too much plot-hammering going on here, I think, even for the old romantic triangle trope. Vaughan's pulled this sort of thing off before but I am currently mightily underwhelmed. Eh.

Reviews from 4/27

No time no time no time.... Trying desperately to get this month's order form, this month's sub orders and this week's invoicing done leaves, really, no time for dumb comics reviews, but I can't leave Jeff hanging out there all alone for 2 weeks running. Still, he'll be happy that there's going to be a revamp of OMEGA THE UNKNOWN (http://www.newsarama.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32944). On the other hand, I haven't read his reviews yet, so maybe I'm covering all of the same books the same way, we'll see...

First up, from last week, because I shouldn't let it pass unmentioned: OMAC PROJECT #1: As an individual story, this was fine, I guess. The beats worked OK, more or less, and I probably feel OK about giving it a very low GOOD on the creative/entertainment perspective. However, in a "bigger picture" sense, this is just ASS. Let's put aside the question of how on earth Batman could design and launch a satellite designed to spy every where on earth without anyone knowing, because that one would just hurt your head, and instead just stick with the ol' reliable "Why hasn't he yet figured out that all of these plans are being used against him?" I mean, this is not the first time they've done a variation of this story (The JLA "Divided We Fall" arc), nor the second time ("War Games"), this is now try #3, and you'd think by now ol' Brucie would understand that it just isn't working out for him.

BATMAN #639: There were cute scenes (esp the dressing down of the JLA members), but, um, what happened with the opening from part 1 of "Under the Hood"? Did they just forget about it? Having a scene open an arc to never be mentioned again within that arc is a bit... sloppy, doncha think? There's no sense of time any longer in the DCU books -- it's like everthing is happening at the exact same moment, and it is hurting my little head. OK.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #5: What is it with publishers gang-rushing creators into the market in a single week? Between this and AUTHORITY and SLEEPER you coulda called it BRUBE WEEK, except that Chaykin matched him with CITY OF TOMORROW and SOLO and LEGEND. Doesn't this seem... counterproductive to anyone else? Bucky as super-ninja-assassian-boy makes a great deal of sense, actually, though it seems so very very out of character for all of the players involved. I did, however, really like how, despite being told in flashbacks all the way through, the story was still compelling and a real page-turner. a low GOOD.

CITY OF TOMORROW #1: As mentioned directly above, if you're a Chaykin fan (Hullo, Seth Hollander!), then this was a good week for you. When was the last time you got 60 pages of new Chaykin art in a week? When Times2 was released, maybe? I had a few of the usual problems I have with Chaykin -- often faces are too close to be able to follow which character is doing what when -- but this is my favorite thing he's done in a while. This looks like a good and imaginative background upon which to hang his tropes, and I thought it was GOOD.

DAY OF VENGEANCE #1: For a corporately-plotted comic (From the NEwsarama interview, it sounded like Willingham was given a list of plot points that had to happen), it really wasn't too bad. Willingham's humor comes through clearly in many scenes, and this easially had the most compelling version of Ragman I've ever read. Not that there's much competetion, mind you. Absolutely hated the Jean-as-Eclipsette thing, but, thankfully that only lasted a few pages. Again, logic doesn't seem to have any place here (SPectre is killing all magic people? Let's go hang out with as many as we can find!), but as these kinds of crossover thingies go, sure, a low GOOD isn't beyond the pale.

INVINCIBLE #0: Here's cheap comic week as we get this for half-a-buck, and RED SONJA #0 for a quarter. Neither had much "hand" (that is, they FELT thinner than a normal comic, and, so, seemed like much less of a "deal"), and this suffered especially from too much talky-talky as it laid out 24 pages of continuity in 16 pages of story. GREAT way to get caught up, but I think, due to the nature of the issue, it probably would have worked better as a FCBD free comic, than as something to buy. A stong OK, when the main book should normally be rated higher.

LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #5: I got lost while trying to read this, and Jeff mentioned in the store that he did too. What I understood, I liked, I guess, but I really didn't get much of what was going on and whose motivations were what. EH

NEW AVENGERS #5: Naked superheroes are creepy. EH.

OTHERWORLD #2: Couldn't follow this at all, either. I like Jimenez's art well enough to pile up a couple of issues at once to try again, but initial grasp was a real EH.

ULTIMATE SECRET #2: I didn't know that Ellis had such a straight-ahead superhero comic in him. This is terrific fun, and still maintained a really nice Ellisism explaining away the Fermi paradox. VERY GOOD.

X-MEN PHOENIX ENDSONG #5: Nice ending on this that didn't go where I was exactly expecting it would. Hated the last page, but otherwise, let's give it a VERY GOOD.

I actually still ahve about 15 comics left in the bag to read -- and it has taken me 60 hours to write this one blog entry. I suck. Better luck next, er, THIS week.

PICK OF THE WEEK: ULTIMATE SECRET #2 PICK OF THE WEAK: Oh, I don't know, Probably AGE OF APOCALYPSE #6, as that was a long way to go for so little.

BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK: For something original, I quite liked GUILTY GN -- a Xeric winner done in insane photo-real detail with lots of speed-freak crosshatching and stipling. Retail voice says: you're really dumb to not put your title on the cover, nor ANY information on the spine... my long term prospects of selling this will drop by 90% because of those two things. But it was a fine little GN.

For a reprint collection, only credible choice is RISING STARS VOL 3 FIRE & ASHTP. This final arc can really be read on its own, too, and is, perhaps, an interesting counter-point to SUPREME POWER.

OK, must go, have to finish keying in the Diamond order....

-B

A Few Reviews from Jeff of 4/27 Comics

Not much to say this week (very, very skimpy wordcount for these reviews) but before getting to the saying of it, I just wanted to mention The Shrew Review as a fine ol' place for comix reviews. I forget how I ended up finding it, but if you like the reviews that cover what works and what doesn't and why, you should check it out. Good stuff, and when I can wrap my brain around it, I'll try to add the site to the side links. In other news:

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #639: The Supes/powersuit fight I liked because it seemed like there was some thought put into it, which made the whole "Lois acts utterly out of character and Clark doesn't catch on because the plot needs him to fall for it" stuff even more disappointing. On the low side of Eh.

AUTHORITY REVOLUTION #7: I liked a few things about it, and disliked many, many more—you'd think the fact that she's called Jenny Sparks and not Jenny Electricity would have tipped Brube off when coming up with Jenny Crusades and Jenny Dark Ages. I also think both Jenny Spark and Jenny Quantum are avatars of changes that have affected everyone in their age, while most of the Jennies shown here seem Western European biased: I don't think Jenny Crusades means shit-all to the Chinese, for example. But that's just crabby frosting on the Awful cake.

BATMAN #639: I liked the scenes between Batman and Zatanna, and Batman and Green Arrow, thought the rest of it was a wash: does this take place before the opening scene of the Red Hood arc, then? After? Has Countdown happened? Then why hasn't Batman connected Amazo and the kryptonite from several issues ago to the events there? I'm no continuity geek but when that's supposed to be part of the hook, and the only editorial note we get indicates that it takes place before Blood of the Demon #1…well, color me nonplussed. Eh.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #5: I'm sure Ed was mighty tickled when he came up with the Bucky angle ("He's not a goofy sidekick! He's a brutal black-ops killer! Who's fourteen!") but I don't like it at all for any number of reasons. Lovely looking, to be sure, but I'm giving it a very antsy Eh until where we see where this whole arc ends up.

DAREDEVIL #72: Much better than the previous issue as far as the character drama goes—that was actually quite good in fact—but the logic of bombing Foggy makes no sense to me. At all. Good, but not great.

DAY OF VENGEANCE #1: Some nice character bits, but too much stuff jimmied in there that didn't quite work (If the Spectre is showing up wherever magic users gather to destroy them en masse, why in Christ would you go to a bar solely for magic-users?) OK, I guess.

DOOM PATROL #11: Bits of neat storytelling (liked that inset of the bullets breaking the panel of the character's hollering face) in the service of an incredibly dumb and dull story. Who knew the Chief's origin would be so lame? Awful.

EXILES #63: I kinda hope that's not the real origin of the Timebrokers because (my mantra for the week) it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'm enjoying how all the little character bits get set up and paid off. A very high OK.

FANTASTIC FOUR FOES #4: Continues its string of super-stinkiness, and not just with regard to the FF and their allies—those pages with the prison building guy are so flat and obvious and clumsy, I spent most of the issue trying to figure out if Kirkman is outsourcing this job to, say, his brother-in-law: I don't think anything in The Walking Dead or Invincible has read nearly as amateurish. Really, really stinky Crap.

HUMAN TARGET #21: Last issue's horribly blasé cliffhanger makes a lot more sense now, although Milligan screwed things a little bit with his set-up: I almost think this would have worked much better as a stand-alone issue where you're really left in the dark as to who's really Chance. Plus, if I'm remembering it right, don't the previous issues of the story show Tim turning into a homicidal lunatic the instant his mask starts to slip? Kinda mitigates for me what's otherwise a Very Good issue and a dynamic finale to the series.

JUGHEAD'S DOUBLE DIGEST #112: Didn't read it, but just now noticed how much it sounds like a porno out of context.

MICHAEL CHABON PRESENTS ADV O/T ESCAPIST #6: Probably the best single issue of this, with really great stories by Best and Campbell, and Offutt and Yeates, and an enjoyably demented melodrama by Grant and Breyfogle. The Eisner story is essentially beyond criticism: if you like Eisner, you'll appreciate seeing a last bit of his work. A bit pricey, like all the issues, but Good.

NEW AVENGERS #5: I can see stripping Iron Man, but why the rest of the Avengers? Were the villains having too much fun undressing superheroes to stop with just one? I guess I have to be honest: if these last five issues had been written by Ron Zimmerman, I would have written them off as the cynical and klutzy shambles it so obviously is. So I think I'm done, pretty much. Awful.

PUNISHER #20: An enjoyably fucked-up little issue, probably one of the best in a while. I'm not really optimistic about this title, but I'm kinda sorta getting there. Good.

PVP #16: Very, very glad about the format change and even despite not playing City of Heroes (no crack cocaine for me, thank you), I enjoyed the stories this issue. Skipped over the potentially disturbing letters column, so: Good.

RED SONJA #0: Sure, the story was skimpier than Sonja's outfit but for a quarter? Pretty damn Good, I thought. Sexy Barbarian Death may not play any better in today's marketplace than Sexy Ninja Death but it works for me.

RICHARD DRAGON #12: Would've liked it a whole lot better without the last page, but Good stuff.

SLEEPER SEASON TWO #11: Weirdly, didn't work for me because I can't see how the previous issue's narration makes any sense if the whole thing were planned: maybe if Gretchen had tried to get more power from fucking over Tao as well, or something. And the last two pages didn't really work for me, either. I guess the last issue could pull the whole thing out, so we'll see. Eh.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #19: Only in a book as apeshit as Loeb's Superman/Batman could the Supergirl Batgirl scene have worked, because I fully expect Loeb to disregard any logic or continuity in an effort to keep you turning the pages (I assume Luthor's not wearing the Infinity Gauntlet on that last page, because I don't think Loeb would be that crazy…but I almost kinda hope he is). A lot of stuff I don't like, the story makes no sense, and yet still: a very high OK. Go figure.

SUPREME POWER #16: For what it's worth, I think taking Supreme Power out of the Max line will hurt the book a bit: part of what I like about it is the feeling that anything could end up happening in it whereas, at the Marvel Knight level, I feel like there's less at stake somehow (kinda similar to why PG-13 horror movies are usually a mistake). And that feeling—that anything might happen—really helps with issues like these, where hardly anything happens. But maybe I'll be proven wrong. Good.

ULTIMATE SECRET #2: I got really crabby and irritated by the time of the last three pages and am not sure why. Because the rest of this was very smart and clever and enjoyable: the implication that Galactus is the explanation behind Fermi's Paradox is very smart and more than a little chilling. I don't know if it was superhero overload in those last three pages or what, because I did think this was Good.

WONDER WOMAN #215 The new art team is making me give this another go and Rucka's done a very good job of beefing up the minor characters, but, uh, I dunno. Still kinda Eh, if only because that was a tremendously half-hearted cliffhanger.

Put Me In, Coach: Reviews for 4/20 (Duuuuude!) Comics

Man, I needed a week off from comics. I don't know if it was just having to get the newsletter done or that we'd been so busy that Friday but I barely read any comics at all. And it felt kinda nice, frankly. But this week I was all fired up, ready to get back in the game, things were pretty quiet at the store, Hibbs damned everybody's eyes, I'm dying to post…and Hibbs hasn't gotten around to posting anything else. So, at the risk of throwing off his not inconsiderable game, here's my super-extendo blabbity-blab about:

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #519: Hibbs summed this up better than I could have, although do they send out memos at Marvel on what properties get played up every year? I mean, this is at least the third fucking “Hydra is really, really scary” attempt in the last twelve months. And you know what? Still not scary. Eh.

AQUAMAN #29: Pretty much gets my “Uhhhh…what?” award of the week: Aquaman is upset over his genes being sold to a big megacorp, so he goes to the JLA Satellite for advice where Superman mouths off, so Aquaman knocks him on his ass but it turns out to be Martian Manhunter instead of Superman and they both learn a valuable lesson about sharing. Uhhh…what? Shame too, because the art’s pretty decent. Awful.

BATMAN JEKYLL AND HYDE #1: Sadly, I already awarded my “Uhhhh…what?” award, but this is a strong runner-up. Yeah, the art’s pretty but so much about this seemed sloppy and cynical. There’s a lot to pick apart here but the one that really irked me, and points out that Paul Jenkins wasn't sweating the craft, is the second person caption narration from Batman. It’s the third scene with either Bruce or Batman in it, and it comes in eighteen pages into the book and really threw me out of the narrative (and I needed all the help I could get trying to stay in it). On the up side, it’s clear Batman editors are not paying any attention to anything at all anymore, so maybe artists can just start drawing Batman pantsless. Come on! Pantsless Batman! It’d be fun. Eh.

BILLY THE KID’S OLD TIME ODDITIES #1: Although Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz have a similar taste in cartoonish grotesquerie, I think Powell’s cleaner line lends his worldview a more platonic conception that reinforces the Aristotelian nature of the comedy. Or in non-garble speak: Billy being an asshole wouldn’t have bothered me half as much if Powell had been drawing it, because it wouldn’t have seemed as painful somehow. Hotz’s work has just enough grit that it feels like watching a Three Stooges short where characters spurt blood with every punch. Not as much fun as I would like, in other words, but hopefully all this blabbity-blab explains why that might be more a matter of personal preference than anything. OK.

CABLE DEADPOOL #14: I would call this “a guilty pleasure” but that overstates the case by far. It’s a good, dumb comic, and I had a good, dumb time reading it. Nicieza knows how to keep his characters surprising yet consistent and that’s starting to seem like a god-damned lost art or something. Good.

EX MACHINA #10: That seemed decidedly anti-climactic, the sort of thing where the writer crafts an unexpected twist that, while admittedly unexpected, saps the story of its emotional connection. Tony versus the other guy whose life got totally changed by the alien incident and September 11? Emotionally resonant. Tony versus the guy’s wife? Not so much. Throw in a baseball bat attack and, uh, I dunno, it just didn’t wow me like I thought the climax of a storyline might. But it still gets a Good because I quite enjoyed the West Wing-lite of the closing scenes.

FANTASTIC FOUR #525: Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett (uh, right? I don’t have the copy with me) step in for an arc so stylistically similar to Waid and Wieringo’s it’s impressive. Unfortunately, that seems that most of the stuff I didn’t like in the W&W stuff is more or less here too. Additionally, it seems understandably rushed to fit into just a few issues. I gotta go with a low OK.

HATE ANNUAL #5: Maybe it’s because the book only comes out once a year, but Buddy seemed almost out of character to me—manic and active, rather than laconic and reactive. And although I can see how that might just be how Bagge sees the character evolving—I know a lot of guys who, once they’ve got a wife and/or kid in their corner, finally come out of their shells in middle age—the book’s not really around regularly enough to gauge. As a result, the Buddy story seems surprisingly forced, but I ended up really liking the Batboy strips. They never did anything for me singularly, but clumped together on the page they’ve got an adrenal, anything goes charm with every obvious target being knocked about in the least subtle way possible. I’ll give this a highly reserved Good because I don’t think the Batboy strips are for everyone (that odd subset of fandom that thought L’il Abner would have been funnier if Peter Bagge had drawn it, maybe) and if you don’t like them, I don’t know if you’ll like any of the book at all. But I did, so there you go.

HAWKMAN #39: So Hawkman’s villains have perfected a drug that lets you see your romantic interest as a deadly villain but the security guard trying to stop you as just a security guard. That’s one mighty specific drug, all right. Eh.

HERCULES #1: Seemed like there was a kernel of a good idea in there, but Frank Tieri decided he couldn’t be assed with it and would write a bunch of shtick instead. (Or as I uncharitably put it in the store Friday, he suddenly went, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m Frank Tieri!”) I wanted to like this, and maybe they had to put filler in the first issue to get a four issue mini closer to the prerequisite six so I’ll give it a very, very low Eh.

IRON GHOST #1: It almost seems like Dixon came up with the whole story then realized in the course of doing research that the time period he’d picked couldn’t really work, but it was already too late or something. Because the scenes of the Ghost’s victims partying it up in a beerhall when it’s already pointed out that Berlin’s being bombed night and day and nobody has any food and everyone realizes they’re all pretty much fucked, just didn’t ring true for me. Again, I want to like this because doing V For Vendetta with actual Nazis seems like some an okay way to get some pulp serial style thrills, but the material seems to undercut itself. OK.

JENNY FINN DOOM #1: Ross Richie is a mensch. I met him when he was in town for Wondercon and he was just a great, down-to-earth guy in love with comics. He’s also, I’m assuming, why I got a complimentary copy of this tossed in my bin this week. It was great to revisit Jenny Finn (since I could remember little more than enjoying the original issues) particularly with the promise of an actual conclusion. It’s an enjoyably nightmarish work—kind of like if Melville and Lovecraft had collaborated on the script of Scorsese’s After Hours—about a good man with good intentions stumbling into a creepy and unsettling world. I would have appreciated a few more details on the inside front cover or elsewhere to let the casual reader know there’s more coming (fingers crossed), and I admit Nixey’s art isn’t for everybody (a lot of his characters have the faces of homely children) but I thought this was very strong Good work.

JLA #113: I think if I was following it any closer, the whole “Hey, it’s not Martian Manhunter, it’s Batman dressed up as Martian Manhunter” thing would have really annoyed me. I can’t see any reason for it other than (a) it’s such a classic JLA trope; (b) there’s only one designated dick in the JLA, and it’s Batman; and (c) it makes the reader grab their head and squirt blood out their nose in disbelief. In other words, I can’t see any reason that would make sense in the story itself. But again, I’m not following it closely so maybe there is one. Awful.

LITTLE STAR #2: Well, I don’t want to jinx it but this may well end up being the best thing Andi Watson’s ever done. The story is taking a little too long to gel up but it’s extraordinarily good on a scene-by-scene basis: the father’s discontent, the daughter’s selfishness, and the couple’s inability to seemingly function together makes each scene both incredibly charming and incredibly disquieting in its candor. If I could get a stronger sense that things are moving somewhere, I’d be even happier but it’s still too early to say one way or the other. So let’s go with Very Good just for the power of Watson’s storytelling and honesty.

LIVEWIRES #3: Uh-oh. This isn’t going anywhere. This seems as barely different from issue #2 as issue #2 did from issue #1. If there had been a bigger emotional heft from the end of this storyline (a stronger sense of the urgency of “The White Whale” intel and how it’s going to drive and/or change these characters), I maybe might have forgiven Warren but I just can’t. It’s better than page after page of barroom shtick, but it’s still wheel-spinning. Barely an Eh, dammit.

NEW INVADERS #9: And so another bungled opportunity comes to a close. I really feel like this could have found a place in the direct market (seeing as it’s filled with middle-aged fanboys like me who loved the first series in even with all that sweaty rubbery Frank Robbins art) but they bungled every bit of it, top to bottom. Awful.

OMAC PROJECT #1: So…I guess this is editorial’s official take on Batman: World’s Greatest Detective; World’s Worst Multitasker. How else to explain the third “Batman comes up with a super-crafty plan that then gets used by the bad guys because he’s not paying attention?” Maybe the Infinite Crisis will reveal that Batman just isn’t getting enough sleep. I read an article online about the effects of sleep deprivation (crankiness, absent mindedness, paranoia) and, you know, they pretty much fit the current incarnation of Batman to a T. What a shame, eh? That said, this needed editorial notes something fierce because Christ help you if you didn’t read and remember Rucka’s Detective Comics run from four or five years ago: I think the whole thing with Sasha would have had no resonance whatsoever otherwise. And, finally, I’m not a continuity freak and I’m sure everyone pointed this out earlier, but isn’t Wonder Woman, like, blind? So Countdown takes place before she gets blinded? After she gets healed? And isn’t Rucka writing that book too so he would, like, know and shit? Yeah, Editorial notes. Or a text page. Or something, goddammit. I was gonna give this an OK but after writing all this down, I realize I have no idea why I should. So I guess I’m going with Eh.

RUNAWAYS #3: Hmmm. So Victor’s dad is a villain… and we see his mom clutching a cross, a cross in her bedroom…and she’s talking to the father while he’s in an opulent ornate office. If the nature of deadlines didn't mean this was written a while back, I’d swear Vaughan was suggesting that Victor’s dad is Pope Benedict XVI. Of course, I would be more likely to think that since I’m in hippy-dippy San Francisco and am infuriated by one of the first things Benedict’s Vatican has done: they’ve condemned the gay marriage bill in Spain, to the point of telling Roman Catholics there they should lose their jobs if those jobs are linked to implementing gay marriages. Way to go, Pope! Pointless soapboxing aside, I wasn’t really knocked for a loop or anything by this issue, but it was Good.

SEVEN SOLDIERS KLARION THE WITCH BOY #1: The first half didn’t do as much for me as the second half, but wow, what a first half! Leave it to Morrison to come up with a clever explanation for Klarion’s very odd appearance involving Croatoan and puritan culture, and throw in a creepy possible Solomon Grundy origin on the side. And he’s able to do all this while keeping it married to actual drama. Pretty goddamned keen. That said, I felt like the second half of the issue kind of dragged with everyone saying the same thing to Klarion all over again just so so the action happens at the cliffhanger, but that wasn't a deal-breaker for me. Very Good.

SIMPSONS COMICS #105: Not the best Boothby I’ve read, but still heads and above anyone else doing Simpsons stuff. Just for 28 Hey-Heys Later, I had to give this a Good. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t yet.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #27: It looked great—the art was good, and man, what an amazing fucking coloring job—and I think Jenkins should be lauded for writing about poignancy and vulnerability and, in particular, childhood in a field that, frankly, is terrified of acknowledging childhood. But I still thought there was something blatantly dishonest about the material: somewhere around seeing the snowmen built into an actual car, I started to think, “Hey, wait a minute.…” Sentimentality (using the traditional definition of “unearned emotion”) is a bitch to criticize because you’re basically criticizing something for working for the wrong reasons which makes criticism an even more precarious enterprise than when it’s evaluating at a simple “did work/ didn’t work” level. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that, by switching out one unrealistic trope (superhero action stuff) for another (Calvin & Hobbes-ish whimsy and nostalgia), Jenkins and crew are trying to make you feel like you’re gaining genuine insight without giving you any genuine insight. Reminded me of a lot of Spielberg’s work in the ‘80s, which was similarly brilliantly executed and essentially empty. OK.

SUPERMAN #215: I already gave out that “Uh…what?” award, didn’t I? Shit. Even assuming the whole OMAC thread was part of “Superstorm,” and would’ve led into an Azzarello OMAC miniseries had this whole thing not tanked—even assuming that—this was a big pile of junk given all the tender loving care that only Jim Lee and seven inkers could bring. Of course, like a sucker, I bought each and every issue…I think I’d feel less ashamed having severed limbs in my longboxes than this arc. Oh, well. At least we can look forward to Superman eating human hearts and sacrificing little kids to Quetzalcoatl in his swank new Fortress of Solitude so...that'll be cool, right? Awful.

TEEN TITANS #23: So people all of a sudden are punching Dr. Light and he’s flying through buildings and he’s getting right back up because…why? I beseech Johns to flip his action-to-drama switch, because the last four pages where the Titans are sharing their secrets is great reading, and the entire issue that takes place before it was a big old incoherent mess. Awful.

THE GRIMOIRE #2: Couldn’t tell you what happened in issue #1—must’ve been a helluva first issue to properly set up the chick, the raccoon, the book, the guy on the dragon or whatever it was, and the superteam—but I liked this. Well-paced and interesting, I’d like to see next issue. Good.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #76: What really worries me is that Bendis is so far ahead on this book, this is the messed-up shit he was writing around time of Avengers Dissembled/Secret War, and fifteen issues from now when we get to the stuff he’s writing while also doing House of M, it’s really gonna stink. What a god-damned shame. A low Eh.

UNCANNY X-MEN #458: I dunno. Gimme Alan Davis art and a race that evolved from dinosaurs and you can throw all sorts of illogical stuff my way and I’ll still dig it. A ultra-highly qualified Good.

WALKING DEAD #18: Kind of an aftermath episode so nothing really fried my burger one way or another, but it was still Good.

WOLVERINE #27: Obviously, asking this to have a little nuance is like asking a sledge hammer to be a tad more discreet, but I do wish there had been a bit more thought to it than twenty pages of Wolverine jumping out of nowhere and stabbing two guys in the chest over and over. Millar and Romita, Jr. really couldn’t be bothered to mix it up a little which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the arc. OK, because ludicrousness without ingenuity gets a little dull, doesn’t it?

X-MEN #169: Whew. That stank about as much as I thought it would. What the fuck is with Peter Milligan? Does he flip a two-headed coin and if it lands scarred side-up he terrorizes us with a shitty comic? I really don’t get it. Awful.

YOUNG AVENGERS #3: I almost slapped my head when The Patriot unmasked himself. Pretty clever stuff. And yet, I don’t know, I'm very bored with the whole Kang thing because, of course, time travel makes no sense. Why doesn’t Kang just appear two minutes before Iron Lad arrived and stop him from forming the team? Why doesn’t Kang just emerge two minutes before Iron Lad starts to flee and stop his ass? The Wookie Defense. Makes. No. Sense. I’ll give the rest of it a Good, though.

And there you have it. Without breaking out the eye-damning, what'd you think?

Media Watch, and the 4/20 Spider-Man titles

Alright, family is off on a play date, let's unload some of what's in me head, shall we? Off the bat, can we talk about SESAME STREET? Look, I know those of you without kids never watch it, but SS has changed, man, it's changed!

It started around the first of this month. I first noticed that "SESAME STREET is brought to you by a cooperative learning agreement with the Department of Education" (Or whatever the exact verbiage was) is NOW "SESAME STREET is brought to you by No Child Left Behind". Um, OK, I guess?

Then I noticed the content changes -- sure they still do letters and numbers (though, it's down to maybe 3-4 minutes, it feels), but it appears that most of the "socialization" pieces of SS have now become "Eat healthy and exercise!"

There's no doubt in my mind that 'muricans are fat and stupid and lazy (Hell, I sure am!), but it strikes me, as a parent of the target audience, that this is kind of a silly message for little eensy kids. If anything, I'm looking for Ben to settle DOWN a smidge and not hare around the house climbing and running and flying about the house. In addition, kids eat what you give them. I know "kids hate veggies" is a wonderful old trope, but, at least looking at Ben, it's really not that applicible. Yes, he prefers sweet foods, of course, but if what there is to eat is veggies, and he's hungry, he eats veggies no problems.

Maybe it's that *I* think the audience for SS is younger than SS does. Ben's been watching it since about age 1, and I suspect he'll be done with it by pre-school, having learned all he can by then. Certainly, that was the case with me. By around age 3 I was already reading (in some capacity, at least) -- I didn't need or want the "baby stuff" of alphabet. Hell, I wanted THE ELECTRIC COMPANY as soon as I could get it - these days I guess the switch is probably to something like BETWEEN THE LIONS.

Now, look, I know Ben's a little advanced with his alphabet (And, YES, he's finally nailed his "Y", he knows can now do all 26 letters, even if "W" remains "Aggah" and seems like it will stay there for a good length of time.) He's already started to be able to chain the ABCs together to some small degree (3-4 letters at a time), and i think before he's two he'll be able to easialy sing the whole song, AND understand it (the more important bit) -- but I don't really think that Ben is "exceptional" (Well, yes I do, but you take my point) -- I really think that any kid, with motivated parents, could achieve the same or better. Kids WANT to learn, especially in a reader's house.

I think that the "socialization" function of SS was as important as anything -- different cultures are cool, a variety of colors and looks in faces is a good thing, share and be a generally-good person, all of that stuff -- but Ben is bored by the singing vegetables and the exhortion that "walking is a good exercise" (Sure, for 40 year olds...); in fact he'll often go over to the TV and switching it off during those bits. Can't say I blame him, really.

As a parent, the value of SS has dropped in half to me. Which is fine, less TV is good, but, man DON'T FUCK WITH THE STREET.

* * *

Swinging way way over in the age-appropriate category, both Jeff and I stink because neither of us talked about SIN CITY when it was still "fresh".

Well, lost time and all that.

Dude, what an amazing adapatation. Faithful? Feh, the word needs to be rewritten. It almost goes all the way to Slavish. What a triumph for Miller. What a gift it must be to be adapated so so very exactly.

Thing is, I'm slightly less convinced that actually works in a FILM. The comics page isn't a moving image -- your eye and your brain will speed things up and slow things down in order to "process" a comics page. The problem is, for me, that SIN CITY, the film, just barrels along like a freight train, never once letting up or giving time to breath when it needs to.

One problem is that the structure of something like "The Big Fat Kill" is episodic in nature -- in the 7 (was that right? I think so) individual chapters, most of them had a cliff-hanger of some sort to, oh, I dunno, keep the audience in the seats or something. This really really doesn't work in film. A good example is when Dwight shows up at the tar pits and the IRA killer arrive and put a bullet in him. In the comic there's "suspense" because your brain automatically slows things down across the chapter break -- while it is unlikely that Dwight is dead, of course, you have time to absorb what's happening. The IRA thing kinda works in the comic because, at least, it is it's own discrete 22 page unit. So what if it is wildly out of tone of the rest of the story? IN the film, though, bang Dwight gets shot, then a fraction of a second later he's right back up again. Narratively, I think that just works against any posible suspense there could be.

I do rather think SC could have been a better FILM if it had taken a few weeks to work to the strength of that medium, rather than being a perfect comics recreation.

There's other bits, too -- there are line-reading that should have been rejected, or scenes that should have been reshot because they come out flat and dead, and there are story plot points that whizzed past in the comic that thump on the screen (Like: Hartigan is retirement-old. late 50s, at least. He spends... 8, is it? years in jail, and it's mentioned that his wife remarried and had kids [!!] while he was in the stir. Now, sure, it's possible he married a woman 20-30 years younger than himself, but it just feels wrong as I watched it)

I also think that there probably should have been Title Cards between the individual stories -- in particular, I think the opening vignette was less successful than it could have been because "The Customer is Always Right" didn't flash on the screen. That would have gotten a big laugh out of the audience, but instead the crowd I was with was kinda scratching it's head as to what was going on there.

I also saw the film on a DLP screen (so all digital projection -- the whites are WHITE, the blacks are BLACK), which I HIGHLY reccommend, if you have such a screen near you, but there were one or two places the effects were a bit much. I'm especially thinking of one of the time Miho's swastika shiruken is int eh foreground, GLOWING brilliant white, drawing your eye right to that as it pulsed with the animation.

Still, quibbles all. For every thing that probably didn't work like it should have (Marv's silhoutte on the brick wall looked far less impressive than the same effect on the page... probably because it was moving), I was utterly blown away by 2 others -- dude, they perfectly captured Frank Miller rain and snow. PERFECTLY. Wow! And all they really do is downgrade the possible "Excellent" to a VERY GOOD. Really, everyone should see this film, it's super-fine, and I really hope it opens any door for Frank that he wants to walk through.

* * *

More comics than this over the weekend (because there was a SHIT LOAD of comics this week), but I wanted to dip my foot in the pool at least, and since there are 4 different Spider-Man books, this week alone, here's a good place FOR a dip.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #519: Spidey goes one step further from what he should be (Unsuccessful, shleppy loser with great power, and a GREAT BURDEN from his great responsability) as the cast moves into the super-heroes-only world of Avengers "mansion". Foo! I was going to say that the most disturbing idea I've encountered this week was probably the potential romantic triangle between Aunt May, Jarvis, and, yikes, Captain America, but then I got more skeeved out by Peter & MJ having sex in Avengers mansion under the watching eyes of paintings of Thor, while Peter is thinking about Wolverine hitting on his wife. I mean, y'know? Then, thankfully, the second half of the book (literally! It's 11 pages) have absolutely nothing to do with Spider-Man in any way shape or form, and, instead, spend thier time trying to convince us that Hydra is actually a real threat. Good luck with that, people, I haven't beleived that since I was 8 or so. This really is a jumbled, skeevy mess, and I'm kinda stunned that Marvel thinks this is a good direction to take thier main solo character. AWFUL, not from craft, but from direction and focus.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #27: Jenkins and Buckingham's last hurrah on the title, and it's surprisingly affective (and effective, too!). Really "nothing happens" other than a conversation, but it is approached with skill and craft and imagination, and above all else, respect. I really liked this, and, insofar as super-hero books go, this probably should be up for an Eisner next year. "Pair of twits" doesn't sound like a May-ism, but even with that, I'll still give this an EXCELLENT. Good job!

SPIDER-MAN BREAKOUT #1: This seems to be the new NuMarvel tack. Stories that are "too big for one title" just get tacked-on mini-series rather than playing out in thier own comics (witness all of the "House of M" minis coming this summer) -- in this case, it is the prison breakout from NEW AVENGERS. I was prepared to thoroughly hate this before cracking the covers, and deride it as a blatent cash-grab, but, tell you what, this was really just fine, being kinda, dunno, VILLIANS UNITED-lite or something. Nice art, at least adequate scripting, and I expected something more Spidey-centric than I got, so, a solid OK here.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #76: I'm so bored with this story. Bored bored bored bored bored. And there's at least 1 more issue left? Ugh. and EH.

OK, so that's that -- see you in a few more days with some more!

As always, what do YOU think? There's thousands of you reading this -- say something in the comments thread, damn your eyes!

-B

Reviews of a few 4/13 things

Yes, yes I know, quit your crying, better late than never, right? Actually, I'm so completely not in the mood to write reviews, but, damn it, somehting must be put up, so I'm just going to do like 5-6 books, OK?

ACTION COMICS #826: Seems like there are Crisis references and tie-ins popping up most everywhere. Which, all cynicism about the tone of the crossover aside, is actually nearly exciting stuff. I mean, those of us who are old enough to remember each and every linewide crossover that's been done I think can remember that we used to bitch that these kinds of things would usually come out of nowhere and not actually be connected to the books themselves. So, it is kinda nice to see this much build-up going on, really -- there were at least 3 references just in this week's comics alone, and that's sorta cool. Well, it is, at least, if you own a comic book shop and get to read all of the comics for free, a little less sure if you had to pay to keep up. It really is rational for DC to keep a running tally of the buildup on thier website. Oh, and I had this stray thought the other day, and excuse me for getting a little too fanboy here, but, y'know, owning the comics shop and all that -- the Egyptian Scarab is a symbol for death and rebirth. What if they just bring Ted Kord back as Beetle? Would that make it "OK" to have created interest in him by ganking him? I don't know, clever or stupid? I always thought that Hal As Spectre was clever as hell, but apparantly the consensus there was stupid. Anyway, this issue of Action was just fine, nothing exceptional, nothing stinky. A solid OK.

CONAN & THE JEWELS OF GWAHLUR #1 (OF 3): It's Lester's joke, but it's so good, that I'll happily steal it and make you associate it with me: it's CONAN THE POOLBOY. I really love PCR's art and adapatations, but this is one character that jus' don' look right when he draws him. Yikes. Still, this is PCR we're talking about, so I daren't say anything lower than OK.

MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #13: I didn't hate Millar's run quite as much as Lester did (though, yes, I thought it was pretty bad), but I'd take that anyday over this first issue of Hudlin and Tan's run. There's certainly no chemistry 'twixt words and pictures, so much so I'll guess it was done "Marvel style" because it just jumps from scene to scene with no flow at all. Plus, that had to be just about the worst cliffhanger ending I've ever seen in my life. I also thought the coloring was poor -- especially in the Absorbing Man scenes where it really wasn't clear what was happening at all. Poor enough, through and through, that I have to give this an AWFUL.

MNEMOVORE #1: I was enjoying it until the oozy tentacle monsters were revealed. Then I thought it read like a rejected pilot from the Sci-Fi channel. Like MANSQUITO -- don't even need to see it, the version in my head is much much better! Maybe it will go somewhere more interesting in issue #2, but latex monsters at the end make me go EH.

TOXIN #1: Weird that after the fully painted (if dark) extravaganza of VENOM vs CANAGE (that was the title, wasn't it?), that this looks as Marvel house-style as it could. I don't know, this feels cynical to me, but it's not incompetently crafted. Like the late Don Thompson used to say, "if this is the sort of thing you like, you'll probably like this." For me, that translates to EH.

ULTIMATES 2 #5: I do like the continuing ambiguity of Thor's situation, and the fight scene was good fun (probably the first time a fight has ended with a pantsing, though), so hurray. A light VERY GOOD, and if this was a normal week, easily the PICK OF THE WEEK

However, this week FLIGHT VOL 2 came out. Now, I have the "TP / GN OF THE WEEK" as a category, but I thought this volume was good enough to transcend just that, and become the full fledged PICK OF THE WEEK. What a wonderful volume! Each story is fun, and is infused with a sense of wonder and joy of storytelling. Beautiful reproduction, lush coloring, and 400 pages for twenty-five bones, man this is a deal you can't miss. Honestly, there's not a single thing that I could recommend to you this week more that FLIGHT V2, it's EXCELLENT.

Insofar as the TP/GN OF THE WEEK, these would all be excellent choices, and all deserve your attention: SHE HULK VOL 2 SUPERHUMAN LAWTP (Good "poking fun at comics" comic) STRAY BULLETS VOL 1 INNOCENCEOF NIHILISM 10TH ANN TP (Dude, Lapham's crime comics ROCK) SUPERMAN VERSUS THE FLASH TP (Though, I always thought that if the Flash wasn't faster that kinda defeated the whole point of him...) SUPREME POWER VOL 1 HC (A great deal at the larger trim size on this fine comic)

On the whole, I'd give STRAY BULLETS the nod, even though he completely changed the numbering sequence...

So that's my week of comics: what's yours?

-B

Kinda, Sorta, Not Really: Reviews for 04/06 Books

At the moment, my time is my own at work so I thought I would do a few quick and hasty reviews, if only as a way to give thanks that I didn't attend the Gene Wilder signing...(the creepy part of that story is, I now totally covet Hibbs' copy of The Little Prince, which was one of my all-time favorite movies as a kid. I mean, Gene Wilder as the fox and Bob Fosse as the snake! That automatically makes it among the greatest movies of all time.) (And if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and you haven't seen The Best of Youth yet, I mightily recommend you check out its hefty six-hour charms: It's like the Avengers Forever of Italian cinema! Or something. Anyway, if you love movies, you should see it.)

Oh, and keep in mind that there are books that I still haven't read because I was waiting until I got home, and then I left them at the store. So if you're looking for my take on Zatanna, you are SOL...Instead, you have to deal with me blabbing about:

AMAZING FANTASY #7: Not great; not awful. I kinda liked it, although I'm a hard-pressed to remember why. Maybe it's because there's something so potent about "Rogue Syndrome" (young female protagonist who can't touch anyone because she's "tainted"), it can still carry some oomph with a new character. OK, although my hopes are not high.

BLOOD OF THE DEMON #2: The art was pretty keen, and I guess the new Blood/Etrigan symbiosis strikes a balance between "gruesome terror" and "superhero hijinks," but I just wasn't into this. Purging demon breath? Conflict between wussy human and evil demon? So now he's like Ghost Rider, basically, but without the bike. Great. Eh.

DEADSHOT #5: Yeah, okay, that worked, sorta. Deadshot went a little too far into the warm and cuddly direction, but it sorta, kinda maybe works that he can still act as a merc and not draw the whole wrath of the mobs as long as he doesn't go back to the Trainagle. I guess? Still, I really liked a good chunk of this mini so what the hell: Good.

DEATH JR #1: How ironic that the book I found solace in this week, after Countdown had utterly burned me out on all the grim and grit, and death and morbidity, of the current superhero market, is titled Death Jr. But it was a fun all-ages read aided immeasurably by Ted Naifeh's work, which looked just gorgeous in sheer color. It read a bit episodic, as if the project had started as a series of eight pagers then was made to read unbroken, but I really enjoyed this. A high Good.

GLA #1: It's pretty obvious from that first page Slott knew the ending of ol' DC Countdown in advance, I think. And this should have been the perfect darkly comic riff on the "Avengers Dissemble" and Countdown kill-a-thons. In fact, maybe it was a perfect darkly comic riff, but I just got too bummed out to appreciate it as such. My instincts call this Good, but it really put me in a funk. There are certainly extenuating circumstances here (a terminally ill friend died over the weekend) so there's probably more to my impatience with all the morbidity (and jocular takes on morbidity) than just DC Countdown burnout.

GREEN LANTERN REBIRTH #5: This mini has been all over the map, but it looks god-damn keen, I think. I kinda thought the last page was a mighty big block o' cheese, and I sorta feel like a mini should do more than put pieces back on the board (are any of the plotlines going to even pretend to be wrapped up? What happened to Parallax?) but I'll give it a high OK, just because Sinestro looks creepy and rad.

INVINCIBLE VOL 4 TPB: I finally got off the stick and read the first three trades of this. As I mentioned, I'm pretty burnt out on any sort of "Blood! Guts! Guns! Cuts! Knives! Lives! wives! nuns! sluts!" (to quote Eminem...) that seems so prevalent to me post-Countdown, and so I actually enjoyed all the pre-Big Twist stuff more than I enjoyed The Big Twist. But, yeah, as Big Twists go, it was pretty good, and I think it's safe to say I'm now hooked on this title. Didn't finish Vol. 4 ironically, but if you're looking for a new title to pick up, allow my Very Good for Invincible overall to serve as a (very late to the game) recommendation.

MARVEL TEAM-UP #7: Thanks to the keen art, I can remember just about two pages of this...barely. Kind of a shame since Kirkman may well be sitting there going: "Get it? Ring? Master? Ringmaster?" Eh.

SEA OF RED #1: Working with these two-tone limited color projects has really brought a new energy to Kieron Dwyer's work, hasn't it? It's like the work had always been perched between illustration and cartooning, and the color allows it to feel more like illustration without losing any of the energy of the cartooning. Or something. So it looks great, is what I'm saying. I'm a little nonplussed with the story (I had more than a few moments of "Tales of the Black Freighter Sense...Tingling!") but there seems to be a ton of fire and ambition behind the title so I'll give it a few issues before I decide one way or the other. OK.

SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #3: Cho's resistance to fleshing out any other characters other than Shanna and the narrator have kinda screwed this narrative, I think. Because if Shanna dies, no story, and if the narrator dies, no narration. Ergo: no tension. Pretty, but you can see actual potential just kinda drying up as you read and that's a drag. Eh.

STRANGE #5: And now there are lightsabers. Great. Looking forward to the dramatic conclusion next ish where Strange throws a ring into Dormamu's ass-crack, thus defeating the dark lord's evil plans. Awful.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #18: Okay, that last page made no sense whatsoever, but it was really kinda cool, I thought. I've been really lukewarm about this arc in that for every three things I dug (Kamandi! Freedom Fighters! R'as Al Ghul Statue of Liberty! Gratuitous Alan Moore shoutout! That's four things!) there were three things I hated (Superman strangles Wonder Woman! The Justice League or Reanimated Corpses! Why doesn't any of it make even a little sense!) Loeb obviously wanted his grim and gritty cake but wasn't willing to give up the sense of wonder frosting, making this even more of an uneven jumble than usual. So a high OK, because if there's one thing the marketplace is overrun with, it's grim and gritty cake.

THE PUNISHER #19: Art is keen, but I never thought Ennis would write anything as inauthentic as that "I told you; nobody makes me go dyke!" shower scene. Or if he did, it wouldn't be so god-damned dull. Eh.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #17: Nice action-packed issue, although I think I would have been happier with about 80% less Jawas. It's almost like Kubert drew 'em once or twice, then thought nobody would catch it so he put them in every other panel of the last ten pages. Or maybe because Jawas are pretty darn easy to draw over and over, particularly if you've got the action figures as reference. Or maybe both. Still, I say Good.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #75: Hibbs thinks this'll read great in a trade. I think the reveal was absolutely not worth all that invested time. (You mean, exposition guy didn't even exist? NOOOOOOO!) And there seemed to be a whole thread (Spider-Man gets called out by arch-enemy; Aunt May won't let him go) that looked for a second like it could lead to a more interesting story, but since it didn't fit into Bendis' outline, absolutely nothing came of it. However, since the Peter/MJ scene was good, and because I have fond flashbacks to Donnie Darko every time someone hollers "Cellar door!!" I'll go with a low OK.

WALKING DEAD #17: Another great issue. Kirkman seems so much more in control of his material here and on Invincible, it's kind of a shame to see him dilute himself with largely ineffectual work for Marvel. Man's gotta eat, I guess. Very Good.

I'm not much of a PICK OF THE WEEK/PICK OF THE WEAK kind of guy (and I haven't read Zatanna, remember) but I think I'd give Walking Dead #17 the PICK OF THE WEEK (with Death Jr. #1 close behind) and PICK OF THE WEAK to Strange #5. And if you'll excuse me, I'll have to see whether the Intarweb is charging for a pristine copy of The Little Prince...

No Foolin': Reviews of the 3/30 Books

This could be clumsy: I haven’t read Hibbs' reviews yet, so as not to color my own thinking (conveniently ignoring the four-plus hours we spent at the store discussing stuff), but my hope is he covered most of the week’s books. I barely made a dent in 'em: it was the store’s sixteenth anniversary yesterday, beers were broken out relatively early, we had a constant stream of customers our last three hours and, of course, there was the crashed car which got towed Friday morning after smashing into a parking meter Wednesday. I took pictures and I’ll see if I can get 'em posted later: last week's attempt at showing our latest window display was a failure, but that may have been because it went through Blogger from Picasa via Hello…which may have been one too many programs to thread through our FTP. (Yes, we're mighty fixated on that crashed car here at CE…maybe because it appeared the same day DC Countdown was released. Hmmm... Coincidence?)

What was the point of that? Oh yes, so I spent most of yesterday yelling and drinking, and not nearly enough reading comics. So this entry might be a little content-light, and/or late, depending. Oh, and SPOILERS! But you knew that.

AMAZING JOY BUZZARDS #4: I tried, man, really, I tried. I picked this book up four times but…beer and partying, you know. Hopefully, it got super-awesome and proved every criticism I had of it totally invalid. But if so, it hadn't happened by page three. No rating.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #9: Kind of an interesting compare and contrast with Countdown because you have a situation that's equally hard to accept (a mutated Danger Room) and Whedon gets around it by basically saying, "I know! I know! I need an ultra-special dispensation of disbelief suspension here. I mean, we've got characters who turn to diamond, for Christ's sake!" So, in comparing it to Countdown, I learned (a) as a comic book reader, I can accept some pretty outrageous stuff if the writer can acknowledge it themselves; (b) I can accept some pretty outrageous stuff as long as everyone continues to act in character; and/or (c) I can accept some pretty outrageous stuff if John Cassaday is drawing it. Good because of all of the above, even though I'm not nearly as absorbed with the second arc as I was with the first.

BATMAN #638: There was that great issue of Hush where it seemed like Jason Todd was back, and I knew, after it turned out to be a red herring, it would only be a matter of time until Jason Todd really did come back. Because that red herring was so much more exciting and unexpected than the rest of the story Loeb had lined up, it was only a matter of time before another writer went for it. Looks like Judd did (although who knows? Could be another red herring, and the Red Hood is really Aunt Harriet…) although the main problem is, really, it's not nearly as exciting the second time around (which is probably why it will turn out to be Aunt Harriet). I thought putting an "epilogue" tag on that final scene made things extra messy since this whole story begins in media res with Batman fighting and unmasking Red Hood and then flashing back—I kinda doubt that scene with the Joker takes place after that opening fight—but I more or less liked this. Winick's writing has pep, Mahnke's art is buttery smooth, and Batman might actually be in danger for a change. So even though this was kind of a mess, and the exact sort of cynical mess I don't want to see DC engage in, I'm giving it a Good because, as a Bat-fan, I jumped right in, read it, and am ready for the next.

CONCRETE HUMAN DILEMMA #4: Didn't get past the opening sex scene, other than to flip through the book to see if there were other sex scenes. Chadwick's art is gorgeous but his storytelling has lost a lot of nuance: if Steve Ditko had ended up as the staff cartoonist for Mother Jones, the result would be a lot like this. No rating. DC COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS #1: I'm gonna keep this review short because I bet Hibbs will cover a lot of the same ground, and better. (And there are some areas where we differ that might be kind of interesting, but not worth the 20,000 words it would take to get into it.) But, let me just say, first, I knew what I was getting into when I picked up the book—more than likely, it was going to take its cues from all the stuff I didn't like in Identity Crisis, which meant (more than likely) a minor character was going to get killed by another minor character in a way that, in order to be a genuine surprise, would have to contradict established thinking at the core of either or both characters. And I knew it would be a lead-in to the upcoming miniseries, so there would be a certain amount of awkward plot hammering to cover stuff like The Rann-Thanagar War. And for all that, for what it did, considering it only cost a buck, it was pretty much OK, I thought. It didn't seem like a hacked-out piece of crap to me (although I've read A.K.'s review since then and now I just wonder if I have no taste whatsoever), although it made me actually kind of sad: I mean if I assembled a list of all the DC titles from the '80s and '90s that deserved to be shit on, the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League would probably be at the very bottom of that list. And yet, this is about as thorough a shitting on as one can imagine (well, L-Ron didn't come out and skullfuck Blue Beetle's exit wound, but maybe they're saving that for the "Director's Cut.") I know Geoff Johns has brought back and cleaned up so many characters that've been shit on he probably thinks he can do the same with Blue Beetle (and I'm sure he can!), but can he really unpoison an entire run? I hope DC was at least suave enough to let Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire know in advance (and/or throw them a bonus or some extra work) because this would feel like a kick in the teeth, otherwise. Depressing.

FANTASTIC FOUR #524: Well-crafted and clever, and kind of has me wondering if the Fantastic Four are, for lack of a better term, dead. I was having lunch with a friend this week, and one of the topics touched on were the imaginary stories Superman used to have and how brilliant and necessary they were. Because with Superman, you have this really brilliantly established status quo and the only way to explore all of its implications without really changing it is by using an imaginary story (or a reboot). So Superman's dead, more or less, but imaginary stories allow writers and readers to still explore the myth of Superman and weave interesting material from it. Without that in place, you basically get stuff like Supreme Power and Supreme and Legend, which are explorations of the Superman myth without using Superman. And maybe it's the same with The Fantastic Four: you've got a really iconic status quo, and you're supposed to explore that status quo without really changing anything. What can you do? You can create very well-crafted and clever stories like this team did and if a scene where Ben argues with Reed that Reed can't become The Thing, because his stubby little fingers will slow down his ability to save humanity, feels patently false, really, whose fault is it? Certainly not Waid's, not Weiringo's, and maybe not even mine. It's just the nature of the status quo. OK, I guess.

FLASH #220: This is how I know I'm just not a true Flash fan—I just don't care about The Rogues. Geoff Johns has crafted some stories that make me interested in some of the individual Rogues, sure. But put ten of 'em in a room and I just lose interest. This was probably better than Eh, but I doubt I'll ever be able to tell.

MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #12: So first, Green Goblin and Doc Ock get struck by lightning. Then, when it looks like Aunt May is dying, she and Spidey get struck by lightning? One convenient lightning strike is absurdly cheap, two just seems, I dunno, openly contemptuous? And the use of Chekov's dictum "If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must knock a love interest off a bridge by the last," was also a bit off-putting (As Hibbs put in the store: "why would you even bother to set something like that up? Why not just have her slip and fall?"). I kind of liked the last page, and I thought the text piece by Millar singing the praises of the strange fucked up '70s Spidey books (an era I also love) was very well done. But it also seemed Millar had spent twice as long composing that text page as he had the previous three issues. Considering the total number of pages I liked in this twelve issue run is approximately four, I would have to give this the Crap rating.

OUTSIDERS #22: I don't care too much about Arsenal, but I liked how this played out. Something about Deathstroke looking at all those wounds and deciding to give the guy a pass really worked for me. A quibble here, a quibble there (is there a bunch of Deathstroke/Arsenal slash fanfic that I don't know about? Because that panel where a well-placed boot obscures what may be Deathstroke mounting Arsenal was pretty darn…interesting), so let's go with OK.

RICHARD DRAGON #11: A pretty good set-up to a what will hopefully be a slam-bang finale. OK.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #26: A fateful "lady or the tiger" decision as Spidey must choose whether to go after a kidnapped Mary Jane or a vengeance-hungry Sara…except it's really more like a "lady or the muppet" decision. Half an hour later, Sara is still in a Mexican standoff with the evil French gangsters until Spidey appears to mop things up. Just one of many reasons I found this issue particularly Craptacular.

TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #31: Yes, we drank and partied so much I didn't even read Tarot. Aww. No rating.

ULTIMATE SECRET #1: Nice and speedy. The science stuff didn't drag on too long, and we got some fun big splodey. As long as next issue isn't just a repeat of this issue: Good.

X-MEN PHOENIX ENDSONG #4: I'm wonder if this was supposed to have been the following arc on Astonishing after Whedon/Cassaday because it really seems to stem from it (in the same way the Whedon/Cassaday work seemed to stem from Morrison's run). I'm liking it, although Land's action scenes are a little bit of a jumble and I'm just not following some of the thinking here. (Why does Logan repeatedly killing Phoenix make her more Jean and less Phoenix? Or have I got that backward?) Still, I have to say I prefer it to all of the regular X-books except for Astonishing. Good.

Sweet 16 reviews of 3/30 comics

First off, today marks 16 years of Comix Experience. Hooray! My baby is ready for her prom! Joy! It almost was a disaster though, as at some point on Wednesday night a car pulled a hit and run on another car parked in front of the store, pushing it up on the sidewalk, and wrapping it around the parking meter in front. If the meter hadn't been there, the hit car would probably have gone through the store's front window. If the car is still there today, I'll try to take some pictures and get them posted. What was funny is that all day yesterday people were stopping and taking pix of the car with their friends standing next to it. Kinda the ultimate rubber-necking experience.

Ben and Tzipora are off on a "play date" so I have a rare (VERY RARE) morning to myself, and I have about 2 hours to write up the CRITIC before I have to go off to the eye doctor and see if they can fix the pairs of glasses that Ben has ruined so far. I love that boy, though.

I should be at the store around 1 or so, and we'll probably be drinking some beer and stuff, so if you're in the area, pop by and join the low key and wholly unofficial 16-year celebration.

Anyway, hows about some reviews? I've managed to read everything, though I'm not going to even attempt to do a "full" week of reviews -- going to try to keep it around 20 books this week.

(I shouldn't have to do this, but, yes, there are some spoilers below, you're duly warned!)

ASTONISHING X-MEN #9: You have to imagine that Whedon is having a blast -- coming up with stuff that, if he was doing a movie or a TV show would be impossible unless, y'know, he only wanted to do one episode a year or something. There's a few great lines here, as always, but I think the central idea of "The danger room is sentient and will reform itself into a giant robot to kill us all" is... well, it's pretty dumb. If it wasn't for the suicidal mutant kid this would have probably just been a big waste of time, but there's enough of a solid emotional through-line there that it works better than it should have. Still, this was the first issue of the run where I was kinda... well, bored I guess, and I'll go with a medium strength GOOD.

BATGIRL #62: I really don't get how this has lasted for SIXTY-TWO issues, man. Over five years of an emotionally stunted protagonist who really does nothing other than hit people well. Her character is about as deep as a piece of paper. *shrug* There were OK scenes here and there (I thought the near-death sequence worked OK), but even if this book was firing on every cylindar both real and imaginary, I can;t really ever picture this book being much better than a strong OK.

BATMAN #638: I really really want to roll my eyes at this. Bringing Jason back seems like such a hack idea to me, and I can't imagine that it would have even occured to anyone had Jeph Loeb not done it 2 years ago. I wildly disagree with Judd's interview earlier in the week on Newsarama (the oddly named link can be found as http://www.newsarama.com/DC/Countdown_more/Batman_Hello.htm -- doesn't that sound like a badly translated Japanese comic? "In the next issue of 'Batman Hello!' Bruce must face a champion Mah-Jong player!") where he posits that the "how" is less important than the effects. The problem is, I think, in comics the HOW is what allows the WHAT to have emotional resonance or not. It's hard to think of a scenario where the HOW doesn't becoming comic-book-stupid, cutting out the legs of any emotional impact (say, if he is a from a parallel universe or some shit). Even IF the HOW is the best idea evah, though, bringing Jason back... well it's emotionally cheap and easy, to this reader. It worked OK in "Hush" because it was a red herring and a feint, but as the real thing? Meh. If I have one real problem though, it's how deeply insular this is as a self-contained story-unit. That last page reveal really only works if you know your Bat-Backstory. There's nothing within the comic that sets this up, or gives a clue to why the last page is significant at all. Sure, if you've been reading Batman for 20 years then you "get it", but if this was someone's first Batman comic? "Who is the guy in the red mask, there?" I will add points, however, for the word-baloon-driven cover. That looks like Wagner's lettering to me, as well. I'll go with a solid OK, I guess, but future revalations could drive that up or drag that way way down.

BPRD THE DEAD #5: Good ending to the arc, feeling like a solid Hellboy-style story, and giving a few threads to play with for the future. I liked it: GOOD.

CONCRETE HUMAN DILEMMA #4: Meanwhile I really WANT to like this, but the actual HUMAN dilemma of the book feels so rote and staged and emotionally flat, it is very hard to care. We do get to the ironic twist of the story (which I saw coming very early in this issue), which could be clever, but, as always, "there's a fine line between clever and stupid". I'll go with a mild OK, which is disappointing because I doubt I'd've ever given any other CONCRETE tale less than a "Very Good".

DC COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS #1: Yes, this is the one you really tuned in to see how I'd rag on this week. I know that. Well, sir, lady, I might just refer you to one of my "Identity Crisis" "reviews" because my stance is pretty much the same -- it is frustrating to me when steps are taken to darken the universe like this, when big events are built UPON corpses and tragedy and horror. It frustrates me when characters act out-of-character and like total asshats because that's what the blueprint demands. In gaming, you call this "plot hammering", and the plot is hammered all over the place in the DCU these days.

Let me ask a serious question: is the story improved by a futile death, and an absence of heroism? Could the story have worked JUST AS WELL if BB had had a lucky last minute escape at the end? Perhaps, even an "Uh oh, IS he dead?!?!" moment, rather than a blantant and no-questions corpse on the floor? See, I think not only would the story have worked just the same, it could have given a possibility that BB could be a starring character again, rather than a sad second string joke. And that, perhaps, is the great failure of the current guardians of the DCU -- enormous effort is being made to bring depth to the also-rans, but the results of that effort is basically to make those characters useless to anyone. This seems like a hugely missed opportunity to me.

Supergirl and Barry Allen died during CRISIS, yes, but they died as HEROES. BB just dies as a sad man way over his head, adding no significance, and wallowing in shock value. SHOCK IS NOT SIGNIFICANCE. What's weird is that at least one of the three primary writers of this KNOWS this -- how much of Geoff Johns' career has been spent in trying to unravel the mistakes of past adminstrations? Killing Superman, breaking Batman's back, Maiming Arther, or driving Hal insane or god the stupidity of what they did to the Hawks... none of those yeilded better stories (Well, OK, the follow ups to the Superman stuff was some of the best modern Super-comics ever, so that's one) -- quite the opposite, in fact. And DC *knows* this: shitting on your characters doesn't yeild dramatic options. In fact, it really reduces them because you've got to spend all of your effort dealing with the plot hammer stuff to the detriment of good STORIES.

Further, I just get queasy when the plot HINGES on continuity minutia (like BG's companion Skeets -- has Skeets appeared anywhere in anything in a comic published in the last 10 years? Longer? I don't think Skeets has appeared since the end of BG's series, has he? That was 1988, according to the Grand COmics Database at www.comics.org -- or 17 years ago!), yet it happily ignores OTHER continuity minutia like how Max Lord has has his mind read by the Martian Manhunter in the past, because that would undermine the plot-hammer.

The idea that Max Lord is behind this all, to me, is just about the worst idea I've ever heard. It is utterly inconsistant with past actions, and just doesn't parse in any rational way. Just about the only way this could have been worse is if it was revelaed that Ma Hunkle was the grand mastermind -- that makes about as much sense, y'know? I almost think someone should go kill Keith Giffen to see if he'll roll over in the grave.

(NOTE: DON'T DO THAT! That was a joke!)

So: ugly, illogical, plot-hammered and filled with asshats. But... at least it is only a buck! The architects say they have a plan, say this is all going somewhere and we'll be happy with the results, but I'm an inch away from just giving up on the U part of the DCU forever because it's really not a place I want to visit any longer. I'd much rather read Morrison's SEVEN SOLDIERS, y'know, where he's trying to reinject FUN rather than misery. All in all: AWFUL

(FOr a good laugh, go read Abhay Khosla's review at http://www.comicscommunity.com/boards/pop/?read=28386)

DOOM PATROL #10: That's kinda a Doom Patrol-worthy origin for those two characters, actually, and I've gone from absolutely detesting them to not TOTALLY abhoring them. Still, this is one meandering directionless book, isn't it? OK

FLASH #220: Lots of threads have been building to this for several years, but now that we're actually IN the "Rogue's War" I find I care a little less. However, this could be because this was the second comic I read this week, after COUNTDOWN. Assume it's just depressive fallout from that, then, because I say OK.

GOON DH ED #11: I loved this issue -- mean, but funny, odd and strange and filled with comic-book weirdness, and oh so very pretty. EXCELLENT.

I'm speeding up from here because I'm down to 20 minutes left to get through the rest of the books.

GRIMJACK KILLER INSTINCT #3: Liked this issue a lot, too. Great action, good dynics, smart ideas: VERY GOOD.

LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #4: Another solid issue, with a good balance of backstory and moving things forward. VERY GOOD.

MARVEL KNIGHTS SPIDER-MAN #12: Thank god for plot-convenient lightning bolts, is all I can say. The plot-hammered MJ's gun finally comes in to play, for no valuable use of any kind. All problems are abruptly solved by the last page, making you wonder why some of it (like the financials) were ever brought into play. This has been a big waste, sorry. EH.

OR ELSE #2: Mostly mentioned so Graeme knows he should pop by. Second issue out, with some great formalistic storytelling attempts. I like Kevin's clean style (especially his lettering -- that's a dying art), but I was underwhelmed by the teeny tiny little package (especailly when not solicited as such), and I think it makes the $6 price tag verging on the steep side. Still, that aside: GOOD.

OTHERWORLD #1: Lots of setup. Lots and lots of it. So much so that it's really hard to judge the issue. The characters seem reasoanbly rich and rounded, and the events are, while a bit cliched, handled well enough, and the art, OF COURSE, is terrific -- but I'm going to need another issue, I think, to see if I LIKE it or not. This issue was just OK.

OUTSIDERS #22: Liked it all around, though the "One of us is a traitor!" is so overused that Judd needs to tread carefully. I got a good laugh out of the next issue box, though it's an obvious joke. GOOD.

PULSE #8: Thought this was terrific, just terrific writing, though plot-wise with SECRET WAR, I am not sure if this title hasn't strayed too far from it's stated point. Don;t care for now, though, I loved the dialogue so much, VERY GOOD.

SECRET WAR BOOK FOUR: This, meanwhile, I was just stunned by. Meandering and pointless and just a big excuse for a fight scene, and it's not much of a "Secret" war, is it? Show, not tell, man -- I guess we'll see in four months and the last issue if this had a point of any kind. EH.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #26: Takes at least one twist that I wouldn't have given the writers credit for, so that's good. Still, just one long EH.

ULTIMATE SECRET #1: A much stronger start, I think, than NIGHTMARE's first issue. I liked this all around, dialogue, art, so VERY GOOD.

USAGI YOJIMBO #82: ANother great issue, isn't it criminal this doesn't sell 50k an issue? VERY GOOD.

PICK OF THE WEEK goes to GOON #11, I'm sure you can guess my PICK OF THE WEAK....

The BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK is a toss-up between BATMAN CHRONICLES VOL 1 TP and PLANETARY VOL 3 LEAVING THE 20TH CENTURY TP. Either are great.

OK, now I'm late, gotta run, what did you think?

-B

The Easter Feast: Reviews of 3/23 Comics

Dear God, he did it. Hibbs actually posted! I am very pleased and impressed. Of course, now I'm in his position, of trying to figure out how to write about the same books without saying the same god-damn thing but that's okay. I'm just so tickled he's posted, I'll happily expose the rest of you to a pointless double-post! So on that merry note:

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #518: Really glad Hibbs reviewed this first, because I was starting to feel like an AMS whiner. Plus, some of the stuff I've bitched about gets mentioned in passing in the script itself (a caption mentioning The Molten Man; a caption mentioning Peter calling MJ) but they actually hinder the narrative. And believe me, if there's one thing this narrative didn't need, it was more hindering. Eh.

ARANA HEART OF THE SPIDER #3: I admit that I dove in cold on this issue (I read maybe the first four pages of issue #1 before getting distracted) but it seems like it could be much, much clearer: one of the pages has two women in mid-fight scene when, the last time we saw either, one was in a car and one was diving out of a helicopter. Although not anything new, the emotional drama (Arana’s classmate is her nemesis; her father’s line of work interferes with hers) is solid; it’s the structural drama that sucks: not only is Arana outrageously passive about the whole classmate/enemy situation (he plans a trap that will destroy her; she goes window-shopping for tattoos with a friend), she’s got a whole superteam that only exists to set up situations and/or solve problems. At the risk of sounding like a page out of Robert McKee’s Story, how can we connect with the protagonist when she’s utterly passive and reactive? (Ugh, I really do sound like a page out of Robert McKee’s Story...) A very low Eh.

AUTHORITY REVOLUTION #6: Utterly without oomph. Although I have other ideas as to why this all went wrong, I will, at the moment, point to the story, which strikes me as alternately unbelievable and dull. I’m going to go with Awful just because I got my hopes up for this arc and am pretty much regretting it.

CHOLLY & FLYTRAP #2 (OF 4): Very lovely looking stuff, and it did make me nostalgic for those days of Heavy Metal when you could pick that mag up knowing you were going to get a dose of sumptious grit. But times have changed, and I expect more from my pretty pictures now—a feeling compounded when reading the book’s closing profile pieces which, if self-authored, make Sudyam seem like a narcissist of a very high order. OK, but no more than that.

DAREDEVIL #71: Reads a bit less like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue, and a bit more like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, than I would have expected, but I’m sure that’s just me. I kinda liked the big fight scene, but it leaves a lot for the reader to infer about the character telling the story and any of the resultant change she went through. And it’s harder for me to give Bendis the benefit of the doubt these days in such matters, unfortunately, so I gotta sit with OK.

ED THE HAPPY CLOWN #1 (OF 9): Everything about this—the price, the quarterly production schedule, that it was printed on the paper towels dispensed in restaurants, Brown’s “this is the only way you’ll ever see this material again, unless I change my mind again, in which case, it won’t!”—annoyed me…until I actually started reading it. Brown’s chops were considerable when he started working on this, but leaning so heavily on his subconscious to provide the story gives the story a freshness and dreamlike allure that can still hold me enthralled all later. Can only give it a Good (and I shouldn't even give it that, probably), because, really, $2.95 and quarterly publication for completed material printed on industrial strength paper towels, is dangerously close to being a rip-off.

EXPATRIATE #1: Starting the story in media res and at a fast pace is a great idea, and there’s a level of ambition and competence that makes me want to pick up the next issue. But there are some minuses (Hibbs' reference to the colors being “hideous and garish” is actually an understatement, and I don’t understand how the couple get away from that last shoot-out unless the agents just let them go) that are a little troubling, and put this on the low side of OK.

FUTURAMA SIMPSONS CROSSOVER CRISIS PART 2 #2 (OF 2): I liked part one a lot more, but the whole thing was on the high side of Good—it read like a classic, clever silver-age JLA/JSA crossover, but, you know, funny and with the Bongo characters. Like I said: Good.

HAWKMAN #38: Making Hawkgirl “just” the love interest really misunderstands how Geoff Johns set up this reboot, I think. I also have a big case of the don’t cares where Golden Eagle is concerned. Pretty art, though. Eh.

LEGEND #2 (OF 4): Hibbs and I really disagree on this one I wish I knew how much of this material is patented Chaykin hyper-libido and how much of it comes from the original source material: there may be some perspective gained on the Superman/Lois relationship if the sexual dread found here was in Wylie’s original (and rubbed off on Siegel and Shuster’s creation). And there's something to be said about a story about someone with superpowers where either fighting or committing crime doesn't seem to be part of the equation. Other than that, it reads like a bad first novel illustrated by an indifferent Russ Heath. Fascinating in its stinkiness, but the price point keeps it at Awful.

LIVEWIRES #2 (OF 6): As Hibbs pointed out, too much like the first issue to really be satisfying, although lots of very neat touches like the seven cognitive frames panel (between this and We3, I'm kind of eager to see someone try an extended bit of super-saturated panel information, which, now that I think of it, is the sort of thing Chris Ware's been fooling around with for some time). I thought it was fun, so it's a low Good, but I feel guilty for doing so becuase I've given tons of books shit for doing exactly this sort of "the same issue twice" thing.

NEW AVENGERS #4: The “good” news is that continuity is back: those of us wondering what happened to Wolverine in the Uncanny storyline have a piece of the answer thanks to the last page here. (And this follows a trend I’ve noticed at Marvel the last few months with some books making slight references to events in other books). The bad news is internal continuity is gone, gone, gone: So much was made of Elektro eating at the same restaurant in Boston for three weeks, but then the waitress there says to Elektro she hasn’t seen him for two. Meanwhile we’re supposed to believe that Captain America was able to assemble the team and Stark had set up his entire base of operations in just twenty-four hours? The art looks great, with the colorist, I think, really adding an almost 3-D feel to the art but there are just so many “wha?” and “huh?” and “but...” a guy can ask before rolling his eyes and just deciding: Eh.

NEW INVADERS #8: I thought of Spurgeon’s great John Romita interview over at The Comics Reporter (taken down now, alas) while reading this: we finally got a big fight scene, but it’s so static and limp it’s painful. (And that panel of Captain America making out with Union Jack while Spitfire freaks out was just funny.) The superhero medium is going through growing pains and so you just can’t have that “silent movie acting” that Romita talks about anymore—but then you miss out on an easy transition to the sheer kineticism of a Kirby-styled fight scene, to say nothing on what to do when you’re not styling fight scenes around Kirby anymore. However the problem’s solved, this talking-heads-followed-by mannequins-falling-over-each-other isn’t it. At eight issues in, I’ve decided New Invaders is probably the dullest superhero comic Marvel’s ever published. It’s like watching paint dry, but without the fun of smelling the fumes. Awful.

NEW WEST #1: Wanted to like this—something about the opening page drew me right in—but why bother explaining something to such great length if it doesn’t make any sense? Los Angeles has all electricity wiped out...but only Los Angeles? The rest of the world has power but L.A. doesn’t? So why don’t people just drive some cars up from San Diego? Listen, if you want your private eye on a horse with a samurai sword, go for it (look at Cholly & Flytrap). But if you feel you have to explain yourself, at least come up with something that makes sense at least a little. Phil Noto’s art seemed a million times more fluid than the last time I looked, but at $4.99, this gets an Awful, and another area where me and Hibbs really split. [EDIT: Frank S. Kim schools me good in the comments section on this, leaving me little choice but to conclude I read the damn thing too fast and stuff is better fleshed out than I thought. Fair enough; I'll bump it up to an Eh just because it obviously wasn't my bag, and point you to Brian's more positive review.]

SEVEN SOLDIERS GUARDIAN #1: Wow. This was absurdly great. from the few deliberately over-the-top captions, to the quickly sketched out history of the subway pirates, to just having the newsboy legion reintroduced in a way that makes them seem cool—this was a great big slice of fried gold. At the two-fisted top of Very Good.

SPAWN #144: If you cross a ‘70s Marvel comic with an iceberg, you get Spawn. I actually liked some of the ideas and scenes here, particularly Mammon plucking Simmons’ memories from him, one by one (and I'm always a sucker for stories with tarot cards in them, ever since that one Son of Satan story way back when). But this book seems essentially cowardly to me—it will set up a new status quo without ever resolving any of the old status quo, as if a finger was constantly trembling over a big ol’ reset button. OK, but frustrating in its miserliness.

SPIDER MAN HUMAN TORCH #3: If you are a fan of Marvel Comics in the ‘70s, then you should pick this up because it has everything a Marvel fan from that era would love: an actual explanation of how the Spider-Mobile works, Red Ghost and The Super-Apes; the Torch’s red costume (which is a beautifully specific detail that all but carbon dates the continuity on the story); and, of course, a few well-placed fruit pies (I wrote this back before Hibbs' review, so there's probably no need for me to phrase that so elegantly, but still....). Don’t get me wrong, even if you’re not a 70’s nut, you’ll appreciate the very elegant craft of Slott’s script where both the plot and the humor build perfectly off each previous piece. But if you’re like me and read all your issues of Spider-Man and Marvel Team-Up ten times apiece, you’ll think this is Very Good stuff (even though the art is a bit vexing). If not for Guardian, this might have been my Pick of the Week.

X-MEN #168: Hibbs is high on crack. This issue stank; last issue stank; Vulcan logic dictates next issue will stink because drug-induced character revelation when the writer doesn't understand the characters will stink. Even Larroca isn't trying anymore and that guy, Lord love him, will work his ass off trying to make anything work. Awful.

Whew. That was a plump little Easter Basket of spite, wasn't it? But never mind that: go hunt up the good stuff because some of it (Guardian!) was really quite good.

Reviews for 2/23, OMG!

The grandparents took Ben this morning, so, woot! Looks like I can good a good morning start on this, and maybe Jeff won't have to "hold off" this week after all. Within an hour of posting my last post, Ben ran through almost all of the letters he has left in his alphabet. Oh, sure, he still mixes up his E and his F, but when you correct him, he corrects himself just fine after that. W is "Ag-gah", but it's consistant, and he says it with such verve that we can let his baby palate slide there.

I still haven't read 100% of this week's books (92% and holding, Captain!), but let's take the opportunity while we have it before I have to go into the store, do inventory, then come back and start working on both the PREVIEWS that is due, as well as the April sub forms.... god, the work never stops, does it?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #518: Ah, the Shared Universe problem. Spidey calls on Iron Man to help, but never for a second asks Tony to actually help help him. Sure, you think your wife and mother-figure are going to be killed by a crazy bastard, and you don't ask the guy in the metal suit with the howitzers to help you fight a battle. That parses. Then, since the plot dictates that Spidey & co will move into the Avengers tower or whatever, everyone's houses have to get destroyed, but no one shows any remorse of any kind. I'll tell you what, if all of my shit got destroyed -- especially by Retro-Continuity Implant Guy -- I'd be pretty fucking distraught about it. Especially if I already had an enemy who had functionally the same powers (Molten Man). I don't know, our Spidey sales have cut themselves nearly in half post-Gwen-is-a-Whore, and I can't say I blame anyone, really. I wouldn't pay soon-to-be-$2.50 for padding and convenience like this. EH.

ARANA HEART OF THE SPIDER #3: I really don't know -- 9 issues of this character so far and I don't see a real point or purpose, or, hell, audience for it. The characters just not very appealing, and, yikes, her costume stinks. There's momentary flashes of cleverness here (The "I can't leave the building" thing, some of the High School stuff), but there's far too many other characters running around at this stage of the game, and secret socieites are so played out. Sorry, Charlie, last issue I'm going to bother to read. EH.

ARMY OF DARKNESS SHOP TIL YOUDROP DEAD #2: With so many bits recribbed from the movie, and a decidely rushed-looking job on the art (we're at 2 months late as it is), these feels just like running in place. EH.

AUTHORITY REVOLUTION #6: I haven't got any fucking idea what's going on here, and everyone seems completely out of character to me. I have to assume Ed is going somewhere with this, but if he is, I have no idea where it is. AWFUL.

BATMAN GOTHAM KNIGHTS #63: When I said in last week's TILTING AT WINDMILLS that there are too many comics, here's exhibit A. Why is this being published? Why was this ever being published? Lots of plot, very little organic characterization, and I swear to god, I really hate Hush the more he appears here in GK. AWFUL.

DAREDEVIL #71: Hey, finally a comic I liked! I can quibble (the fight scnee dragged on too long, and I'm really not sure WHAT kind of an inspiriation DD provided to the girl... she gonna throw on tights and beat the crap outta people now herself?), but I very much liked the setting and set-up for this arc, and thought this was a solid GOOD.

ED THE HAPPY CLOWN #1: Man, that cover is unbearably pretentious (Calling this work "Chester Brown's First Graphic Novel" is, at best, a ret con), and that's just a horrifically awful paper stock that it is there on, and Chester's editorial kinda indicates that you probably don't want this version anyway, because the new collection will be a revised one, and while I really really really love this work, that's 1, 2, 3 strikes at the old ball game, knocking the Savage Critic grade down to an OK. This version is probably only for you if you want to read Chet's annotations at the end, otherwise, wait the 2 or 3 years or whatever it is going to take (dumb not doing this as a monthly reprinting, if you ask me) for the TP to come out and read it then. It is hysterical and askew and top notch work, but this package is yucky and weird and wrong -- over $30 for the whole thing when it's done? Uh, what?

EXCALIBUR #11: See, and I feel like a shmucky philistine of an ass ripping on Chet, with the first sentence of the next paragraph being, "This is a marked improvement in the quality of EXCALIBUR". But, damn if it isn't. Maybe because this seemed to actually be about something (Magneto's actions), for the first time in 11 issues. This is another "I have no idea whatsoever why this is being published" book, but this one issue I thought was a very very low GOOD.

EXPATRIATE #1: Not too bad, though I thought the colors was pretty hideous and garish. This feels like I've heard this story before, somewhere, but the line art was nice enough that I could give it an OK.

FILLER BUNNY #3: Prepare to Wuv Aborto! And that was probably the most tasteful thing in the book. Yet, I laughed in many many places. I give it a solid GOOD.

[Gr, nope wait, called away to watch some TV we recorded over the last week ("I need to free up the tapes, so come now!") -- watched the American remake of THE OFFICE (Good, but I don't know if America can handle the uncomfortable nature of the show -- most of the events just happen note-for-note as in the original, with just a few Americanizations) and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (what a great SF show!), and now I have to fly off to work to do this week's inventory and back issue management. Back in a bit]

[Back, and here's the rest....]

FUTURAMA SIMPSONS CROSSOVER CRISIS PART 2 #2: Many of the in jokes and references were funny, but, if anything, I thought this issue was nearly "too dense" with stuff, creating an uneven narrative. A high OK.

HAWKMAN #38: Golden Eagle?!?! Are there more than 6 people who might care about him? I mean, wow! I was also nearly surprised that it was kept in-continuity (but, people: ED. NOTES, man. Gotta cite that shit), rather than being a new teen hero who could join the Titans. I thought the story was solid enough, and a nice attempt at building a "Rogue's Gallery" for Hawkie, but the bomb thing at the end was kinda deadening. So, let's also call this a lowish GOOD.

HELLBLAZER #206: The wife-beating thing took this farther than it should have, I think -- long-suffering Chas, well you can wreck his car, or have him take a beating or something, but this didn't seem "fair" to the character... not after 206 issues, at least. A strong OK on because I think Chas should be off limits.

KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #101: hurray, back to the storylines. I know, I know, you don't want to hear me talk about the gamer comic with the lousy art, but, damn you this is the funniest "funnybook" published each month. I'd still rather have only the comics, and not the gaming stuff, and pay a buck less per issue, but whatchugonnado? VERY GOOD.

LEGEND #2: In which Russ Heath gets to draw lots of titties. Lots and lots and lots of them -- some even in wildly out-of-place situations. They're also all perfectly perfect, which kinda bugged me, but what do I know? I very much liked the story, but there were certainly places where I couldn't figure out a transition, or who was speaking to who or why, and I think the issue could have stood a bit more editing. (Just like this column, man was that a run on sentence or what?) Anyway, a really high OK, but the cover price stops me from being able to say "Good"

LIVEWIRES #2: This suffered even more than the first issue from over-exposition, in a lot of places just restating what we already knew. Yet, there were some cool ideas and scenes here, and it was incredibly frenetic in a fun way, so I'll be generous and give it a low GOOD.

NEW AVENGERS #4: Bendis is finding his sea legs - this was certainly my favorite of the eight issues so far. But, man, pay attention to what you're saying. Jeff'll be along any moment with the "I can't figure out how much time has passed" problem; me, I was bemused by the "previously in" page whihc talk about how they broke up the old Avengers because they didn't want to deal with politics and money and all of that. So what do the first few pages deal with? Sure, politics and money. There were fun beats, yes, but it's really not holding together as a team book at all. The fun beats earn it an OK.

NEW WEST #1: While Jeff was right in observing that the scenerio doesn't make much sense vis-a-vis the balckout and the timeline, I didn't really care all that much. I liked the execution of the book, I liked the style, and while it's probably bloodier than it needs be, I thought it was GOOD fun.

NEW X-MEN #11: And it was all a dream! Well, of course it was, but that's a little long for dream story, don't you think? EH.

NIGHTWING #106: The end of the "year one" arc, and I really had to suspend my disbeleif a lot for everyone's reactions to Jason. But, whatever. This was fine, but the middle of the arc was much better. OK

RUNAWAYS #2: I really love how this is creating it's own little internal world in the greater Marvel universe. I'm really liking this book. VERY GOOD.

SEVEN SOLDIERS GUARDIAN #1: Dude! Best comic I've read so far this year. It has it all -- absurdity, action, imagination, fun, and a positive outlook -- this comic might be able to cure cancer. Pirates of the Subway lines, man, what a killer idea. Loud sour note right at the end with the "Hahahaha, we have your family!" bit, because that's dramatically lazy, and every other page is singing like a fire pole too the moon. Still, can't say anything else than EXCELLENT, and, no suspense here, PICK OF THE WEEK.

SLEEPER SEASON TWO #10: Two more to go, can this all be wrapped up satisfactorially? Oh, I think so, and this may be my favorite single issue of all 22 so far. VERY GOOD.

SPELLBINDERS #1: A neat idea, and, relatively, well executed (the cast is a bit too large, and some of the wicks voices seem a bit forced), but the actually strange thing is that this is a Marvel comic. I can't really see Marvel being estatic about the kind of numbers this is likely to pull, where at Vertigo, this could be a top seller as a monthly. Maybe is something about eggs and baskets. Anyway, yah, I liked it, and give it an easy GOOD.

SPIDER MAN HUMAN TORCH #3: Yes, I howled with laughter at the fruit pie explanation. This really does has it all for goofy-ass comics: Spider-Mobiles and Super Apes and Fruit Pies. Mm, Fruit pies.... GOOD.

X-MEN #168: I think it's marginally possible that next issues "trapped in the mansion, they sweat the drugs out" could be great, but, if so, damn was that a long bad build up to get there. EH.

PICK OF THE WEEK, as I said, is easially and happily SEVEN SOLDIERS: GUARDIAN #1. That much fun should be illegal.

PICK OF THE WEAK.... well, lessee, probably GOTHAM KNIGHTS #63. I'm pretty ambivilant this week because SS: G #1 makes up for like 50 bad comics.

The TP/GN PICK OF THE WEEK is.... either AVENGERS ASSEMBLE VOL 2 HC which has the second half of Busiek & Perez's run on Avengers or QUEEN & COUNTRY VOL 7 OPERATION SADDLEBAGS TP. I think the nudge goes to Q&C

Right, that's it for the week, and before it is "Too late", hurray! Thanks to Lester for putting up with my unreasonable madness!

As always, what did you think?

-B

Picks for 3/16 and shipping 3/23

It's true, dear god it IS true, I AM the World's Worst Blogger. See, here's the thing: I function really well with a deadline. "You must get this done by such-and-such" works well with my lifestyle. I am goal-oriented, or something.

But the deadline has to be "real". Like, I can writing a TILTING once a month, because, y'know, Newsaram is paying me, and if I don't give it to Brady by the Thursday before it runs, then I'm in deep shit. Not with him, of course, but with myself.

On the other hand, because I'm goal-oriented, I'm also the worlds biggest fucking procrastinator. I usually have 20 plates spinning, so "me time" is precious, and if I DON'T have the deadline, I push it back and back and back until I never get anything done at all.

I was motivated this week, I was GOING to post on Friday, but then Lester sent me all of the ONOMATOPOEIA stuff, and boom! new goal, y'know?

Because my motivation is kinda "beating Jeff Lester". I lose a lot of my steam when Jeff gets his reviews up first, 'cuz, y'know, "what's the point" if he's already handled a title? So, I think I'm going to ask Jeff to hold off on posting (but not writing) his piece unless I've posted yet.... unless I fuck up, and don't post by Sunday or so. Maybe we'll try this for a week, unless it has the same effect on Jeff that it does me.

In Ben news, he's slowed down in his alphabet pretty dramatically -- he still has like 5 letters he hasn't mastered (E, I, T, W, and Y for those playing at home), but he's decided that numbers are cool too, and is busy trying to sort those out. He has about 9 numbers through to 20 (thank you, Sesame Street!)

He also said his first sentence to me. He was playing with a ball, and it got stuck where he couldn't get to it. So, he marched right up to me, pointed to me and demanded, "Up! Baw!", then pointed to the ball. It couldn't not have been more clear. "Get off your ass, old man, and fetch my ball!"

I really only am going to do the picks for last week's comics because, let's face it, it's already Wednesday.

My PICK OF THE WEAK was not the worst comic of last week (HUMAN RACE #1, maybe?), but the one that squandered potential the most: TEEN TITANS #22. Y'know, there was an interesting through-line that could have been actually explored there: if the heroes are brainwashing their foes, and even their allies (like Batman), were they doing the same to their kids as well? That could have been a fascinating and taut psychological concept, and, instead we just get 22 pages of largely incoherant fight scenes. I suppose I can vagually understand how Dr. Light can control Superboy's heat vision, but wtf was up with Wonder Girl's lasso? "Of course I can control LIGHTning, I am Dr. Light!" Uh, what? Plus we get just about the worst reintroduction of all of a new revamped character (Hawk & Dove, who just show up out of the blue, and babble a lot), and that dumb last page where every titan every shows up to fight Dr. Light. Seriously, kids, Dr. Light simply isn't that scary, even if he appeared in IDENTIRAPE CRISIS. This comic was pretty much the reason people say they don't like Super-hero comics,and it was really AWFUL.

Oh, god, speaking of awful, I saw both CATWOMAN and THE PUNISHER this week, as the library finally got copies in (Like I'm going to pay for those films?!?!?), and yikies! CATWOMAN was an abortion -- almost certainly the worst "superhero" movie I've ever seen (and that likely includes the JLA TV pilot with David Ogden Stiers as the Martian Manhunter) featuring stocker-than-stock characters, a wooden, and utterly predicitble script, and horrific acting. It's MST3k-level bad. THE PUNISHER also sucked, but that's mostly because they spend nearly 40 minutes to build up the backstory (why? It's the PUNISHER people want to see, not his happy family life), and, actually, there's hardly any blood at all. Seriously, there's the scene where the mob wipes out Castle's entire family (no, I mean ENTIRE family -- it's a family reunion in Puetro Rico), and the ground is littered with corpses from the submachinegun fire, and my mind was registering nothing except "Why is there no blood? Where is the blood?!"

My PICK OF THE WEEK is probably no surprise: SHAOLIN COWBOY #2. Terrific fucking art by Darrow, and the wonderfully absurd and surreal script makes that the clear, EXCELLENT, winner.

For the BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK, I'll go with STARMAN V10 SONS OF THE FATHER, a great end to a great series, and, even reading it years removed like this, made me shed a tear at a certain point. Great stuff, go buy it.

Right, "full" reviews of THIS weeks books in just a couple of days, here's what's shipping...

100 BULLETS #59 2000 AD #1427 2000 AD #1428 30 DAYS OF NIGHT BLOODSUCKERSTALES #6 ALAN MOORES HYPOTHETICAL LIZARD WRAPAROUND CVR #2 (OF 4) AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #518 ARANA HEART OF THE SPIDER #3 ARCHIE & FRIENDS #90 ARCHIE DIGEST #215 ARMY OF DARKNESS SHOP TIL YOUDROP DEAD #2 AUTHORITY REVOLUTION #6 (OF 12) BATMAN GOTHAM KNIGHTS #63 BOOKS OF MAGICK LIFE DURING WARTIME #9 BRIAN PULIDOS MEDIEVAL LADY DEATH #1 CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #7 CHOLLY & FLYTRAP #2 (OF 4) CONAN #14 DAREDEVIL #71 ED THE HAPPY CLOWN #1 (OF 9) EXCALIBUR #11 EXPATRIATE #1 FILLER BUNNY #3 FREAKSHOW #4 FUTURAMA SIMPSONS CROSSOVER CRISIS PART 2 #2 (OF 2) GARTH ENNIS 303 WRAPAROUND CVR #4 (OF 6) HAWKMAN #38 HELLBLAZER #206 JLA CLASSIFIED #5 KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #101 LEGEND #2 (OF 4) LITTLE SCROWLIE #9 LIVEWIRES #2 (OF 6) METAL GEAR SOLID #7 NEW AVENGERS #4 NEW INVADERS #8 NEW WEST #1 NEW X-MEN #11 NIGHTWING #106 OFFICIAL HANDBOOK MARVEL UNIVERSE X-MEN AGE APOCALYPSE 2005 PHANTOM #5 PIGTALE #2 ROBIN #136 ROGUE #9 RUNAWAYS #2 (OF 12) RUNAWAYS LTD ED VARIANT #1 (OF 12) SEVEN SOLDIERS GUARDIAN #1 (OF 4) SLEEPER SEASON TWO #10 (OF 12) SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #147 SOULFIRE #4 SPAWN #144 SPELLBINDERS #1 (OF 6) SPIDER MAN HUMAN TORCH #3 (OF5) STAR WARS OBSESSION #4 (OF 5) STAR WARS REPUBLIC #74 TALES OF BLOODY MARY #1 (OF 8) THE BALLAD OF SLEEPING BEAUTY #8 THE INCREDIBLES #4 (OF 4) TRIGGER #4 UDON CANNON BUSTERS CVR A #1 UNCLE SCROOGE #340 WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #655 WOLVERINE SOULTAKER #2 (OF 5) X-MEN #168 X-MEN AGE OF APOCALYPSE #4 (OF 6)

Books / Mags / Stuff 2000 AD EXTREME ED #8 ANITA BOMBA BY CROMWELL AND GRATIEN HC VOL 4 AVENGERS ASSEMBLE VOL 2 HC AZPIRI DEMONWINDS HC BATTLE ROYALE VOL 12 GN (OF 13) BODY BY TAYLOR GIRLS & OTHER MUSINGS TP COMICS BUYERS GUIDE MAY05 #1604 ESSENTIAL ARSENIC LULLABY VOL1 TP FRAGILE TP FRANKENSTEIN NOW AND FOREVER GN GIANT ROBOT #36 HELLSING VOL 6 TP JAMES BOND CASINO ROYALE TP JUDGE DREDD DREDD VS DEATH TP OVERSTREET COMIC BOOK PG VOL 35 IRON MAN SC PREVIEWS VOL XV #4 QUEEN & COUNTRY VOL 7 OPERATION SADDLEBAGS TP REVENGE OF COUNT SKARBEK GN RG VEDA VOL 1 GN SCREEN POWER OFF JACKIE CHAN MAG VOL 6 #4 SFX #128 SIGLO FREEDOM TP SUGAR BUZZ VOL 1 YOUR TICKET TO HAPPINESS TP SWORD OF THE DARK ONES VOL 1 TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #132 ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN VOL 12 SUPERSTARS TP WAKE VOL 6 & 7 WIZARD BEST OF BASIC TRAININGDLX TP WOLVERINE CLASSIC VOL 1 TP

Jeff's Reviews for 3/16

I am always amused and impressed at what a bad blogger Hibbs is. After all, just yesterday, he posted a new Tilting at Windmills at Newsarama, a really lovely little piece that not only brings up some great points, but is a bit of a love letter to the comics stores he knew as a kid. You'd think he'd be posting here, pointing you to it, trumpeting his greatness, etc., right? No dice.

So I figure the least I can do is post the link for him (the discussion thread is chugging along nicely, too) before getting around to this week's books. I just finished writing 7,000 words for the CE newsletter so I may have already passed my limit for writing coherently about comics. If so, I apologize.

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #638: Rucka's very clever idea about Mxy (since he appears every 90 days, he should pop up every three issues or so) sounds much better than it reads, for any number of reasons. Hibbs had some impassioned argument about the mistake of introducing real time into the books that I had fun rolling my eyes at ("...which means that Superman is now at least 87 years old!") but my complaint is far more practical: Mxy is pretty played at once a year unless you've got a great take on him; at four times a year, he's really played out, maybe even if you do have a great take. Rucka may think he's got that (Mxy is kind of both Daffy and the animator in "Duck, Amuck" simultaneously) but I hope this issue might correct him: it was kind of a train wreck, with the idea of Lois and Kent having a kid explored in a way that was supposed to read as wacky and incisive but was no more than flat and obvious riffing. The ideas were more-or-less sound, but the execution was, at best, Eh.

BIRDS OF PREY #80: I kinda fade in and out on this book: for each thing I like (the Rose and Thorn tie-in), there's pretty much one thing I don't (I know I'm a jaded comic book reader, but one guy with a gun in a stairwell against two superheroes and a cop is not an exciting dramatic showdown--even if Gail goes out of her way to let us know it's a very, very narrow stairwell). The art seems less exploitive these days, Simone gives her characters a lot of depth, and she seems very "on" with regard to her research (that opening surgery scene was pretty cool) but this still feels like a long way from firing on all cylinders. Eh.

BLACK PANTHER #2: Okay, so last issue Hudlin re-introduced the one Black Panther story everyone does (the return of Klaw) and follows it up with the other Black Panther story everyone does ("T'Challa's throne is rightfully mine!"). And for this they had to wipe out all previous continuity? Also keen was how Hudlin wrote the big fight scene with an idea ("anyone who can defeat the Panther can take the throne!") he seemed to realize was a bad one and undercut it as it progressed ("So it's a good thing only someone in the Royal Family has ever beaten The Panther! Ever! And no one ever thinks that's rigged! Because Wakanda is really cool!") rather than just throw it away and start over. I'm really, sadly underwhelmed. A very low Eh.

CABLE/DEADPOOL #13: A fun read if you like Deadpool (which I do) and you don't think about it too hard (which I didn't). Cable/Deadpool is kinda turning out to be the Power Man & Iron Fist of the new millennium: a financially expedient team-up book of two very different characters that somehow manages to work (in large part because of Fabian Nicieza's scripting). Call me crazy, but I thought this was Good.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #4: Unless the subtext to Brubaker's first arc is a dire warning about the future of transportation, maybe he should stop having Cap getting into fights while in transit to someplace else. This is the second time in four issues, at least. That said, I did like this issue and it feels like things are building to a head so: Good.

CATWOMAN #41: Part of why I thought the more cartooned look was such a great choice for Brubaker's work on Catwoman was that it allowed the reader a bit of distance from the relatively bleak setting of runaway prostitutes, junkies and corruption. I really would have preferred a bit of that here, where the opening scene of the guy killing the dog and killing the streetwalker had me cringing. It's actually decent stuff--much, much better than that Wooden Nickel story--but I finished this issue feeling a bit skeevy. OK.

EX MACHINA #9: I don't think I can say anything new here--I started the title kinda dreading the gay marriage press conference but appreciated the turn it took, and thought the showdown with the female reporter was smartly done. Not thrilled with the last page but this is undeniably Good work.

EXILES #61: The team here continues to keep the pace fast, and we're more or less out of the AoA business as quickly as we got into it, which suits me fine. Bedard also does a very good job setting up conflicts that come from characters acting intelligently, and we need more of that in superhero books. If there's a problem, it's that the fight scenes are unexciting but I'd think they'd be hard to make interesting without slowing down the pace. A very high OK.

HUMAN RACE #1: The art was nice and expressive, but there's some disturbingly obvious padding (It's not enough that the mother runs up the stairs and yells, the father has to be shown running up the stairs too, so the sequence can fill three pages instead of two) and occasional bits of brainlessness that I'm not sure any first issue in this marketplace can afford. I'm simultaneously relieved and disappointed the super-powered fraternity thing isn't the easy target for jokes it might be, but wonder if Raab might not have had better luck taking that route and running with it: this feels generic. Eh.

HUMAN TARGET #20: A taut and smart storyline, and stronger than the book's been in while. Yet, the cliffhanger feels somehow simultaneously underdeveloped and forced--I can't believe Chance would be so blase about the whole situation as the ending has him. But, you know, Good.

INCREDIBLE HULK #79: It looks great--just amazing stuff to look at--and David's Hulk is an enjoyably genuine bastard. But I found the other characters' dialogue flat and grating--David's "wink, wink, nod, nod" approach to the reader has become more of a "twitch, twitch, grimace, grimace" and makes it really hard to invest any emotion in the story. OK, because the art and colors on this are super-sweet.

JLA #112: Doing stories in a "widescreen" style is a bit like telling a joke--if the pacing's off, forget about it. And this seemed really off, as three big fight scenes take place simultaneously but read to me like a big jumble of who/what/where/don't care. The dialogue seemed very, very flat as well. (I don't know if the Qwardians have previously used "Spent shafts!" as their oath of choice, but it sounds so porn-o-rific, it totally pulled me out of the story.) A distressingly big mess, and I'm inclined to go with Awful.

LOVE & ROCKETS VOL 2 #13: Jaime's work just knocked me on my ass this issue, particularly "Angel of Tarzana" which was just so gorgeous and keenly observed, it seemed somehow trenchant in its apparent pointlessness. (The Hopey and Ray stories were stellar, too.) Gilbert's work didn't resonate nearly as strongly, but that didn't stop this from being a Very Good issue. It was pretty great.

PVP #15: Two of the strongest storylines I think Kurtz has ever done, and the strongest issue of the PVP comic by far. But the letter column where Kurtz berates a female reader who's informed him she's quitting the book over the cheesecake covers is one of the most cringe-inducing things I've seen since watching The Office (which, admittedly, was just last week). I'm a big believer in separating the creator from the work, but that really robbed me of the glow I got from reading this, making this a more reluctant Good than I would like.

SHAOLIN COWBOY #2: Holy fuck, this was good. After the dialogue-light first issue, I thought all the talky, jokey dialogue wasn't going to work, but Darrow knew when to use his art as a straight man to his story (King Crab going through the kung-fu training montage is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time, all because it's presented so straight) and when to let it also get insane and absurd. An absolute blast to read, and top-notch Very Good work.

SIMPSONS COMICS #104: Started as really funny, ended pretty funny, but not particularly funny in the middle at all. Bummer. Eh.

TEEN TITANS #22: I really like McKone's art--the guy's a knock-out talent--but apart from a nice scene between Light and Green Arrow, I didn't care one whit. I have no idea what "the tough" Dr. Light's powers are so the fight had no tension to me. Thus, the idea of every Titan ever ganging up to kick his butt again offers no tension either. And don't even get me started on the new Hawk and Dove... Eh.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #74: Strong, well-written and convinces me even more there's absolutely no reason it shouldn't have been USM #73. Again, the end of this would be even stronger if we hadn't been shown so much of where Harry's head is probably at. Good, though.

ULTIMATES 2 #4: After seeing some of his recent output, it's hard to believe Millar can still be subtle, but here, just as it definitively looks like Thor's a nut, he again pulls the "Is Thor crazy, or is Loki fooling everyone?" idea, just so you're not sure either way. And that, along with that Tony and Natasha scene, made this a damn Good read for me, despite there being any number of other things I just didn't buy.

UNCANNY X-MEN #457: Again, this looked great, but was dumber than a sack of black labs: Rachel now thinks she's always been a dinosaur chick? Then how is she able to access any of her memories about the X-Men to use against them? What about her possible feelings for Kurt? (I also can't believe anyone still thinks Rachel is anything other than a glaringly awful reminder of how little sense the whole Phoenix thing now makes, but that's a whole 'nother rant.) But beautiful art, a fun idea and kind of nice handle on X-23 (she's defiant, but so much more openly needy than Wolverine ever was) made this highly OK.

WOLVERINE #26: I think John Romita, Jr. needs a nice vacation--the opening fight scene, like the fight scenes in Black Panther #2, seemed so dull and by the numbers, I almost couldn't believe it was JR, Jr. (The colors, however, were gorgeous throughout.) And Millar keeps trying to top any of his previously over-the-top efforts, so that parts of this read like blatant self-parody. ("By six, he had finished his first opera and tried to commit suicide twice." Sorry, but if a six year old wants to kill himself and can't do it, he's not a child genius. Dumb-ass six year olds manage to get themselves killed all the time.) But there was something so winningly dumb about the end of this (Hydra's big plan is to load two hundred evil undead superheroes and supervillains into a big catapault and ka-sproing them at the helicarrier...or something.) I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. A very guilty Good.

YOUNG AVENGERS #2: Unlike last issue, stumbles very badly with its pacing. Once we learn Iron Lad is Kang, we get it: we don't need four-plus pages to show the why or the how unless there's something unexpected: frankly, that probably didn't need more than one. But the Cassie Lang stuff I liked a lot, and the YA's are all likeable enough (even though it seems kind of silly that they keep asking "Do you think we're ready for Kang?" when they keep having problems beating up four ordinary guys). Disappointing after last issue, but still a high OK.

Wow, look at all those high marks. Since I'm usually much tougher and more burnt out on comics after working on the newsletter, I'd say this was probably a pretty good week for the floppies. I picked up 100 Percent as my sole trade this week, and am really curious to see how it reads as a whole. I'll let you know.

Sorta reviews from 3/9's comics

It was another kinda blah week for comics, weren't it? After I read Jeff's Saturday entry, he covered everything I woulda, and pretty much the same way I woulda, this week. In fact, there were only 2 books "left" that I had ANY interesting in writing about.... FABLES #35: Nice ending to this 2-parter, though I was a little surprised by the leap forward in time. That could be an interesting choice, I suppose -- after all, the Fables are eternal -- but it did jar my reading of the issue a bit. I'll go with GOOD.

JSA #71: Some real nice character moments here, though the Mr. Teriffic vs The Klan scene was corny and arbitrary, and I was kinda annoyed by the abrupt jump in the Hourman scene without any explanation whatsoever. However, the moment with Courtney and Ted was really precious, and the whole back half of the issue was nearly as good. All in all, I liked it and will also go with GOOD.

That's it, otherwise I pretty much agree with Jeff.

PICK OF THE WEEK goes to clearly to PROJECT SUPERIOR, which I thought was easily VERY GOOD, a hard-ass rating for an anthology to get. While, like Jeff, there were entries that I HATED, there were several immaculate editorial choices made in pacing the book, so I was never more than 2-3 pages from something I loved. What's interesting is that the stories that were probably the best (I'd go with the one with the aliens, or the one with the letter to Marvel probably [man, without my copy at hand, those sound like episodes of FRIENDS where Jeff Lester was the Executive Story guy...]) weren't really about super-heroes at all, but rather the feelings they create in us. What's also interesting is that the dead worst things in the book were by the older, more established creators who have dabbled in fields of mainstream pubs. I also want to draw special attention to the physical production of the book -- the reproduction is crisp, and clean, and there's TONS of different styles and media being used here; the whole package is just impressive to look through. This really is something you should have a copy of, and while you might like different things than I did, I guarantee you you'll like way more of it than you don't.

"Oh, but Brian, that's cheating, that's not a comic book!" Bah, fine. I've got three real choices for a purely floppy PICK OF THE WEEK, the first is probably STREET ANGEL #5, but, in large part, it's because I read and loved the "Afrodesiac" piece in PROJECT SUPERIOR. I agree with Jeff that there's just not enough ambition here, because this could be The Best Book Evah, and still it's instead just Really Strong. I'd go with a low VERY GOOD here.

My second possibility is SHINING KNIGHT #1, which lays a number of my fears to rest in regards to the accessibility of the individual pieces of the "Seven Soldiers" meta-arc. I liked this a lot, but didn't love it -- a VERY GOOD comic. Really, not enough "happens" in the issue on it's own, tho it be chock fulla stuff -- I mean the interesting thing about a Shining Knight is him being here, in modern day, not the Camelot stuff. Just like how Thor is dull as dirt in Asgard. Still, a good start.

In a normal week, I woulda stopped there, but I'm feeling perverse today (I just got back from sorting through THIS week's comics!) and I think I shall give PICK OF THE WEEK to BLOOD OF THE DEMON #1, even though it is "just" VERY GOOD. I'll grant Lester's problems with the last page, but, damn it, I haven't seen Byrne look this nice.... well, in a damn long time, and Pfeiffer solves the problems of Byrne's sometimes leaden scene-turning with a different authorial voice. I really have to give props to inker "Nekros", he brings a density that Byrne 's work needs. Now, mind you, I may be saying in 2-3 issues, "Ugh, god, make it stop!" But I think this is one of the "Good" Byrne projects, and if it goes someplace less obvious as we progress, maybe there's some hope here. One odd thing, though: how the hell is this not a "Mature readers" book? Seriously, there are explicit scenes of flayings here, man. Now, look, I don't mind -- it's my PotW, ain't it? -- but there are places in the country where people could get arrested if a teenager bought this.

That was easy enough, despite not a single "EXCELLENT"

Hm, well, maybe I'd give FREEDOM FORCE VS THE THIRD REICH an EXCELLENT, but then, that's not a comic, is it?

PICK OF THE WEAK just has one possibility: WOLVERINE SOULTAKER #1. Good lord, that was truly bad comic, plodding and leaden and stock characters being offered up for dull shadow plays of other Wolverine stories. God, if I never see Wolverine in Japan story again, or Wolverine versus ninjas (or, sure, monks too, same diff!) it will still be too soon. Seriously, trying to pull out "this is my oldest, dearest friend, who the audience has never met before, and so he must be killed so that this time (finally!) it is personal" trick is the surest sign of not only a bad comic, but a bad bad bad writer. Marvel seriously needs to stop hiring writers that just take old Marvel stories and putting them in a blender. Sheesh, fucking hacks.

The TP/GN PICK OF THE WEEK goes to.... um, well, I guess it is John Byrne week here because I think I'll go with FANTASTIC FOUR VISIONARIES JOHN BYRNE VOL 4 TP. The only credible competetion is SUPERMAN BATMAN VOL 1 PUBLIC ENEMIES TP. It could go either way, but I'm perverse today, I said, didn't I?

If I had a TP/GN PICK OF THE WEAK, it would have to go to STAN LEES ALEXA VOL 1 GN, for putting Dave Gibbons and Dan Jurgens names on the top of the cover, when they do pinups, man. Dumbasses, it's not like people BUY something because you put a name artist's name on the cover. They'll pick it up and flip through it, but when they don't see what you've advertised, they drop it fast. Sheesh.

Anyway, that's that -- sorry I'm so late (but, better late than never? Or something?) I do so solemnly swear I'll be much much earlier in next week's cycle!

What did you think, anyway?

-B