Morph could kick Gumby's ass anyday: Graeme complains about the 7/19 books.

Is it just me, or was San Diego completely devoid of any surprising announcements from either Marvel or DC? I mean, when the most interesting news story is Oni putting out a comic based on Stephen Colbert’s Lady Nocturne 9: A Tek Janssen Adventure, then that says something about the state of the Big Two, right? If you want something else to be said about the Big Two, then you had to look no further than this week’s releases: Civil War! Batwoman’s first appearance in 52! Justice League of America #0! It’s all ground-breaking originality this week!

*Ahem*

52 WEEK ELEVEN: Why did it take me this long to realize that Greg Rucka – who I would lay money wrote the majority of this issue, centering as it does around the Renee Montoya/Batwoman plot, although there’s a scene in here that’s very very close to a scene in Geoff Johns’ first arc in the current Green Lantern title, so maybe he had some say in there as well – is the new Chris Claremont? I mean, okay, so everyone and their sister knew that Rucka shares Claremont’s fetish for the take-no-shit strong female character type, but when the main Intergang bad guys here turn out to be half-forgotten characters from Rucka’s Detective Comics run years ago (much in the same way that Rucka’s OMAC Project series was centered around a character and unresolved plot from his Detective run, giving said characters superpowers and a new ongoing series of her own), then it all becomes very clear; he shares Claremont’s self-referentialism as well. Of course! That said, this is pretty much Eh. Batwoman’s appearance isn’t too annoying (although it would’ve been nice if she’d had a personality while in the outfit and Joe Bennett could’ve turned down the posturing when she appeared without the outfit), and there’s some forward motion on both the Montoya and Cult of Conner plots. The best part of the issue may be the last four pages, however – not that the History of The DC Universe all of a sudden becomes good or anything, just that it finishes its run with this issue.

CIVIL WAR #3: I give up. By the time I finished this issue, I have no idea what Civil War is really about anymore, because all this mini seems to do is set up plots for other series to follow up on. It’s not about the destruction of Stamford, because that becomes more and more of a McGuffin (and set-up for the Wolverine crossover issues) with each page; no-one seems to care about dealing with rebuilding the town, or discussing how the tragedy has even really affected anyone outside of “Well, they passed a law because it’s so appalling”. It’s not about the Superhero Registration Act, either, because that too has become a McGuffin, a reason for the characters to fight and little else; any discussion of the pros or cons of such an act was either made off-panel or in crossover books, and the Act passed in the middle of the last issue. It’s not about Spider-Man unmasking, despite the amount of space dedicated to that happening last issue, because that’s hardly referenced this issue – any follow-up happens, of course, in the Spider-Man books. Instead, it’s about… Well, I really don’t know. Super-heroes fighting, I guess? The more I read of this series, the more it feels like it’s been plotted by a twelve-year old. You can almost imagine a kid making the story up (“And then there’s this big disaster and Iron Man wants everyone to, like, sign up to be superhero policemen or something and Captain America says NO! and they fight and Captain America has this thing that switches Iron Man’s armor off, but then Spider-Man beats up Captain America while Iron Man gets his armor working and then THOR COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD AND WINS BY HITTING EVERYONE WITH LIGHTNING! Cool! And get this – Tony Stark used to fuck Emma Frost!”) because everything happens without consequence or context here – characters act out of character to service a plot that’s centered around “the big event” of the issue, as opposed to anything else. There seems to be less and less actual story each issue, just action set pieces that don’t have any dramatic punch because, we know by now, nothing will get followed up on in this book. Crossovers, maybe, but this series? This is where you see the “highlights,” edited in such a way to be meaningless. I know that some people will turn up and again accuse me of anti-Marvel bias, but, really; this was Crap.

CIVIL WAR: X-MEN #1: And this was… Okay, I guess. It’s entirely unnecessary, and I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with Civil War at this point, because it seems more like a continuation of the House of M/Decimation/198 plot than anything to do with this year’s big crossover, even with an Iron Man guest-shot and throwaway lines of dialogue talking about the Superhero Registration Act. Unless there’s some stunning revelation within the next four issues where we discover a real connection to whatever Civil War ends up being about, then this is probably another example of Marvel using mini-series to tell stories that could, and probably should, be told in one of the three ongoing X-Men series. Yannick Paquette’s Kevin-Nowlan-lite art is always nice to look at, though.

THE FLASH: THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #2: I skipped issue 1 of this revamp, but I’ll tell you this: The title is the best thing about this book. There’s a scene in the middle of the book that perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with the whole thing: Supporting character Valerie Perez gets a telephone call. The first panel has her saying “How did you get this number?!” The second goes for a closer look (with the legs of her glasses disappearing, for some reason), with her continuing to talk: “No, I told you never to call me again, anywhere…” and then the third panel has her gritting her teeth and anger lines coming off her face, as she finishes with “…I don’t care if you are my father!!!” Yes, three exclamation points. Any comic with foreshadowing that obvious, with dialogue that bad, is not a good comic, my friends. It’s not the worst comic ever made, just clumsy and kind of amateurish. Crap may be the word, in fact, but I’m surprised that I got through that review without fanboyishly complaining about DC getting rid of Wally West without realizing the unique position he had within the DC Universe (The only sidekick to have grown up, assumed his mentor’s mantle and be accepted by the mentor’s peers, more or less) and instead replacing him with a generic conflicted-but-fated-to-be-great-if-only-he’d-accept-his-destiny eponymous lead.

Oh, wait.

Damn.

JACK KIRBY’S GALACTIC BOUNTY HUNTERS #1: Think that “Galactic Bounty Hunters” is a surprisingly un-Kirby-like name? Well, one of the two text pieces at the back of this first issue about the creation of the book lets loose the fact that they were originally called “the Wonder Warriors,” which is much closer to what you’d expect (it’s also as good a name as Galactic Bounty Hunters, and fits the story better, which kind of makes you wonder why it was changed). Shock of the week: This isn’t as bad as I’d expected. In fact, there are parts where the dialogue (for the most part, atrocious) achieves some kind of comedic zen badness – when the monster is captured at the start of the book, one of the main characters warns another: “Careful, Tyr… She bites!” “And I have rabies!” the monster replies – and the art isn’t as slavishly Kirby-esque as, say, the art in Godland (In fact, it’s similar to what Ron Frenz inked by Karl Kesel – who inks part of this book – would look like)… It’s all just very dated, which is (sadly) to be expected, probably. It’s worth an Eh, at the very least, and if this were twenty years ago, I’d probably be eating it up with a spoon.

GUMBY #1: I met Art Clokey in San Diego, kind of. He was there, behind the table at a booth, looking more than a little bewildered by everything that was going on, while someone – possibly Mel Smith, who edited this book – tried to explain Gumby to me. We didn’t have Gumby when I was a kid, you see, we had Morph, so when someone jumps out and says “Hey, you wanna meet Art Clokey, creator of Gumby?” to me, my first response is pretty much “Who…?” All of which gave a strange context to reading this first issue of new Gumby adventures, because I couldn’t shake Matt Maxwell’s explanation that, even though Clokey was straight, there always seemed to be an LSD influence to the character that I was just experiencing for the first time.

That said, this was a surprisingly Good book. Yes, there are the weird parts about criminal clowns and lines about children should be locked in cages, but there was something sweet about Gumby’s awkwardness around his new girl friend that came from somewhere much more innocent and touching. I’m not convinced that I would ever need to experience Gumby again, mind you, but still…

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #0: I don’t know if I should admit my impure love for Bravo’s camp classic “Project Runway” in public or not, but picking up this to read with its cover line “Who’s In?” while Heidi Klum is onscreen telling the Runway competitors that fashion is a business that you can never tell who’s in and who’s out provided a special pop-culture crossover moment that the rest of this book failed to reach no matter how hard it tried. Ignoring the fact that it kind of ruins Wonder Woman’s “Who will Wonder Woman be?” plot – Diana, and in a slightly revised costume that makes its first appearance here, for those who care – Brad Meltzer just tries too hard to convince us that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are all pals again despite their past differences. We’ve all read Infinite Crisis, Brad, and they all seemed pretty chummy at the end of that series, thanks. The flashbacks and –forwards are cute, with art of varying degrees of greatness (Eric Wight, you win again), but… there’s no point to the book at all. No forward motion that we didn’t already know about, and the looks back are too short to really provide any new insight. We don’t even really get a feel for what the new series is going to be like, because there’s no real story here. All I can tell you is that it looks like Meltzer will continue to use his narration that makes Jeph Loeb look concise, and new series artist Ed Benes really really likes the 1990s Image artists. So, um, huzzah? Eh.

THE SADHU: I never read any Crossgen books, but this is exactly how I imagined them to be – Generic dialogue filling a slow story with hints of mythology, illustrated by non-descript artists whose work is made to look a lot better thanks to some pretty good coloring work. As with most things this week, Eh.

PICK OF THE WEEK turned out, practically by process of elimination, to be Gumby. Who would’ve suspected that? To be fair, my real pick of the week is also my TRADE OF THE WEEK, and it’s something that has been out for awhile but only just picked up by me in San Diego after meeting the author: Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards, by Jim Ottaviani and “Big Time Attic” (Really artists Zander and Kevin Cannon, as well as Shad Petosky). If you can imagine a graphic novel about the real life battle between two scientists fighting over the discovery of dinosaur bones in the late 1800s Wild West (and slightly less Wild East), written in a style that crosses Matt Fraction’s recent Five Fists of Science with history nerd goddess Sarah Vowell that guest-stars PT Barnum, Buffalo Bill Cody and President Ulysses S. Grant and not get excited about it, then you’re a stronger man than me (Here's Bri reviewing it when it came out, last year). PICK OF THE WEAK, meanwhile, is Civil War, because even though Flash was probably a worse comic overall, Civil War is more of a wasted opportunity…

What did the rest of you buy this week?

Lifestyles of the Sick and Craptacular: Jeff's Takes on 7/12/06 Books....

Finally, I am sick. Months after Hibbs and the GMc became deathly ill and recovered, I was struck--on my last four days of vacation--with an ultra-phlegmatic cold that makes me incapable of concentrating on anything but recently rented video games (which, now that I think of it, I was supposed to return last night. Crap.) as opposed to comic books and movies and a writing deadline for the next newsletter. Yes, pity me, boo hoo and all that. It does suck, though, when you return to work and a coworker cheerfully asks you, "Hey, welcome back! How was your time off?" But, before you can answer, you all but yank the tendons out of your neck turning away so you can release a wrenching set of coughs followed by a wheeze that sounds like half-death rattle, half-squeak toy. Good times, my friend. Good times. But enough about me. What about the remarkably healthy comic book industry?

52 WEEK #10: It gives me pause that this has one of the best scenes in the series so far--Clark Kent getting that scoop, old-school style--and it's about a character who's more or less not a character in the book. 52, it seems, suffers from a surfeit of ambition, in more or less the same way that a four-year old does when given two or three too many glasses of Kool-Aid: there's a lot of pointing and shouting and jumping, and one certainly gets the feeling something pretty damn cool is trying to be conveyed, but it's too diffuse to really care about. Rather than convincing me the DCU is one big place, 52 has convinced me of almost the opposite: the DCU is actually a very small place, where whatever Booster Gold is whining about this week is far more important than how people in devastated cities are trying to rebuild their lives...and that's kind of sad. OK, I guess, but I'm a little worried by how many storylines are up in the air 20% of the way through.

AMERICAN VIRGIN #5: This book is notoriously good at making me hate it just as I'm beginning to like it, and vice-versa. At the core of it is, I think, Seagle's essential, um, "fratboyishness" when it comes to sex and religion--respectful to the subjects' faces, but essentially mocking and disdainful at the core of things: how else are we to regard a scene where the hero, overcome in a confusion of religious and sexual longing, tries to fuck a closed casket? Is it anything other than the creator's acknowledgment that he can't take the protagonist's plight too seriously? (Twin Peaks fans, by the way, may remember a similar casket scene, which ended up casting a rather chilling insight on the grieving character when later facts came out.) If American Virgin was written by someone truly mesmerized by sex and religion--and say what you will about Alejandro Jodorowsky but Santa Sangre conveys more in any given 45 seconds about those subjects than American Virgin has in five issues--then I'd be down with it. Similarly, someone with a healthy skepticism, if not blatant disgust, at religious and sexual longings (like, I dunno, Philip Roth?), I'd be down with that, too. But American Virgin can't really decide on the tone it wants and so settles for a very Eddie Haskellish, "Why, yes, Mrs. Cleaver. The desire to know God is a truly wonderful thing. I've frequently said the same thing to Anthony myself." As the notorious comic book critic Revelations 3 put it, "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth." Sub-Eh.

ANNIHILATION SILVER SURFER #4: Seemed like a whole lot of work for the end result (Silver Surfer's walking the streets again for Galactus the Pimp? Makes for a pleasing arc for the character, I think) but at least it wasn't the big-ol' suckout of Annihilation Super Skrull. OK, but you should keep in mind I can't remember any details from issue #3 at all, so it might be either better or worse than that.

ANNIHILATION SUPER SKRULL #4: Like I said, big ol' suckout. I know the creative team was trying to be clever with their "Aha! You thought the supporting cast you didn't care about would die so that the title character you don't care about would live, didn't you?" maneuver but it's six of one, half-dozen of the other. So the supporting characters we don't care about are never seen again, and the title character we don't care about will show up in eighteen months, probably without any acknowledgment this mini ever happened. Big whoop. Awful.

CIVIL WAR DIRECTORS CUT #1: Flipped through this just to see the big ol' DD spoiler everyone's been talking about, but I ended up being caught by a chunk of Millar's earlier draft where the inciting incident to the event is the death of Happy Hogan. In Millar's script, Hogan's next to last line in this lifetime is:

[Witty banter]

to which Pepper Potts responds something like:

[Laughter, probably something about Tony Stark]

This has both amused me, and unsettled me, for close to a week now. Do you know how many conversations in the Marvel universe run right along the lines of: [Witty banter] [laughter, probably something about [name-drop important Marvel character here]]? Fucking all of them, that's how many. I can't tell what creeps me out more, that Millar is so obviously aware of it, or that he's so obviously aware of it and still can't be bothered to put it in his early drafts because that's how unimportant it is to his "this is my face when I'm fucking Marvel continuity in the ass" mega-event. Sorry, Speedball; better you than Happy. OK for the painful insight.

CIVIL WAR FRONT LINE #3: I admit it: I read this just to see what piece of verse or concept of national pride Jenkins will screw up in his back-up strip. (Between these and Jurgen's History of the DCU over in 52, we're kind of in a Golden Age of amazingly shitty back-up strips, aren't we?) It was something about some guy who fought in the (first? real?) Civil War and whose last thought before dying was Captain America holding his shield high in the air where it's not protecting anything except Captain America's big ol' forearm. I can't wait for the other seven issues to see how American history gets hilariously trivialized, I really can't. Awful.

ESCAPISTS #1: Liked this when I was paying too much for those damn Escapist anthologies, and I like it here for a buck. Like Jog, I loved Chris Ware's "I Guess," but unlike Jog, I very much enjoyed that story's narrative trick being briefly revisited here. Jog, in fact, condemns this issue as being too cute by half but let's face it, Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is also too cute by half (or more, depending on how you feel about The Escapist saving Salvador Dali from drowning at a cocktail party) so I think it's quite a good pairing. As long as we don't have to wait another eight months for the next issue, I'm hopeful. Very Good, even if I had to pay regular comic book prices but for a dollar? Go get it, is what I'm saying.

GHOST RIDER #1: I didn't like the preceding mini, so it's not particularly surprising I wouldn't like this, right? But I didn't like the Ennis mini because he obviously thought GR was a crap character: here, it's the inept execution. The Ghost Rider has to stay in Hell because he wasn't honest with a shady character he just met? If nothing else, Hell must be filled with women who go to bars and people who answer telemarketer calls at dinner time. Pretty art, though. Eh.

GREEN ARROW #64: I'll be honest, I was gonna cap on this. It has this two page intro to a character we never see again--a dude who owns a movie theater who's been showing the same movie for six months to packed houses but is trying to smuggle the popcorn and oil back into this cordoned off neighborhood when he stumbles across the fight--that's obviously meant as no more than your averrage "average bystander/local color" hook straight out of a '70s Marvel comic, but which I found tremendously interesting, moreso than anything that Green Arrow and his buddy Grout were going to do for the rest of the book. So this review was gonna point that out, that writers should either avoid making their local color more interesting than the main plot of the book, or else realize what that says about their main plot--but thinking back on it, I seem to recall Scott McDaniel did a great job giving the "heroes surrounded by junkie zombies" scenario an intense claustrophobic feel--like something from classic John Carpenter. So the capping is called off. McDaniel's work, which I normally find scratchy and rushed, saves the day, and this was actually pretty OK.

GREEN LANTERN #12: Such is the rough magic of Geoff Johns: he can actually take three concepts I pretty much loathe--that annoying Cyborg guy, the manhunters, and Hal Jordan, as written by Geoff Johns--and draw connections between the three of them that actually intrigue me. That the Cyborg, also in his way a test pilot like Hal Jordan, ends up being the new head of the Manhunters (who are similarly a dark mirror to the Green Lantern Corps) is one of those nifty ways of playing with continuity that's one of the true joys for an old-school comic nerd like me. I'll go Good, even though if someone other than Van Sciver was drawing those Manhunter Transformer robot thingies, I'd realize it was only just okay.

MAN CALLED KEV #1: I skipped the last Kev story (or maybe two) because although I liked the character, he didn't work well with The Authority. So, although I've seen critics I trust suggesting the Kev stories have already been played out, I wouldn't know, frankly, and so quite enjoyed this: it was the first bit of Ennis in a while that really reminded me of his lovely work on Hitman, where you're laughing at lowbrow humor on one page and actually touched when a character dies on the next. So if you're semi-clueless like me: Good.

MS MARVEL #5: Wow. This isn't cancelled yet? So dull Frank Springer should be drawing it. Awful.

NEXT #1: DC really specializes at the pretty-looking crash-and-burn, for which this can serve as Exhibit A. Tad Williams, from what I can tell, has written fifty-two kajillion fantasy books (the titles of at least two of which, The Dragonbone Chair and Tailchaser's Song made me laugh like Beavis and/or Butthead for five minutes), at least two of which are trilogies, and seems to assume, like any good fantasy writer, that a truly interesting set-up is worth explaining, and over-explaining, until the reader finally understands how truly interesing this set-up is. Also, like any good fantasy writer, Williams has a sense of humor a little too high on the whimsy side of things for my taste so the captions read as if written by someone over-exposed to the lethal radioactive elements Douglas Adamsium and Monty Pythonite-230. What I'm saying? Is that I thought this was pretty Eh but I realize it's not written for me, it's written for the two dudes in the Firefly dusters I'm gonna be stuck behind for 45 minutes at Worldcon two years from now while waiting in line to see the Wonder Woman trailer, and one of those dudes is gonna say that Tad William's Next was underappreciated, and the other dude is gonna emphatically agree and then they'll both talk about how awesome The Dragonbone Chair was. And who am I to disagree?

PINK SNIPER GN: We got this in and I was bummed it wasn't some insane "Spice Girls Meets Golgo 13" Killer Princesses type title, but regular creepy ol' pr0n? According to the solicit info, "Med school student Niibia is abducted by the sexiest and horniest goddess of the school, Haruana! Pink Sniper is filled with half-animal people, flying sci-fi vehicles, loose women, and Haruana’s giant breasts!" Which begs at least two questions: (1) how many goddesses does any given med school have? and (2) Does any of that sound cooler than a "Hello Kitty" sniper rifle?

ROKKIN #1: A terrible book but an awesome title. A barbarian called Rokkin? My only hope is that he teams up with the thief, Poppin, a mage, Free-Sty-Lin, and together they can successfully loot the mysterious treasure of Beeattt Street. Seriously, though, this suffers from some very lame approach to the narrative and a real deficit of imagination, but the art is occasionally striking and odd--if you can imagine someone trying to make the Ralph Bashki film Wizards look more like the work of J. Scott Campbell, you'll kind of get an idea of the influences--but given a choice in generic barbarian hijinks, I'll take the uglier but more accomplished Claw. Awful, I'm afraid.

SHAOLIN COWBOY #6: The art wasn't at its usual "Sweet Jesus!" level, because everything seemed a little too dark. (The printing process maybe?) But the book had at least two mind-blowing moments--the Cowboy fleeing a pack of attacking sharks by leaping from body to body, and that amazing cross-section panel of the shark (and the head inside the shark's mouth)--and a genuine laugh or two. Not up to its usual standards of making my hair stand on end, but Very Good nonetheless.

SUPERMAN #654: How long until well-done Superman stories get dull? Hey, I'm just glad we've got the chance to worry about it! (We've had far too long to ponder the answer to the "how long until poorly done Superman stories get dull" question.) Like Graeme, I really liked this. Unlike Graeme, I don't have many compelling reasons as to why--if forced, I'd say that by putting the tension on how Clark's gonna keep his job rather than how Superman's gonna save the day is a very, very smart choice and very well handled. Very Good.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #31: You know, when Millar's not trying to fuck somebody or other in the ass, he can actually tell a neat little story. I liked the turns in this one, even if they were told with a remarkable lack of nuance. ("Reed... why was Doom...crying?") Land's art tends to sucks the action from a scene, however, and when he's in a rush, as here, you don't get any of that lovely "wow, it's like the most awesome van art ever!" feeling from it. It's just ugly and inert. Let's call the whole thing OK.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #97: Bagley's art (or maybe the finishing inks) also seemed rushed here--I assume he's trying to get through drawing his entire run on USM before he drops dead from exhaustion--but don't take my word for it: I didn't even notice this was the part one of the "Ultimate Clone" saga until I finished the book. (Yeah, that'll instill some confidence in my reviews....) Kind of a bummer because I thought Ultimate Scorpion was actually pretty cool before the reveal. Only three issues until the bug-eating? That's coming up quick. Good.

WALKING DEAD #29: Kinda surprised Kirkman chose to milk the misery for another issue, as I thought the big bloody finish to this arc would've started by now, but whatevs. What I found interesting were the number of people in the store who objected to the rape scene as being "too much" despite the fact that it was entirely off-panel. I thought it did an excellent job of being repellent without exploitative, and would only object to it if it turns out to have been done for little more than padding out the issue's page count. Good.

WASTELAND #1: I think the artist dropped the ball here if you ask me--I know it's a challenge to draw dozens of people dressed in rags in a desert near a shantytown and make it visually compelling--but the answer to such a challenge is not a bunch of cheap shortcuts. If nothing else, the reader really could have felt the loss of that tiny little town at the end of the story if more work had been put into it. And don't even get me started on the fights, most of which looked two folded pairs of curtains blowing about in a wind. By contrast, the scripting was very competent and did a good job putting all the pieces and hooks in place, but it seemed dutiful, rather than inspired--more like ultra-competent work-for-hire than the long-brewing personal project Johnston says it is on the text page. The page-to-price ratio is incredibly generous, so let's say call the book OK, but it's gonna take more than this--a lot more--for the book to catch on. I hope it finds what it needs.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Reprint or not, Escapists #1 is a Very Good comic at a great price. Too-dark printing or not, Shaolin Cowboy #6 continues to make a compelling argument that Geoff Darrow be crowned King Crazypants of Comic Book Town and soon.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Almost too many choices, huh? I'll go with Rokkin just so you can imagine me yelling that in a stoner voice while playing air guitar: Rokkin!

TRADE PICK: Dunno--I'd say Buddha Vol. 2 SC but that's just guesswork on my part. But that second Showcase of silver-age Superman stories has been blowing my mind for several weeks. If you haven't checked that out yet...

MANGA FIX: I don't know how many copies of the first volume of Dragon Head Hibbs sold, but it apparently it wasn't enough for him to bother with Volume 2. Lemme get back to you on this one.

NEXT WEEK: San Diego! I'm not going! Are you?

Comics Aren't For Kids Anymore, but apparently I am: Graeme's reviews of the 7/11 books.

It’s a short week here at my wing of Savage Critic Towers; my family is still in town, and we’re celebrating by spending this afternoon going on a tour around the city on a fire engine or something. I’m still not entirely clear about what Kate and I have agreed to, apart from it being very exciting to my niece and nephews that we agreed to it in the first place (Yesterday, we spent part of the afternoon taking them to the pirate store at 826 Valencia, where we discovered that Kate and I – 29 and 31 years old, respectively – found the jokes there much funnier than my 3, 6 and 9 year old child companions). Also, it was a pretty dull week in terms of things coming out this week, wasn’t it? Or maybe that was just me. THE ESCAPISTS #1: Okay, it’s a reprint of the first chapter of Brian K. Vaughan’s sequel to “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, which had formely seen life in the over-priced and under-read Amazing Adventures of The Escapist anthology, but still: this is good stuff. For one issue only, sadly, you get art by Philip Bond and amazing colors from Dave Stewart – really, the best coloring that Bond’s art has ever had – and a story that for the most part avoids the cuteness that’s started to creep into Vaughan’s writing lately (although the list of “alternative” influences from one of the characters is getting close to it), and all for only one dollar. It’s a good deal and a Very Good book.

SUPERMAN #654: I’m sure that there’s a train of thought that continually complains that the problem with Superman as a continuing series is that the same stories keep being told over and over again, and this issue – Kurt Busiek’s first solo one, and the debut of new art team Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merino – isn’t something that’s going to convince anyone otherwise. It’s a fairly stock plot (Superheroic business interferes with Clark Kent’s personal and professional life), but it’s all about the execution; despite the familiarity, this is a Very Good Superman story. Busiek plays with the familiarity through the characters’ own reactions, and uses that to offset the superheroics that would otherwise threaten to overpower the more important domestic story. It’s wonderful that Busiek starts with this kind of story, as well; it harkens back to the stories that are in the recent Showcase collections from the ‘50s, where all of the fantastical elements were there as window-dressing to much more mundane plots (“How will I ever get Superman to marry me? Maybe the time-travelling Hercules, who’s gained super-powers by gaining all of his god friends’ abilities, can help me!”), and I’m a complete sucker for stories where Lois saves Clark’s ass while he’s saving everyone else’s. Pacheco and Merino, meanwhile, provide the glossy idealized superhero art you’ve come to expect from them, albeit with a couple of oddly ugly Superman panels and a Lois Lane who’s picked up hair tips from Ramona Flowers. It’s not the same kind of book as All Star Superman, but it’s almost as good, in its own way. Yes, I know, heresy. They’ll be taking my Grant Morrison Fanclub membership card away from me next.

X-MEN #188: And continuing my blasphemy trend, this book – Mike Carey’s first issue as regular writer – was much more enjoyable than Ed Brubaker’s first issue last week, although I’m not entirely sure why. There seemed to be less continuity porn, despite similar plots (last week, Polaris was being hunted by people for some reason I didn’t understand, and this week, Sabretooth is being hunted by people for some reason I didn’t understand – the difference being, I think, that I’m not supposed to understand why Sabretooth is being hunted yet), and the dialogue seemed less generic. The saving grace for the book, however, might be Chris Bachalo’s artwork, which has some beautiful storytelling and design – the move from the action scenes on page 6 to the open double-page spread on pages 7 and 8 is impressive in what it does to the pacing and atmosphere – elevating what I may, otherwise, have thought an awkward opener. I still have the problem of feeling that, more than anything, it’s an X-Men book and therefore kind of review-proof, mind you. It was Good for me, but Paul O’Brien might be the man to turn to if you’re more of an X-Fan than me.

PICK OF THE WEEK is probably The Escapists #1, despite it being a reprint with horrible horrible design and a pretty weak Frank Miller cover. PICK OF THE WEAK is a tough one, seeing as I read so little this week… I guess that it’s probably X-Men, but that was still pretty good, you know? There were lots of things I didn’t even pick up this week, so why not say that, um, Civil War Frontline #3 is my pick of the weak, instead? I’d probably have hated that more than X-Men. I couldn’t even tell you what my TRADE OF THE WEEK is, because I’m still reading that Elongated Man Showcase from last week (Carmine Infantino, you really could draw up a storm back then); if you haven’t bought that one yet, go and demand it. Everyone needs a Ductile Detective in their lives.

Next week: I will be in a state of shock – I’m doing the blogging panel in San Diego on Friday lunchtime, so you shouldn’t be surprised if all I write next weekend is a variation on “Heidi MacDonald… killed by Chris Butcher… Spurgeon was fast, but not fast enough to save her…” Consider yourself warned, friends.

Short & Sweet: Jeff's Reviews of 7/6 Books....

The plan is to keep it short, since I'm down to my last four days of vacation and there's all sorts of things still to do before getting my ass back to work. To keep things moving, I've added a few relevant movie reviews in the mix as well, rather than talking about 'em up top. (Christ, this is taking too long already. I miss having a smart brain.) 52 WEEK #9: I've read DC Comics for a long time so you'd think I'd be inured to dull fight scenes by now. But, no. That "punch-fly-land-talk-repeat" fight between Steel and Natasha was stultifying. I can see why Devilance is the God of Pursuit and not, like, the God of Catching Stuff if Also, if Animal Man, Adam Strange, and Starfire can escape in four pages from an entire planet he built to trap them. As a bonus, having Dan Jurgens summarize Identity Crisis in four pages is funny: it's like having your five year old little brother summarize an episode of Knight Rider for you. Eh.

ALL NEW ATOM #1: Really shows the problem with The Atom: if half your adventures come from almost getting killed when you use your superpower, you are not a good superhero. (This is why Captain I've-Got-Bleach-In-My-Eyes never caught on either.) Also, Gail Simone and John Byrne aren't a good match for telling Grant Morrison stories for exactly the same reason you'd never get Jo Anne Worley and Sebastian Cabot to tell Emo Philips jokes--one hams up the laffs a little too much and the other doesn't understand there's a joke being told in the first place. But then, I guess you couldn't get Peter Milligan and Tony Millionaire in on this, could you? Eh.

BEYOND #1: Surprisingly decent. Of course, I like Scott Kolins' art (which I know some of you don't) but Paul Mounts' colors give the work an extra burst of vibrancy. And Dwayne McDuffie crafts a quick-moving little story where the characters are likeable and the motivations convincing. If you like seeing a bunch of Marvel C-listers slug it out, you could do much, much worse. Good.

CONAN & THE SONGS OF THE DEAD #1: As should've been expected, Lansdale and Truman can barely keep a straight face, as Lansdale peppers his dialogue with anachronisms and foul-mouthed jokiness, and Trumans throws in some impressively unsubtle penis-and-vagina imagery. But it looks great and is a fun read, so if you're not a Conan purist, you'll find this at least highly OK.

DARK HORSE TWENTY YEARS: Some great pin-ups for a quarter and the round-robin concept worked perfectly up until either (a) the Emily The Strange team tried to think of an iconic Rick Geary character and their heads exploded, or (b) Joss Whedon was told to think of an iconic Rick Geary character and couldn't be bothered. Either way, some nice stuff with the Eric Powell Darth Vader page probably worth the two bits all by itself. Good.

DEATH JR VOL 2 #1: I wish I wasn't such a fair-weather Ted Naifeh fan: here I am sitting on all six issues of Polly & The Pirates and haven't cracked a single cover, but I tore right into the first issue of his work-for-hire Death Jr. It's fun all-ages stuff and Naifeh's art looks gorgeous in color. If you wish your kid's Nicktoons had a little more Charles Adaams to them, you should pick this up pronto. Good.

DETECTIVE COMICS #821: Hmmm. It wasn't until I got to the end of the issue that I realized Dini was presenting us with a genuine mystery, with clues and suspects and stuff--I'm so used to the typical Bat-hack trick of "run down the pages with small talk and then have villain pop up for climactic fistfight," I was caught off-guard when someone was unmasked and explanations were proffered like I should have been paying attention. Honestly, some fault with that lies with either J.H. Williams III or John Kalisz: casting the Bruce Wayne sequences in different monochromatic shades seemed like a great idea but it drained all attention away from the background and the background characters. On the other hand, it looked absurdly gorgeous and is worth the coin for that alone. But, honestly, this could've been better than highly OK if the creators had been able to correctly guide the reader as to how they should read the book. I'll be curious to see how future Dini Detective scripts play out without such a strong artist controllig the material.

DEVI #1: Thanks to a canny accumulation of international talent, Virgin Comics can now produce a perfect duplicate of an Image Witchblade comic from 1995! If you ask me, they needed a lot less Shekhar Kapur and a lot more Mukul Anand (God rest his soul). At best, Eh.

GOON #18: With one line ("Is it just me, or has our entire existence boiled down to nasty little things that want to chew our faces off?") Powell sums up the pleasures and the problems with his book eighteen issues in. Am I still enjoying this book? Oh, hell yes. Do I kind of wish The Goon would take to the high seas and have an adventure fighting the sea hag and maybe meet his pappy (poopdeck optional)? Hell yes to that as well. Surely there's a way to do that and have the book keep its high quality, yeah? Good, except that I'm a whiny cry-baby and there's no pleasing me.

HATE ANNUAL #6: Can't shake the feeling that Bagge is throwing in the Buddy Bradley material to make sure people buy this and he can't paid twice off his Weekly World News and Matrix material. All it really does is make me wish he'd return to the material with something like consistency--Bagge's take on the characters and my take on the characters are growing divergent enough to where I probably won't bother picking this up next time. More Eh from the cry-baby.

INCREDIBLE HULK #96: It'd still be nice if they could get an artist who really sunk his teeth into this kind of material, but it's probably the best issue of the storyline I've read yet. Hope they take their time with the material and don't just go for the big finish in issue #100. A high OK.

JONAH HEX #9: The second issue in a row I've read where the in media res approach is taken to the point of me having no idea what the hell is happening. Is this happening to anyone else? No rating because, frankly: huh?

KRRISH: As Treacher predicted, I thought Krrish was krrrap. Considering I liked Koi...Mil Gaya, an amazing cinematic combo E.T., Flowers for Algernon and Spider-Man, I figured my bars were properly lowered for Krrrish. But I was wrong. While I figured that there most of the superheroics would be in the second half, I had no idea the first half would be an awful summer-camp style romantic comedy nor that the filmmakers would figure the best movie they could choose to rip off for the last third of the film would be Paycheck. (I mean, Jesus! Paycheck?!) Interestingly, Krrish has a lot more of the traditional Superman-Lois dynamic (in that feisty gal reporter Priya stages a life-endangering stunt or two to force Krishna to reveal himself as superhero Krrish) then Superman Returns does. But that's maybe the only interesting thing about it. It sucked, frankly.

LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE #1: Imagine watching Absolute Beginners in a South Park animation style and you get a sense as to how bad this is. I think they were trying for a similar energy to Scott Pilgrim, maybe, but O'Malley's line, although simple, is energetic and here the artwork is stiffer than petrified wood. I wanted to like it, but, wow, I really didn't. And for the price? Awful.

OCCULT CRIMES TASKFORCE #1: After the initial thrill of going "Hey, that looks just like Rosario Dawson!" at every panel wears off, you are left with nothing except a hole in your wallet where $2.99 used to be. Ghostbusters+Rosario Dawson+fumetti=boring? Who coulda guessed? Awful.

OUTSIDERS #38: If you read Teen Titans first and then this, then I guess the continuity kind of works out, I guess. Doesn't help with all the dumb scenes that happen for no reason (like Nightwing slapping down Captain Boomerang), however. Awful.

SEX & FURY: If you want a perfect, insane little movie that manages to out-Lady Snowblood the Lady Snowblood movies, you should rent this. Reiko Ike plays the lady gambler Ocho, searching for the three mysterious gangsters who slew her father when she was young. This movie has nudity every four minutes and an astonishing visual every seven, for more or less the entire movie. I thought the sequel, Female Yakuza Tale, was dull (with so much rape even Mark Millar would get bored of the concept) but Sex & Fury is a perfectly executed little exploitation film. If you dig that sort of thing, you should check it out.

SUPERGIRL #7: Ewwwwww! That panel of Kara kissing evil Superman while he's got his hand on her super-caboose is just the nastiest thing I've seen in a DC comic in a long time. (Sadly, that's an achievement.) If they can turn the classic "Nightwing and Flamebird in Kandor City" story into such a creepy, nonsensical morass, then the re-introduction of Comet The Superhorse and the Legion of Super-Pets oughta make Pier Paolo Pasolini blanch. ASS-tacaular.

SUPERMAN RETURNS (the film not the graphic adaptation): I liked it. Plotwise, it was just an outrageous mess and the script suffered from not having the time to dramatize what it wanted to convey (and so just told you, at great lengths, instead) but Singer, the real-life equivalent of The Simpsons' Steven Spielbergo, is finally picking up some of Spielberg's visual wit, Kevin Spacey made a great Lex Luthor, and nearly all of the cast was decent, and occasionally exceptional. Also, I can honestly say the comments thread on Brian's post is one of the few times my appreciation for a film has honestly been deepened by the Internet so that helps, too. Highly OK.

THEY FOUND THE CAR: I didn't read this. I just noticed the title in the list of arriving comics and was transfixed. Has anyone written a story about a kidnap victim held captive at a publishing company who sends increasingly desperate messages out as comic book solicits? It'd be worth it just for the panel of the comic retailer looking at Previews and going, "Hmmm. Sweet Jesus, They're Cutting Off My Toes With Gardening Shears? I could probably sell three copies of that...."

THING #8: Incredibly charming wrap-up to a very charming little book, even if the Ben & Alicia thing had to be really rushed to make it into those final pages. Guys like me can whine all we want, but the market knows what it wants, and it wants grim, not Grimm. Bummer. Very Good.

UNCANNY X-MEN #475: I liked this a helluva lot more than Graham, it seems. I'm sure in three issues I'll feel like a sucker for thinking Proudstar is pretty cool with his vibranium blades and super-action poses and all, but, dammit, I thought he was pretty cool. And Brubaker's take on the characters and characterization is what I want from an X-Men book. Like I said, call me a sucker but I thought this was Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Pretty vanilla tastes this week: Beyond #1, Uncanny X-Men #475, Death Jr. v.2 #1.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Is there any doubt at all? Supergirl #7, by a mile.

TRADE PICK: A lot of stuff that I haven't sat down to read yet. Hibbs pointed out that the ALAN MOORE COMPLETE FUTURE SHOCK TPB is indeed complete, containing stories that didn't make it into the previous Shocking Futures and Twisted Times trades; I'm enough of a Kirby ho to buy the second volume of BLACK PANTHER stories (with four guys--the very odd quartet of Jim Shooter, Ed Hannigan, Jerry Bingham and Gene Day--needed to wrap up what one guy was doing all by himself); and volumes 5 AND 6 of Death Note are right here waiting for me. So, if you excuse me, I'm gonna get right to 'em.

God Bless Freeview: Graeme's reviews of the 7/6 books. And some 6/28 ones, too.

Thanks to the wonders of DirecTV, I’m writing this with the accompaniment of Gorillaz’s “Demon Days Live” – on Freeview all weekend, popfans – and trying my best not to be distracted by Ike Turner milking his piano solo for all it’s worth. Mind you, with the outfit that he was wearing, I can’t say that I wouldn’t have tried the “It takes four minutes for me to walk to the piano” thing myself.

Thirteen comics to review and only an hour to do it in before Kate comes back and we’re supposed to go to Sonoma. REVIEW BRAIN GO!

THE ALL-NEW ATOM #1: With different art, I probably would have liked this a lot more. It’s got a lot going for it – I like the idea of playing the Atom as a scientist who’s just pretending to be a superhero, with a team of mad scientists as his back-up. I like the “microscopic alien invaders that are possessing dogs” subplot, and I like Gail Simone’s dialogue (although the quotes-from-scientists-as-footnotes thing borders on the annoying, especially when the scientists as fictitious; Do we really need to know what Will Magnus, creator of the Metal Men, apparently wrote at some point?). But the art… It just seems weird. It’s Byrne’s strongest work for a long time, I think, helped by Trevor Scott’s inks, but it feels at odds with the tone of the book, far too mainstream superhero for what (writing-wise) seems to want to be an off-kilter alternative to your usual superhero. The incredibly bright, primary-colors don’t help, either… If the book can sort out its identity, it might make it past the first year, but right now, it’s nice-but-inessential, confused, and just OK.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #533: Yes, everyone else read this last week, but I hadn’t been to the store in a few weeks before yesterday, so I’m playing catch-up; sorry. Anyway, the start of this “Spider-Man unmasks! The world reacts!” issue almost sold me on the whole idea, as J. Jonah Jameson’s reaction – much, much better than the one-panel joke in Civil War #2 – rang true and suggested that everyone had thought this thing through properly. Shame, then, that the rest of the issue was horrifically clumsy, with “bickering Fantastic Four” jokes, and the ongoing portrayal of Tony Stark as manipulative and eeeeeevil to foreshadow Peter changing sides in a few months. That’s one of the things I don’t understand about Marvel’s continued claim that they’re playing both sides as equally right: Tony Stark, the leader of the pro-registration side, is continually being shown as someone who doesn’t care who he uses or what he had to do in order to get his own way – like, you know, a bad guy. Meanwhile, his opponent is Captain America, who’s Marvel’s purest of the pure. It’s already pretty biased in favor of the anti-registration team before you get to the obvious “Tony Stark was only using Peter Parker, Marvel’s everyman point-of-view character, and Peter’s realization of that forces him to also realize that he made the wrong choice and should be supporting Captain America” plot that’s in motion here. Where’s the evidence that the pro-registration side is in the right? Meh. Getting back to this particular book, though: It’s OK, mostly because of the strength of the JJJ reaction.

BRAVE NEW WORLD: In the little-seen Elseworlds 80-Page Giant that DC put out a few years ago, Tom Peyer wrote a parody of Kingdom Come and various other overblown superhero epics where pages would end with random quotations from classic literature that bore little or no connection to what was actually happening on the page itself, as illustration of the desperate pretention and need to dress up superhero books as something more than what they really are. This collection of six uninspiring previews for DC’s next six minis ends with the by-now-seen-all-over-the-internet double-page spread of the Monitors, and the following caption: “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it. William Shakespeare, The Tempest”. Nuff, as Stan Lee used to say, Said. Crap, although almost worth it for the awkward politics of the Creeper and Uncle Sam stories.

DETECTIVE COMICS #821: In which Paul Dini and JH Williams take over, and Batman starts acting like a detective again. Not the light-hearted Bat-japery that I was expecting given Dini’s animated pedigree – something that I’m not sure Williams could get away with anyway; I think that his attempt at light-hearted may end up looking creepy, but that might just be me – but enjoyable nonetheless. The solution to the mystery at the end is somewhat random: “The bad guy was someone was a background character in one panel earlier on in the story!”, but there’s something to be said for done-in-one mysteries. Good, but I’m curious to see how Dini’s stories will read without Williams’ overly-designed art. I have the strangest feeling the answer may be “better”…

DEVI #1: Virgin Comics’ first title starts with a “Story So Far” blurb. Somewhere, someone must have thought that wasn’t the smartest idea, right? It’s pretty much an omen; the rest of the book is generic superhero mythology and execution and feels like something that’s been going on for years as opposed to an exciting new comic from an exciting new comic publisher: Characters with dialogue like “You walk into my home and threaten me? Such arrogance must be justly rewarded… by a slow and painful demise” fight each other for no real reason other than the story demands a fight, done with a noticable lack of passion or style. Not a good start for the Power Man and Iron Fist of comic publishers, Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra; hopefully their other books will have something in them that’ll let me remember them for more than five minutes after I finish reading. Crap.

FANTASTIC FOUR #538: Dear J. Michael Straczynski, please stop. Each issue I read of your FF run makes me feel as if you’ve never read any Fantastic Four before, but you’ve been told by someone what the characters are supposed to sound like. It’s a very strange and uncomfortable experience. Crap.

FRANKLIN RICHARDS: SUPER SUMMER SPECTACULAR: You know things are bad when the Calvin and Hobbes rip-off that this is – but Hobbes is Herbie The Robot! Genius! – has more of a Fantastic Four feel than the real Fantastic Four book. I don’t know if this is all-reprint – I’ve definitely read the free comic book day story here before – but it’s gentle enough family comedy for what it is. Brian seemed to really like this, but that may be more to do with his sick robot fetish than the quality of the comic itself. OK.

THE LEADING MAN #1: So, yesterday, Hibbs and Lester were giving me grief for the last New Comics I wrote for Onomatoepia, and the apparently obvious hatred I had for everything I wrote about. Now, I don’t think it was that bad, but then again, sometimes I just get grouchy and it makes me hate everything. That might be what’s going on this week, because I came away from this book, B. Clay Moore’s story of hot American actors who are also hot American spies, with a negative opinion that I’m not sure it really deserves. I mean, I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t like it. It’s a cute idea, and Moore’s dialogue has some nice moments; the art by Jeremy Haun is reminiscent of Michael Lark and Sean Philips’ team-up from “Scene of The Crime” years ago, as well. It’s just… It’s missing a story. There’s a plot, sure, but it’s so vague and undefinied that it’s barely there – there’s nothing that happens this issue that makes me want to come back next month, if that makes sense. I want to say that it reads as if Moore was so in love with the high concept that he forgot to put anything behind it, but like I said, that might just be me being grouchy. Eh, but ask me again when I’m in a better mood.

NEW AVENGERS #21: Or “You thought Howard Chaykin was phoning it in on Hawkgirl? Read this and think again, true believer!” Not that I’m saying that Chaykin is lazy here – although feel free to notice that the cover is just a recolored and flipped version of the last panel in the book – but, man, there’s some shitty Chaykin art in here. Thankfully, Bendis brings his writing to the same level, giving us the internal monologue of Captain America and revealing that he is (a) a moany old bastard – “What do you expect from a society that gets all its news from late-night comedy shows? Or course they don’t care! Everything is a punchline. Everything is just - - No. That’s not true. They care. They just care about themselves more than they care about the world they live in.” You half expect the narration to include “Why, in my day, I lived in a cardboard box.” – and (b) Frank Miller’s Batman (“You tried. At least you did that. Poor kids. Just doing what they’re told. Good soldiers.”). Really, really Ass.

OCT: OCCULT TASK FORCE #1: Tom Spurgeon was right. Ass.

SUPERGIRL #7: Hibbs handed this to me with the intention, I think, of seeing whether my head would explode when I read it. I mean, What the fuck is this? I know it’s part two of a story and all, but I have no idea of what is going on here, apart from Joe Kelly is possibly working out some issues and I am getting more and more freaked out with what DC is doing with Supergirl. From what I can gather, Supergirl is in some kind of parallel universe where there’s an evil Superman and he’s a dictator who Supergirl fights against until she decides that she would rather hook up with him in possibly the most fucked-up Supergirl/Superman scene ever published: Evil Superman: “What do you want that only Kal-El can give you?” Supergirl: “I - - Save me.” And then she kisses him while he cops a feel of her ass. No. I mean, just… no. That’s really, really creepy. And isn’t this Supergirl meant to be sixteen years old or something? Aiee. What’s the worst rating we can give here? Let’s go for Really Disturbing Whatever Happened To Quality Control Dan Didio Jailbait Supergirl Is Not Okay Especially When She’s Swapping Spit With An Evil Version Of Her Cousin Steaming Piles Of Crap From An Ass The Size Of The Moon Creepiness, shall we?

UNCANNY X-MEN #475: In which Ed Brubaker becomes a full-time X-Men writer by becoming a full-time X-Men writer. By which I mean, this doesn’t even read like Bru’s writing, except in small bits of dialogue. On the one hand, huzzah for consistancy for the X-fans, but on the other, Ed’s other writing – even on other Marvel franchise books like Captain America and Daredevil – is much, much better than what he’s offering here. Starting his run on the book with what is apparently wrapping up continuity from old storylines is an odd choice as well, considering that the last four pages of the issue start the real plot of Ed’s first storyline - which is, itself, wrapping up continuity from Ed’s first X-Book, Deadly Genesis. It’s a shame, because when Professor X explains his plan for the next few issues (which starts “First of all, the five of you are going to steal a spaceship…”), your immediate reaction is, “Well that sounds like a lot more fun than what I’ve just read.” Eh, but I’ll probably check out the next few issues because I tend to like Ed on other things.

YOUNG AVENGERS #12: Oh, Allan Heinberg. You should feel happy that I didn’t get around to reviewing your first Wonder Woman issue, because, really? By the time you give Nemesis his own logo without explaining to the reader who he is, I knew it was complete continuity porn as much as I personally enjoyed it. The same thing seemed to happen to this book – the amount of backstory necessary to understand it fully overwhelming the story itself – over the last few issues, but this issue manages to sidestep that by going for the interesting solution of “cramming everything into one issue because the book is going on hiatus”. A lot happens here - The Kree/Skrull battle, Patriot’s getting almost killed then getting superpowers that save his life, Kate getting the name Hawkeye, the Young Avengers apparently becoming official Avengers – but it all happens so quickly and without proper explanation that instead of anything being satisfying, it becomes confusing (Especially the Super Skrull’s fate, considering where he picks up from in Annihiliation). It’s all so rushed that it’s a frustrating and annoying read, which is a shame, considering how enjoyable the book was when it started out. Let’s hope that the return of the series next year sees a return to that level of fun. Eh.

PICK OF THE WEEK is, kind of by default, Detective #821, and PICK OF THE WEAK is very obviously the more-disturbing-than-Tarot Supergirl #7. Luckily for this disappointing week of single issues, it’s a bonanza for trades; I’m waiting for Kate to read the latest Fables collection before I can comment on the quality of it, but thankfully I can bide my time with my TRADE OF THE WEEK: SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE ELONGATED MAN VOLUME 1. Skip past the Flash stories at the start of the book and soak in the sheer brilliance of the Gardner Fox-written, Carmine Infantino-illustrated, detective stories that made Brad Meltzer fall so in love with Ralph and Sue Dibny that he had Sue raped and murdered, reducing Ralph to the depressing character that mopes his way through 52, depressing the hell out’ve everyone. No, wait, that sounded better in my head before I wrote that…

Hibbs & SUPERMAN RETURNS

Hurray, it's me! SUPERMAN RETURNS: is absolutely a gushing love letter to the 1978 Donner SUPERMAN film. The are repeated shots, structure, even Lex Luthor's plot is basically identical to the one from the first film. And all of this would probably be fine if it didn't keep missing what I took as the best elements of the original.

Here's a for example: both films have a sequence of vignettes of "superman fighting random crime one night". In RETURNS, this is more bombastic: chain guns and bulletproof eyeballs, and lifting cars over his head and whatever. But for me, what made the '78 version work was that Supes stopped to help a little girl get her cat out of a tree, too.

Or how about the climax of Luthor's plot? In '78, Lex sent out TWO missles, in opposite directions, one immediately killing people, and one indirectly doing so. Superman had to make a CHOICE about what to do, and that's where the drama of the character comes from. "save the innocents, or stop me". Nothing even close to that here, even when they had some perfect chances (like, what happened to the Tidal Wave they set up earlier in the film?)

The SUPER parts of SUPERMAN RETURNS -- the plane spectacle, the car catching, lifting a mountain, or flying backwards with his heat vision, or the super-hearing or super-breath elements -- were all really well done. Terrific terrific stuff.

On the other hand, all of the MAN parts were just terrible. Predicated on a few inane concepts -- namely that Superman would leave earth and Lois for half a decade without bothering to say one word to anyone; or that it coincided with "astronomers finding Krypton" and that no one thought to say "oh, right, he's probably looking for home" -- on both sides that just doesn't make sense, and so all the resulting drama feels emotionally false. And all that stuff with the kid? I can't find a way to add up the time-frame to make any of that work.

What's really missing for me, though, was the marraige of the SUPER and the MAN -- I gave 2 examples from the '78 version above, and I'm sure you can all think of several more. And I don't think there was really any of that in RETURNS. A Superman film needs to show why he's SUPERMAN, not just how he's super, and why he's a man. And, yeah, rescuing kittens from trees is part of that.

The performances varied -- Routh looked the role, most of the time, but he had such vanishingly little dialogue to deliver, it's a little hard to call it a performance. He certainly did a fine enough job playing Chris Reeve playing Superman playing Clark Kent. Clrak is basically not in the movie, anyway -- he makes no impact and he has no role, other than, I guess, to see the fax. Spacey's Luthor was fine -- he gave a deal of gusto to whatever he was doing. Bosworth's Lois Lane was the real problem for me, though -- she looks way too young, especially with a five-year gap, and she's far too conventionally pretty to my tastes. Margot Kidder was raspy enough to be a journalist, I thought.

I walked out of the theatre thinking "That was good!", and by the end of the bus ride home, I was way down to "That was merely OK". Today I'm at a VERY low OK, and by this time next week, I could be well down to AWFUL.

Ben liked it though, which is the important bit. I didn't know if he'd sit still through 2.5 hours of film (he was fine, though he asked [whispering!] "Where's Superman?" 2-3 times through the show), or if his interest would hold. For nearly two weeks before Ben woke up every morning and asked first thing if Superman had opened yet. Swear to god. And now that we've seen it, he wants his SUperman figure to talk to him all the time. "Daddy, can Superman talk to me?" -- which actually means, "Daddy will you answer questions for him in a Superman voice?"

Overall, a very low OK from me on the Savage Critic scale.

What did you think of it?

-B

An Almost Perfect Storm: Jeff's Reviews of the 6/21 Books...

Seems like a seriously huge week for comics, huh? I mean, you've seen that shipping list--all we needed was a new issue of Ultimate Hulk Vs. Wolverine to go with Astonishing and Ultimates and it would've put an end to about 95% of the "when is _______ coming out" questions I get every week from Marvel fans--so you'd assume that yesterday would've been a "tall dollars" day, right? Right. But, weirdly, it seemed the vast bulk of it was from out-of-towners, first-timers, gift shoppers and people shopping for the classics: I sold a copy of Maus yesterday, for example. A copy of Jimmy Corrigan. (One guy took five steps into the store, looked to his two o'clock, snagged the copy of Watchmen he saw there, paid and left. Total time from entrance to exit: approximately 45 seconds.) I don't doubt this week's new books will continue to move off the shelves (although I couldn't tell you if it'll happen this weekend or the next, when people get paid) but it really suprised me.

And as to that deluge:

52 WEEK #7: So Superman of Earth 2 was so annoyed by the events of Zero Hour he started punching stuff? Nice to know I wasn't alone on that one. The whole issue felt ham-handed but in a more-or-less fun kind of way. (I really liked Ralph's renunciation of Booster on TV: "This man is no hero! He's using his knowledge of the future to further his own selfish interests! When he should've been using his knowledge of the future to further *my own* selfish interests!") OK, but eye-rollingly so.

(Also, did anyone think maybe some dialogue or caption boxes dropped out of the last two pages of the main story? I asked Hibbs, and he was like, "What is there to say? Starfire flies around, finds a big space shovel and sees a Sentinel reaching for it. Kinda self-evident, right?" And yet, I wonder...)

ALL STAR SUPERMAN #4: My only problem with this was that it was too short--it had to wrap up just as it was picking up steam. That's probably because it took too long to get the situation properly set up, but everything was so delightful and wonky nothing felt draggy. I dug it. Very Good.

ANNIHILATION NOVA #3: Way too many scenes of Quasar asking for help and Nova equivocating, but Annhilus actually looked cool and menacing rather than his typical "grasshopper-with-bad-fashion-sense" self. Barely OK, but I could retroactively yank that higher if Nova gets something more to do in the last issue than whinge and be made fun of.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #15: I'll be honest: there were tons of problems with this. But having Wolverine talk like Little Nemo? Priceless. I say Good, but understand if you think otherwise. I admit it's still a long way from that great first arc.

BIRDS OF PREY #95: First copy of this I've read since the initial OYL issue. (For the first time in several months, there were copies of Robin and BoP still on the shelves, which means that either Hibbs has started skewing his orders upwards or some buyers are skewing their purchases downwards, maybe?) It was highly OK, maybe even Good but I feel like this is the seventh or eighth "we're incredibly outclassed but if we push ourselves to the limit, maybe we can beat [name of villain] to a standstill and live to fight another day" type of issue. Yeah, it's dramatic the first couple of times, but a little played out by now. OK.

BITE CLUB VAMPIRE CRIME UNIT #3: You know, if you'd told me that there could be a comic with a vampire female prison shower fight in it and it would still be boring, I would've called you a liar. And then you would've shown me this comic book, and I would've tearfully admitted you were right. Sweet jesus, how you were right. Awful stuff.

CASANOVA #1: Matt Fraction is dangerously close to being the Quentin Tarantino of comics--a witty raconteur with a love for genre trash, a streak of formalist playfulness and a canny ear for dialogue. I thought this first issue was head-spinningly fun and jammed with oddball twists, setpieces and classic pop references and influences (If Grant Morrison was ever to cheat on his wife with a comic book, it'd be this one.) Kind of a drag it came out the same week as every other title under god's green earth, but I was still able to handsell some copies. The closest thing I have to a complaint is I can't really imagine where it'll go with issue #2, but I guess I'll just have to see, won't I? Very Good stuff and worth your time and coin.

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED #1: A lot of shit to make fun of in this "senses-shattering first issue" (which, you know, "senses?" Did the scratch-and-sniff card fall out or something?) including a really absurd page of a severed demon claw killing a deer and lines like "You do not grasp the nature of the claw." (Ummmm, for grasping, maybe?) But, embarrassingly, I liked it anyway. It's got just enough interesting elements to be more than a base Conan rip-off, and yet it's basically a base Conan rip-off so it's got everything you'd want in such a book. And Chuck Dixon almost always does good work with this genre stuff. Or maybe common sense was one of the senses shattered by this first issue. Either way, highly OK.

CONAN #29: Mignola does a great job putting his Mignola-ish obsessions on what the editors say is little more than a fragment from REH--not that Conan has punched out any Nazis yet, but it's only the first issue of three. Good with the potential to get better. Fingers are crossed.

ETERNALS #1: I'm a Kirby fan and a John Romita, Jr. fan and any page with the Celestials on it rendered me insensible with drooling, so you'd have to crap up this book something awful for me to dislike it. And I didn't dislike it, far from it, but it was surprisingly klutzy for guys as accomplished at Gaiman and Romita, Jr: all of the dialogue sounded stilted and forced, like Gaiman was trying too hard to be light and breezy, and the encounters between Ike and Mark started and stopped too abruptly with too little reaction from Mark. But maybe with a different artist it would've felt more, I dunno, dream-like and deliberately delicate and unreal--Romita, Jr.'s square-shouldered characters seem about as delicate and unreal as a slab of steak cooked rare--instead of unbelievable and flat. (Also? If you saw that cover and could think of anything besides "Someone needs to clean that Miracleman fish tank," you're a far better person than I.) OK, but at $3.99, only barely.

EX MACHINA #21: Haven't seen subber Mark Shveima in a while and I hope he'll forgive me for saying this (and/or for mangling the spelling of his last name) but maybe Tony Harris should...move on to another title or something. I really enjoyed that Chris Sprouse two-shot and maybe BKV's work loses a little something when the artist has some minor depth perception issues and gives the characters "First word? No, first syllable! Sounds like...scratch? Itch?" body language. Or maybe Mr. Vaughan's work on this title really waxes and wanes. I honestly can't tell. Either way, I was eager to pick this issue up and was very Eh when I put it back down.

FLASH THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #1: Wow. This stunk. Confusing storytelling (I had to read that opening action scene three times to figure out what was going on), unlikeable characters ("So, Allen...hot daterape last night?"), bullshit that just came out of nowhere("The Speed Force is gone...but what if it's not? What if it's turned E-vill?")--nobody involved had any fucking idea what they were doing, did they? Makes me wish DC Editorial had just held off on a relaunch until they were absolutely sure how they were gonna move on this, because unless next issue is fucking ambrosia on toast, this book will be dead in a year and a half. No joke. Craptacular.

GOLGO 13 VOL 3 TPB: I'm getting the impression the editors of the line are choosing the more Tom Clancyish storylines (which are impressive with their knowledge of real world situations and hot spots) rather than the more absurd "Golgo 13 gets two nuns to give it up for him in less than a page, then he snipes a satellite using DirectTV dish and an M-16" stories. Me, I'd prefer the latter, to be honest, but this issue has its kooky charms: in one issue, Golgo slits some throats and snipes some copters while having reminiscences with his good pal Nelson Mandela. In the other story... well, I can't top Jog's description so lemme just steal it outright:

It's kind of like Syriana crossed with a Carl Barks duck short, one that focuses on how rich Uncle Scrooge really is, only it's 78 pages long and features a man knocking a helicopter into the ocean with one shot. 

So it's still pretty awesome, is what I'm saying. Good, but, yeah, more over-the-top crazy sex-crammed kill sprees, please.

JUSTICE #6: Gorgeous, but there's a weird melancholic tone to the whole project that occasionally results in an arresting scene--those few pages where Green Lantern encodes himself in his ring and then walks sadly around an empty green city really kicked my ass--but generally feels depressed and lethargic and unhealthy. Good stuff, I guess, but disquieting.

MANHUNTER #23: Hibbs had some really compelling issues why he didn't like this issue that sadly I can't remember (a shame, because I'm half-convinced the creative team worked in Sweeney Todd as a villain just to court Hibbs' approval). Me, I thought it on the high side of OK although the scenes between Kate and her Grandma, Phantom Lady, seemed like a desperate attempt to make Kate "matter" to the DCU. I can't really say I blame 'em, but has that trick ever worked? Like I said, OK.

MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #2: Somebody suggested I not write this book off on the basis of one issue, so I came back for a second helping and they were right: this was less an all-ages issue of Avengers than it was an all-ages issue of Marvel Team-Up and that suited it fine. Jeff Parker had some fun ideas about The Leader (unsurprisingly for someone with such a big head, The Leader is a bit of an egotist) and the unholy trinity of The Hulk, The Leader and The Abomination, Spider-Man gets some good lines in, and there's a quick little bit about the friendship between Hulk and Spidey I probably wouldn't have bought in the regular Marvel U that made me go "Awwwww...." here. I've got a few problems here and there with it, but a marked improvement over the first issue and a Good read overall. I'll be back next issue, certainly.

NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER VOL 3 TPB: Ouch, pegged that one. My mind cued up The Lonely Man Theme from the Incredible Hulk TV show no less than three times this issue as Doc Tenma saves a blood-stained terrorist, an abused child, and a frustrated love between a country doctor and a dying woman, all while trying to hunt down fearsome super-monster Johan. Interestingly, the last story--where Inspector Lunge develops the theory that Johan is Tenma's murderous split-personality while solving cases and alienating everyone--is more the road I initially thought this series would go down. It's OK--to be honest, I could probably read manga about doctors and cooks 'til the cows come home--and maybe it'll return to the fascinatingly complex mix of murder mystery and hospital drama (because, I mean, come on, where's a better place to set a tale about split-personality serial killers than post-unification Germany?) but my enthusiasm is now officially dimmed.

NEW AVENGERS #20: Ever gotten a handjob from someone so passionate but inexperienced they nearly yanked away your entire epidermal layer and tossed you into the next room to boot? This arc of New Avengers is pretty much just like that: I can see how Bendis really was trying to craft a cool widescreen epic that would rock my fanboy world, but I just feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and contused by how unsubtle, poorly paced and misprioritized it all is. (When, in your team book of roughly a half-dozen superheroes, the only character who has any sort of dramatic arc and does anything at all surprising is an agent of SHIELD, and when the only character who can save everyone's bacon with their crucial superpower is the other agent of SHIELD, you've done something very, very wrong.) I should take the time to pick apart all the Xorn related problems but I'm too mortified and really just want to pretend the whole thing didn't happen. Thanks for the wonderful time, Brian. I'll...call you. Awful.

ROBIN #151: As mentioned in my BOP review, this is the first issue of Robin since the first OYL issue and, uh, I'm kinda pissed. The creative team here does everything with a lot of energy and flair but making Cassandra Cain into an angry murdering antihero really sucks. Not only is it contrary to the character's overall conception and character arc, but, on the heels of Spoiler's death, Leslie Tompkin's betrayal and the distancing of Birds of Prey, it more or less completes the Boy's Clubification of the Batman Family. Yeah, I can see how it opens up a bunch of storylines but I still think it sucks. OK for the execution, Awful for the conception--let's call it a peevish Eh.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #27: Huh? What was the point of all that, other than to make the reader wonder if the pageturn was going to bring the world's most disquieting lesbian sex scene? I totally agree with Chris Butcher--Jeph Loeb had already salted the earth on this title, but DC coulda tried at least a little. Awful.

TESTAMENT #7: Okay, so God rejected Cain's sacrifice because it came from nature, but accepted Abel's sacrifice because...why? Cows come from a wafflemaker or something? Just one of many "wait, wha?" moments in this issue, plus Vertigo was apparently too chickenshit to show genitalia on Adam and Eve. Considering this series has breasts-a-plenty and this issue has Cain and Abel arguing over who gets to marry their mother once Adam is dead, that bit of modesty may be the biggest "wait, wha?" of all. An Awful waste.

ULTIMATES 2 #11: Yeah, compare and contrast this with New Avengers--it's really not until you breathlessly finish reading this issue that you realize that more or less nothing happens (Hulk and probably Thor are put back on the board and the stage is set for Iron Man to come back as a 300 foot high transformer satellite/giant robot firing ICBMs out of his enormous iron nipples or something). There's a lot of running and yelling and misdirection, sure, but very little of actual importance really happens. But it's done with a tremendous amount of skill, which is part of what separates the Good from the Awful. If it can pull off the widescreen over-the-top ass-kickery next issue, it might even be great.

UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #1: Hmm. You can neatly split this issue in two--one half concerns Ororo's semi-conscious musings on her love life and her feelings for the Black Panther, and the other concerns the X-Men trapped in a Black Hawk Down style showdown with militia soldiers. And like Black Hawk Down, the X-Men showdown side is arguably racist (I know there was another phrase the X-Men used regarding the attacking soldiers besides "third world thugs" but I'm blocking on it. "Third world thugs" was probably bad enough, though.) and the Ororo side is arguably imperialist. (It's okay for Storm to marry the Panther because she's also from a line of royalty. Huzzah!) Not really a great day for Marvel Comics, if you ask me. Also? Pretty dull. Eh.

PICK OF THE WEEK: All-Star Superman #4? Casanova #1? If you live in a state with no sales tax, you can get 'em both for just a buck more than the first issue of Eternals.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Flash The Fastest Man Alive #1. You, my friend, were horrible.

TRADE PICK: I feel like a dick because I really, honestly do love Ellen Forney's work but $18.95 for 112 pages? (And I think I already have a third?) I just can't recommend I LOVE LED ZEPPLIN SC as much as I dig her stuff.

No, I'm gonna have to go with the greatness-by-the-pound of SHOWCASE PRESENTS SUPERMAN VOL 2 TPB where nearly any page is kinda hilarious and mind-bending. (I opened it up just now to a panel where Superman grabs Lois, thinking "Some unknown force is urging me to kiss Lois...so I will!" (If I wasn't such a lazy bastard, I'd just take photos of choice panels and post 'em.) If they ever release one of these where it's all Lois Lane stories illustrated by Kurt Schaffenberger, the delight might well kill me.

MANGA PICK: It's a shame ADV Manga is more or less down for the count because the first three volumes of Yotsuba&! by Kiyohiko Azuma are great. I thought it'd be typical "loveable kid teaches everyone valuable life lessons" crap but it's really more like "witty people amuse themselves and each other as a loveable kid threatens to drive them all nuts" which is much, much better. If you like the deadpan joshing and teasing Scott Pilgrim and his friends engage in, you'll really like Yotsuba&!. If you can find 'em, you should get 'em.

Okay, so that was a lot of words, but a lot of books. Next week: less words, less books, and hopefully a review of that Bollywood superhero flick, Krrish.

New York Times Book Review? Feh. (Jeff's Reviews of the 6/14 Books)

Dog-sitting, sleep deprivation, GTA: LCS for the PS2, dog-barfing, writing deadlines, co-worker frustration, dog-farting, exhaustion, dog hair tumbleweeds rolling across the kitchen floor, father's day, furniture moving, carpet cleaning, neighbor hating, muscle pulling, vicodin. It's been a week.

52 WEEK #6: This+Checkmate #3= mild confusion. So the world is almost pushed to war because of China's superhero program, but nobody really looks at it in any detail until Checkmate, one year later? Hmmm. I thought this week's Moment of Melodrama was more than a little shrill (I love how "It's All His Fault!" is written eleven million times and then there's a picture with Booster circled and a "Him! This guy! His Fault!" notation--like Rip (or whomever) wrote "It's All His Fault!" eleven million times, then reread it and thought, "Hmmm. Yeah, that's not really as clear as it could be, is it?") but it was fun read. OK but it would be nice if we were getting payoffs as well as set-ups.

ANNIHILATION SUPER SKRULL #3: Pacing mistakes made in issue #1 come back to swamp the mini this issue as we get the lifestory of female-alien-we-don't-care-about jammed into the front of the book in the hopes of emotional identification from the reader when previous emtional center turns traitor. Were I prone to nitpicking, I'd also point to aforementioned female alien's backstory centering on several months of torture post-Annihilation Day despite the fact that the current story is quite clearly dated as less than two months after Annihilation Day. Awful overall, and clearly the worst of the four Annihilation minis.

CANT GET NO: I'm a fan of Veitch's work, particularly when he works in either elliptical (Volumes 2 and 3 of Rarebit Fiends is some of my favorite comics stuff, ever) or super-formalist formats (those keen issues of Swamp Thing). So you'd think I'd really dig this, his elliptical, super-formalist summary of a man whose life unravels at the same time 9/11 hits.

Alas, no.

Can't Get No has amibition by the buttload but Veitch chooses to tell his story with no dialogue and captions that only elliptically comment on the action. That's all fine and good but it puts a tremendous weight on the writing which is precisely where Can't Get No is weakest. Jim Woodring is able to use this technique to powerful effect, but Woodring's prose is exquisite and evocative on its own right with an ear for original language and organic imagery that keeps it taut. By contrast, Veitch's prose here reads like overly florid automatic writing with an injudicious use of free association: at one point, there's a series of captions of something like, "the indelicate ambergris of desire stirring at the core of the leviathan until you're green in the gills," which is just--yuck. (Whale ambergris to the archetypal conception of the Leviathan, okay, fine, but considering whales are mammals and do not have gills, the whole thing comes off as bad beatnik poetry.)

Pictorially, there's images here that I loved--the abandoned park with the giant President heads, the Family-Circus style path taken by an eyeless dog, those frail and tiny people looking out the windows of the WTC at the deathly snout of the passenger plane one second before impact--and CAN'T GET NO is absolutely a noble failure. But, wow, failure it is. Tragically Eh.

CIVIL WAR #2: Okay. I'm assuming you know by now the big "shock ending" of Civil War #2. If not, don't read this (or Graeme's review or most of the comics blogosphere) because I want to whinge just a teeny tad about it.

First, as far as the rest of the issue goes without the ending factored in, it's more or less OK. It suffers from what Graeme has nailed down as Millar's biggest weakness as a writer--it's a given that every character is a self-centered prick to some degree--and from some weirdo pacing problems (unregistered superheroes are hunted like dogs by professional SHIELD teams 24 hours after the Act passes?) but also looks cool and has some really neat moments (although, like 52, some of those really neat moments feel like they were cribbed from Watchmen). Unlike House of M, this fucker moves, even if it's just from one fanboy cockpunch to the next.

As for Spidey....they did a very good job building up the personal justifications for the unmasking in ASM but I was sure they'd pull the ol' "rampaging villain and/or Captain America rescue squad crushes press conference just at crucial moment" thing because, hmm, how do I put this? Because Peter Parker's secret identity is the second most archetypal thing about Spider-Man (the first being, of course, the spider powers) and stripping him of that bones the character's appeal far worse than any sort of marriage.

If you ask me, what makes Spider-Man work in the first place is how Stan and team approached the whole Pete/Spidey duality. Unlike the relatively binary set-up of secret identities for superheroes (usually hero is lauded, secret identity is dumped on--the Superman/Clark Kent blueprint) which makes them such satisfyingly simple ego-fantasies, Stan made that duality more complex: the happier Peter Parker would be in his personal life, the more fucked up things would get for Spidey, and vice-versa.

Seriously. Check out the first hundred or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man. What makes the title work isn't that Peter is a miserable bastard, or that Spidey is a shat-upon superhero, it's that the two rarely happened at the same time. As Pete gets a girlfriend and a life, Spider-Man becomes a hounded superhero (and when Pete was more miserable in high school, Spider-Man actually had a stronger public following). Part of that--the miserable super-hero--is what we think of as "Spider-Man," but it's really that distance that's so archetypal, because it taps into the universal frustation about how the distance between one's fantasy life and one's real life always stays constant. (Which is why "Spider-Man No More" is so potent--despite what we'd like to believe, people give up on trying to fulfill their fantasy lives all the time.) Anyone who's struggled between, say, spending time with one's significant other and making time for one's hobby or art can understand it.

So, for me, the more that distance closes--as Peter's life and Spider-Man's life becomes the same--the less archetypal Spider-Man is. It doesn't matter if (for example) because of Peter's unmasking, Mary Jane gets killed and Peter becomes miserable again and the "And it's all my fault!" anguish is put back into the Pete/Spidey dynamic. Short of a big ol' reset button, a huge part of the Spider-Man mystique is toast. The only draw now is seeing if it's gonna be as big a mess as I think.

FUN HOME: The last in today's triptych of mouthiness (I forgot to mention I barely read any comics since I helped Hibbs re-organize the back issues on Friday) is a book I read about a month ago and absolutely loved. I wish I'd written about it then but I was caught short after discussing it with Bri. Fun Home is Allison Bechdel's memoir about growing up in a funeral home in a small town and the complex feelings she has for her deceased father.

I think it's brilliant, an astonishingly assured memoir that winds together reminescence, imagination and exquisite literary allusion to show the quietly devastating effects the father's closeted homosexuality had on his family.

Hibbs thought it was dull. To paraphrase (and badly): "It just said the same thing over and over, showing us the same stuff over and over. Autobio comix is supposed to show us what happens, how it affects the cartoonist, and moves on. It tells a story. This just showed the father dying, and then built up to it, then returned to it, again and again." As a result, we had a long talk about the difference between "autobio" and "memoir," and I found myself really unable to nail down why I thought Hibbs was wrong--or at least fixated on the wrong things. The trick lies at least in large part in the difference between autobio comix and literary memoirs. Fun Home is not Persepolis, where lots of little events happen and a picture of a time and place and family emerges, nor is Fun Home a Crumbian recounting that pushes the narrator front and center. Fun Home is a lot more like Mary Karr's The Liar Club or Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss where events crucial to the development of the narrator are recounted as part of an attempt is made by the narrator to understand a parent and a parent's influence, and in the end, the reader has the sense the parent is fully rendered, if not fully understood.

Because Bechdel points out the intensely literary nature of her father and her household, the rich literary allusions (opening with Daedelus and closing, of course, with Joyce) are not only a way of understanding her father's life the way he himself did, it's a commentary on the aloofness his self-loathing has engendered. (At one point, Bechdel mentions that the closest she feels to her parents is when she understands them as literary characters.) (And, if you want, compare and contrast this with Mary Karr's description of her mother's face in terms of punctuation in The Liar's Club.)

In the end, Fun Home works with levels of allusion Can't Get No can do little more than aspire toward. My worry is that, in the end, Fun Home will be overlooked in the direct market anyway, as the current genre expectations of "autobio comix" hobble reader enjoyment of more subdued affairs. As it is, yesterday's review of the New York Times Book Review suggests that the mainstream literary establishment may not know how to treat such a work, either: the reviewer gives Fun Home a thumb's up and then, with no interest in dissembling its complexity, talks about how accurate the drawings in the book are and how you can use the illustrated map of the small town as an actual map if you visit. Fortunately, the reviewer hit their word count before talking about how the book tasted, or what color curtains would like nice if the book is placed nearby. (I keep hearing this recurring rapping noise in the distance since early yesterday morning, and kinda assume it's Bechdel banging her head repeatedly against a wall in frustration.)

Anyway, If you like a rich narrative voice and tasty thematic musing, Fun Home is for you. Between it, The Fate of the Artist and the upcoming Curses, 2006 has at least three intensely literary graphic novels under its belt. I couldn't be happier.

PICK OF THE WEEK/TRADE PICK: Yeah, it's all about Fun Home this week.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Going by sheer inept and flat reading experiences, Annihilation: Super Skrull. Going by deeply cynical money-chasing and potential character wrecking, Civil War #2.

Next week: More books! Less words! No dog!

My name is Peter Parker, and I've been a blogger since I was fifteen years old: Graeme's reviews of the 6/14 weeks.

The World Cup! A time when America wakes up to the international love of football, thinks about it for a second, shrugs and goes back to sleep. But yesterday, when my dad – still in town, for those keeping track of my familial visits – told me that America had drawn in their match with Italy, I said as a joke, “Have Italy forgotten how to play football?” Little did I know that the answer actually was yes, and that America hadn’t actually scored the equalizing score themselves. In a week when Marvel get a massive amount of publicity for Spider-Man revealing his identity to the Marvel world-at-large and thereby ending one of the core parts of the Spider-Man concept, it seems fitting to start off reviews by thinking about that familiar concept called “the own goal,” doesn’t it? 4 #30: Call me a strange internet ghoul if you must, but for some reason, this final issue seemed like the perfect time for me to try out Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s version of the Fantastic Four for the first time. It’s something that I’d been meaning to do for awhile, mostly because Ed Cunard – a man of wealth and taste… Well, taste, anyway – has been a secret fan of this series and recommending it to me for months. Perhaps if I’d heeded his advice sooner, I would’ve provided the book with the one sale it needed to stay alive. Anyway, maybe it’s because I was so horrified by JMS’s version of the characters over in their main title the other month, but I kind of enjoyed Aguirre-Sacasa’s more traditional take on the team. The issue has lots of faults – not least of which a lack of actual plot, as it concentrates more on what seems to be revisiting past storylines from this series – but I liked seeing a Fantastic Four that felt like a family as opposed to the meanspirited characatures that seem to populate the other books these days, and the light tone (especially with Super Apes beating up Namor) was equally welcome. Okay, and enough to make me wish I’d paid attention to Ed earlier.

52 WEEK SIX: Wasn’t I complaining about the writers introducing too many plots last week? Well, the majority of this issue deals with not a new plot, but many new characters, whether new to the series (the Green Lanterns) or entirely new altogether (the Great Ten), which gives the same “Wait, get back to those stories you were telling before” feeling. That’s something that’s only amplified by the two returning plots in this issue, neither of which move forward a great deal but nonetheless play for time in a fascinating way – especially the Booster Gold plot, which suddenly becomes something much, much larger than what I’d been expecting. If it wasn’t for the fact that various DC writers have made comments to the effect of “Hypertime will never be mentioned again, ever,” I’d be counting the weeks until we had a return to Mark Waid’s semi-forgotten Kingdom mini-event… but that’s because I’m a big DC geek. I have to wonder what non-DC fans make of the series at this point, because with each step towards continuity nerd-dom that makes me enjoy it more, I’m convinced that more sane minds are deciding that it’s not worth the trouble. Good, with the admission that this kind of thing bypasses my critical faculties.

CIVIL WAR #2: So, wait, Spider-Man is Peter Parker? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!? Again, Marvel’s hype machine outdoes itself and removes all suspense and surprise from this issue: We knew that it was going to be Captain America versus Iron Man from the get-go, and thanks to the tidal wave of press midweek, even the castaways on the mysterious island in Lost know that Spider-Man unmasked himself at the end of the issue, so actually reading the story was somewhat underwhelming. Hopefully someone in Marvel’s press department is going to realize that they’re not helping matters by giving everything away ahead of time, and the next big shock reveals will actually stay big shocks until, you know, the comics actually come out. As far as the quality of this issue, eh. Mark Millar’s dialogue still sounds the same no matter who says it, his characters still act out of character for the sake of spectacle (Captain America throws a defenseless man out of a moving vehicle into oncoming traffic? What?) although that does help mask whether or not Iron Man is a Machiavellian bastard behind everything or just clueless, and the art is pretty but still kind of awkward. It hits all the points it wants to, I’m just not sure that I’m interested. I was probably more upset about the Spider-Man Unmasked idea before I read it, such are the anaesthetic effects this book had on me. Okay, but those who like it will probably love it to death.

EX MACHINA SPECIAL #2: Hey, Brian K. Vaughan? Can I nitpick with you about your definition of “Special”? Because this conclusion of your two-part story, that because Tony Harris didn’t draw it – Chris Sprouse did, and very well, I may add – gets shunted off into its own spin-off series, felt more like a fill-in inventory story that adds nothing to the main series whatsoever than anything I’ve read in years. Not that it was bad or anything (Just Eh, really), but it definitely wasn’t that special.

JLA CLASSIFIED #22: I admit it; I was a fan of the Detroit era Justice League. In my defense, I was about 11 at the time and didn’t know any better. Nonetheless, that old bastard Nostalgia saw the solicitation for this, months ago, and thought “Detroit era JLA? As written by Steve Englehart, the man who wrote my other guilty pleasure Millennium? I have to read that!” The reason that Nostalgia is a bastard, my friends, is because it blinds you to simple facts like “Steve Englehart was wonderful in his prime – and his prime lasted for a long time, way into the late eighties with things like West Coast Avengers and Green Lantern Corps – but he hasn’t written anything really great in quite some time, and anyway, that Detroit League? They were kind of sucky characters. Especially Vibe, with his accent-cum-speech impediment.” All those facts that flood into your mind when you read something like this, and spend the entire time wondering “What is the point?” and “How many other suckers bought this because they were 11 when the Detroit League and didn’t know any better?” Which is to say, Ass. And I’m sorry.

SUPERMARKET #3: My wife Kate’s sitting beside me as I write this, and when she saw me write “Supermarket”, she told me to write “Is good”. It’s her third favorite comic these days, next to Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, although she’s very disappointed in the main character for irresponsibly spending money on a hotel room and then acknowledging it in her narration. She does like the tattoos, though. Me, I liked it; it’s got Brian Wood merging the emotional core of Demo with the dumb-action of Couriers in a way that’s more successful than DMZ (although that may be me misreading the intent of DMZ, which may be more “Channel Zero but more thought through”), and Kristian Donaldson does some of the best art – specifically, some of the best coloring – in the business right now. Very Good, and not just because Kate and I agree.

(Kate’s just added that she’s glad that I said something nice about a book. Earlier, when I was writing about JLA Classified, she asked me how I’d feel if Steve Englehart jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge because I was mean about his book. When you put it like that, it does kind of make you think.)

UMBRA #1: Robson, you didn’t steer me wrong on this one. Without your convincing dulcet tones, I would’ve stayed thrown off by the mono-monicker of the writer (“Murphy”, although the copyright notice admits that he’s really called Stephen) and a cover that manages to be nicely colored but entirely unexciting, and missed out on this unusual and unusually enjoyable mystery. There’s something very Whiteout-esque about this book – perhaps the lesbian-detective-in-snowy-surroundings set-up, but more likely the narration, which reads like Rucka before he got his teeth into the DC Universe – but the central plot, about the apparent shooting of a neanderthal wearing modern clothing is something else entirely. The appeal of the series is confusing, as I found myself wishing that we could see more of the personal life of the lead character at the same time as wanting to read more about the central, seemingly time-travel-related, murder mystery, but nonetheless… I want more. Very Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK is probably Umbra, which turned out to be an unexpected pleasure, if reading about impossible murders can be called a “pleasure”, and PICK OF THE WEAK is easily JLA Classified, because… well. Just because. TRADE OF THE WEEK is a bit of a cheat, but I finally managed to get through THE FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE this weekend, and even though it’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen meets a History of Science in America textbook in many ways, it’s a lot of fun and enough to make you want a Matt Fraction-written ongoing “Adventures of Mark Twain” series each and every month – Instead, we get him doing Punisher War Journal (boo) and the as-fun-as-FFOS Casanova, which launches next week unless I’m misremembering. Something the lot of you should pick up, whenever it appears, though.

Next week: Less football talk, I promise.

Short and Sweet: Jeff's Reviews of the 6/7 Books.

Funny. It's probably the most anemic release week in six or seven months and you've got all three of us contributing reviews. Whether there's a connection between the two events, I can't really say. Nonetheless, I'll be pretty brief here, because most of the really good points were hit by Graeme & Bri. But, first! Hats off to Justin Riegner, whose letter to Robert Kirkman ends up on the next-to-last page of Walking Dead #28. Justin asks Kirkman quite openly why he can't get his creator-owned books on schedule and how shipping issues two weeks in a row hurts retailers. Justin then goes on to point Kirkman to Hibbs' articles on Newsarama for a full explanation of what he's talkign about.

Justin, seriously, you are my hero.

To give Kirkman his due, he did print the letter, but I wish he'd had a little more to of a response than "We're getting the book back on track. That's all I can say." All that really does, frankly, is dodge and ignore the main issues while acting like they're being addressed.

And, on an unrelated note, if you're a Lovecraft fan, you should go to this site, and get this movie. It just showed at the latest "Hole In The Head" Indiefest at the Roxie, and I thought it was great. Admittedly, I'm a fan of silent movies anyway, but this adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" really nailed 95% of the essence of Lovecraft's stories, I thought. It's awesome.

And so:

52 WEEK #5: Pretty much what G & B thought, except I seemed to like it a little bit more than they did--Hibbs thought that scene with the Red Tornado's voicebox yelling "52! 52!" was cheesy, I thought it was neat. That scene between Buddy Baker and Starfire made everything else worthwhile. On the other hand, as Graeme pointed out, it's funny as hell watching a batch of writers who've never really had to worry about real-time pacing struggle with the concept. They better figure it out fast or it's only going to get worse. Highly OK.

ANNIHILATION SILVER SURFER #3: Fucking mother of god, that pneumatic lettering directly on the background art is awful. Are we all too good for caption boxes or something? And if that wasn't the nitpicky enough, I've decided the secret to a good cosmic epic is thick ink lines. Seriously, all the classics of the Marvel cosmic epics had a thick-ass ink line to really make you feel like the scenes are powerful enough to command your attention. Here, each scene feels like the cosmic debris you see floating throughouth, untethered, unimportant, weightless. It's not bad or anything but it seems deeply inconsequential, which is the opposite of the intended effect, I think. Eh.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #9: Weiringo art? Lovely as hell. David story? Deeply annoying to my inner fanboy, as I was hoping this would be a Spider-Man book from which I could take refuge from all of JMS's mystical blah-de-blah and technotastic Spidey-McSuits and we could see, you know, Spider-Man. Being Friendly. In a Neighborhood. Instead, we've had mystical wrestlers, imaginary stories chiding the mentally ill, and origins of time-travelling Hobgoblins. Check, please! Eh.

HARD TIME SEASON TWO #7: Again with the ugly lettering dropped directly onto the art--but rather than it being just the where and when like Annhilation, it's the meat of the story. Fuckin' great. While I doubt the ballsiness of Gerber's conceit would have worked, it really needed every single element working at 100% to have it come off and that wasn't the case. Frankly, I liked the issue but I'm self-aware enough to know that, in large part, it's because it reminded of some of the really bold shit Gerber used to do (and pull off) back in the '70s. OK, at best.

LUBAS COMICS & STORIES #8: Beto's recent Luba-related output (the last, I dunno, five years, more or less?) has always made me a little nervous and uncomfortable, and this issue seems to finally point out why--more or less every character ends up getting what they've more or less always wanted, and somehow this simultaneously fulfills and destroys the person, simultaneously. Nothing seems to underline this point more than Doralis who comes out as a radical queer and then wastes away and dies in the space of a few pages while babbling about how happy she is. Rather than make it an illustrative death to warn the readers of the perils of this or that, Beto keeps the details minimal and maximizes the attention to Doralis's joy. Milo Manara is always quick to play the "I worked with Fellini card," but Beto's work (here and in his other Heartbreak Soup stories) strikes me as a true successor to Fellini's awareness of the simultaneous joy and horror at work in desire and excess, and the feelings of titillation and dread those things provoke in a spectator. It's not everyone's cup of tea--I'm still trying to figure out if it's mine, in fact--but there's no denying this is Very Good work.

WALKING DEAD #28: Alot of the characters in this book speak the same, ploddingly spelling out their feelings and their worries and their frustrations, so The Governor comes off as shocking just in the brutally direct way he cuts to the core of what he wants. The chopping and the raping and the callousness is just icing on the creepy cake. No matter what else he tackles, Kirkman's work seems the most assured and provocative on Walking Dead and I hope he never loses that while chasing the tall dollars. Very Good.

WONDER WOMAN #1: I read and agree with everyone's complaints about this (in fact, I have many more) but, on the other hand, I dug it. It looked great, it read like a more cohesive Jeph Loeb story (hey, here's all of Wonder Woman's rogue's gallery in six pages!) and that last page brought back many happy memories. Hopefully when the next issue comes out--you know, seven months from now--I'll feel the same. Good.

Y THE LAST MAN #46: This, too, was Good.

PICK OF THE WEEK: LUBAS COMICS & STORIES #8 or WALKING DEAD #28, depending on your tastes.

PICK OF THE WEAK: FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #9. I admit it, I'm unimaginative. I'd like to have at least one title where Spider-Man fights, like, The Prowler and shit. Does that make me a bad person?

TRADE PICK: ACTION PHILOSOPHERS VOL 1 GIANT SIZED THING TPB has the first three issues of Action Philosophers for only $6.95! Really great stuff. There's some other awesome trade stuff--I haven't read it, but that Essential Fantastic Four volume is sheer opium for the eyes.

Also, no time to write it up now, but Graeme lent me his advance copy of Curses by Kevin Huizenga and oh, sweet jesus, is it great. I'd missed most of this material when it first appeared and it knocked me on my ass. Between "28th Street," "Curses" and "Jasper Johnson," this should really grab people's attention. [Note to D&Q people: You must get this into the hands of the New Yorker review staff. Seriously.] I hope to write more on it later.

Paul Jenkins, what were you thinking?: Graeme's reviews of the 6/7 books.

Ah, to be healthy and actually reasonably current with what’s come out this week. No longer do I have to look online for spoilers about what happened in that week’s books, now I only have to look online for spoilers of things to write about on Newsarama. Another benefit of being healthy: Going to see French wonder Camille tonight at Bimbo’s. I admit it, I’m a fan of the singing in languages I can’t understand. For all I know, she’s singing something about hating all Scottish comic-reading men over thirty-years old, but all I hear is breathy loveliness. Sigh… 52 WEEK FIVE: By this point, having read weeks two through four in a batch earlier this week before reading the latest issue, it’s becoming kind of obvious that this would be a much better series without the central “real time” gimmick. The plots that the writers are trying to tell are (with the exception of the Black Adam storyline, which seems like just the latest version of “A hero who goes too far”) interesting enough, but things seem to fall apart when you take each scene’s timestamp into account: Did a cult of Superboy really have time to learn all about Kryptonian mythology, including resurrection myths, and recruit Wonder Girl, before defacing Sue Dibny’s grave in just five days? How did Booster Gold get all his sponsorship deals in those same five days, and why did he apparently forget about looking for Rip Hunter for two weeks after realizing that something was wrong with time? Did the majority of this issue really happen the day after the last issue’s cliffhanger? And so on. Another problem is that plotlines keep appearing while existing plots get seemingly backburnered – Part of this, I think, is down to sleight of hand, because I’m convinced that the Steel, Luthor and Will Magnus threads are all part of the same overall story – After a big deal being made of the missing Mad Scientists in issue two, for example, it’s apparently not been something that anyone’s been thinking about since then; me, I think that Luthor is the one collecting the scientists, and that’s how he apparently has been able to synthesize the metagene, but I could be wrong… Overall, the book’s been interesting despite itself; the writing (and editing) has been sloppy and the art unspectacular and fairly generic, but there’s still something that keeps me from thinking that it’s a disaster, even if I can’t tell you what it is. A month in, though, it’s definitely not the creative success that Dan Didio was hyping back in that first issue. Eh.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #0: It’s obvious that Greg Pak is a fan of the series, but he doesn’t have a handle on any of the characters’ voices yet (although he comes close in the first conversation between Adama and Roslyn, especially the “It’s a pleasant idea, isn’t it?” response). Similarly, the plot is close to something that the show would do, but executed in such a way as to seem just slightly off. Part of the fault with the execution definitely lies with Nigel Raynor’s art, which lacks any of the visual aesthetic that the show has spent two years perfecting, instead looking like a 2000AD strip in the mid-90s. Sadly, a bit of a misfire. Frak. Eh.

CIVIL WAR: FRONT LINE #1: Oh, where to start… Why not the worst part of the whole book, the third strip that somehow tries to suggest that Spider-Man wondering whether or not to reveal his identity is just like the Japanese being forced into internment camps in World War II? As if that isn’t offensive enough, the way that the internment camps are treated, with a Japanese father explained to his daughter that they’re moving to a new home because it’s their duty as Americans to help the war effort, as they happily walk towards their camp, and captions avoiding any use of negative connotations by describing the event as “one of the largest controlled migrations in history” before going on to explain “these relocation centers had the highest live-birth rate and the lowest death rate in wartime United States”, just adds insult to insensitive injury. Hey, I wish I’d been able to have been “relocated” to one of those wonderful, safe, centers back then! Utterly, completely, shameful.

The rest of the book couldn’t come close to such crassness, but it tries. In the first story of the issue, we learn that 9-11 was just a prelude to Civil War (“This was put in motion the day some angry extremists decided to fly a couple of planes into some tall buildings in Manhattan”) as Paul Jenkins does his best to fulfill Marvel’s desire to make Civil War politically “relevant”. References to Fox News and Bill O’Reilly abound, and we discover that that real life wars are nothing compared with even the most trivial Marvel superheroes (“Johnny had been on at least four tours of Bosnia, three to Afghanistan and maybe eight or nice to Baghdad with CNN. Last year, he won an Emmy nomination for his bit on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and from there he graduated to [working on the New Warriors’ reality show]. This was his big break.”). I’m sure that this will be another success for Marvel, and that Civil War will break the internet in half and everything, but this is hitting a new low on the shameless scale. Ass.

DETECTIVE COMICS #820: Is it just me, or has James Robinson completely lose control of the story here? If, as seems to happen here, the identity of the murderer of various C-level supervillains – You know, what seemed to be the entire point to the plot at the start of this crossover – is revealed almost as an afterthought in the back-up strip, then I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything good. While everything gets dragged into the much less interesting return of Two-Face, there’s still enough here to keep your attention, not least of which is Batman making up for being a dick to a new supporting character in Robinson’s first issue. Andy Clarke’s inks continue to make Leonard Kirk’s art look much better than usual, as well. Despite the main plot being revealed to be a McGuffin, this is still, surprisingly, Good.

STAR WARS: LEGACY #0: As Bri’s already pointed out, this is more a guidebook to the “Legacy” universe than anything else, but that’s not enough reason for me not to complain about it. Legacy, for those of you lucky enough not to know about this, is “Star Wars… One Hundred Years Later,” and more than anything else, an example of the death of creativity in the halls of Lucasfilm. Reading this primer, you discover that a hundred years after the destruction of the Empire, we have… the New Empire! A hundred years after Darth Vader, the last of the Sith, turns back towards the light, we have… the New Sith! But that’s not to say there aren’t some shocking turns; Luke Skywalker’s descendent is… Han Solo! Okay, not exactly; he’s called “Cade Skywalker,” but he’s a bounty hunter and smuggler. Other characters include Jabba The Hutt As A Girl, and A Wookie Smuggler Who Pilots A Smuggling Ship But Isn’t Chewbacca, Honest. It’s depressing that Star Wars: Legacy seems to be less Star Trek: The Next Generation and more Saved By The Bell: The New Class, but maybe that’s more a reflection on knowing what their audience wants. Either way, this is Crap, and makes me want to avoid the new series more than anything else…

WONDER WOMAN #1: I have no idea. CE sold out in a couple of days, so I’m expecting a press release and reprint announcement any day now. Still, DC’s got to be happy about that, because when was the last time that Wonder Woman sold out without the help of a crossover or guest star?

Given the relatively disappointing haul this week, I’m going to cheat with my PICK OF THE WEEK (PICK OF THE WEAK is Civil War: Front Line, which also gets the first YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED, JOE QUESADA award. Which I’ve just invented, but remain confident I’ll be able to award on at least a monthly basis if not weekly. Especially having heard the rumors about Spider-Man, which will unleash a fanboyish rant like you wouldn’t expect when they come true. And not only from myself.) and award it to the same book as my TRADE OF THE WEEK: De:Tales, the short story collection by Brazilian creators Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. I’ve been a fan of the two since their first US release, Ursula, came out from AiT a couple of years ago, but this is a much more impressive book than that (very enjoyable) fairy tale, a bunch of magical realism centering around romance, optimism and the fear of missed opportunities. If you’ve ever wanted to read a comic version of Amelie, then this is the book for you; alternatively, if you’re just looking for some of the most impressive black and white art around (If you’ve seen Fabio’s work in AiT’s Smoke and Guns last year or previews of Gabriel’s art in Image’s upcoming Casanova, then you know what to expect), then this is well worth the $14.95 you’d be paying for it.

Next week, Civil War #2 comes out, and I will, more than likely, complain very strongly about the events therein. Just you wait.

Hibbs reviews 6/7

You know what I wonder? How many blogs would get written if it wasn’t for their writers being bored (or trying to avoid work) at their regular jobs? I ask because I know of at least 2 people (heh) who appear to do most of their writing at their (well paid) work. Heck, even I’m writing this at the counter of the store, where I’m trapped for the full 8-hour shift today. If I was at home, I’d be doing something more entertaining – maybe playing Oblivion, or City of Heroes (apparently my account has been reactivated until Sunday for free – dare I play again for 2-3 days?). But, instead, I’ve wasted enough time running through the SF Weekly, the Chronicle and the SF Bay Guardian (you can vote for SF’s Best Comic Shop in their annual reader’s poll at http://www.sfbg.com/vote/ , should you feel so inclined), and I don’t feel like getting working on the set-making I should accomplish this afternoon, or sorting through the 3 long boxes of back issues we’ve just bought, so I’ll start working on the reviews, in the order in which I read this week…

52 WEEK 5: I have to say that this week’s installment was a big improvement over last’s, but in and of itself, it was pretty much just OK. The big problem of this series is kinda turning out to be the art – there were sections of week 4 where I couldn’t tell what was happening at all – but there’s also a few panel-to-panel writing things that jar, too, like how GL and Steel get all wrapped up in their own angst while Mal has seizures a foot behind them. And what they hell are they doing to Hawkgirl a few pages later? The low point for me, however, is “52! 52!” which just feels like a shark being jumped (already?) On the other hand, having Buddy completely ignore Starfire’s brazen nakedness as he worries about his family was pretty much pure brilliance. I know *I* would rather see a new Buddy Baker series than, say, UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS. Still, the weakest link of all of this, is absolutely the backup story – a “history” that has spent FOUR installments now doing the History of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, and there’s clearly at least one more to go.

The PROBLEM with this approach is that as an after-INFINITE CRISIS project, this is all wholly irrelevant and dull dull dull – so what if FLASHDANCE-Supergirl died (20 years ago, at that)? As far as I know that didn’t happen to “our” Superman, because if it DID, then that basically invalidates the TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL Supergirl and the most recent Loeb version – neither of which might be a bad idea, necessarily, when you think bout it, but that’s not the point. The POINT is, I want to know where the CHARACTERS stand, not the freakin’ multiverse. If you don’t know about CRISIS, 52 is absolutely the wrong place to find out about it, and if you DO know about it, you just want to punch Dan Jurgens in the face for wasting so much time. God, it makes me want to scream.

One last thing: is EVERY issue going to have that white background on the cover? Bad call, IMO.

WONDER WOMAN #1: We remember that the SAVAGE CRITIC is a place where there can be spoilers, right? We try hard not to wreck your enjoyment of a tale, because we know not everyone is a Wednesday regular, but every once in a while it’s impossible to separate plot from content (or something)

So, put in some SPOILER SPACE here, and skip the rest of this entry if you’re squeamish at all.

So, WW is now Donna Troy, huh? To me, this is an extremely weak dodge for the essential character problems they ended the Diana version on. Rather than thinking of how to get D out of the corner they painted her into (probably not easy), they just ignore the whole thing.

I guess Donna is meant as an example of the “legacy” of the DCU, which would be fine if she was wasn’t one of the most singularly confusing character histories, or if you could explain her character in 100 words or less. Heinberg does an OK stab at it, but seems to ignore a whole lot for a try at simplicity – all of that New Chronus crap, or even her current as-of-52 role as NuHarbinger. Where’s her “star hair”? Why would anyone take on the mantle of Wonder Woman, considering the failure of the last try, or the fact there is no longer a Themiscryia? Sure, I can give them 2-3 issues to fill in those blanks, I guess, but it sets up a real emotional distance for me as a reader, and makes it very hard for me to approach this with any impartiality.

On the other hand, it LOOKS swell, and, thanks to there being basically nothing shipping this week, it sold like a monster on day #1 – we’re nearly out, pretty much because there’s nothing else to try this week.

Still, I could log-line this in less than 25 words (Donna is Wonder Woman, she fights a bit, Diana is in a jumpsuit – there, 13 words), so there wasn’t much there there, and I’m not “Oh my god, I need to find out what happens next!” like a good first issue should give you. A mild OK, I guess, and I was expecting much more.

SUPERMAN RETURNS: KRYPTON TO EARTH: though it is now “SUPERMAN RETURNS PREQUEL #1 (of 4)”. Here’s the thing: if you were looking for an adaptation of the first 20 minutes or so of Donner’s SUPERMAN film, you’re going to be really thrilled. It’s pretty, it’s scripted well. But it doesn’t add anything you haven’t already seen in a 30 year old movie, not one thing, and I sort of wonder why anyone would WANT an adaptation of the first 20 minutes or so of Donner’s SUPERMAN, this late after the fact? A low GOOD, but, again, why?

Y THE LAST MAN #46: a decent enough end to the arc, and I thought the reunion was touchingly sweet. OK

DETECTIVE #820: quite liked it (esp the Harper sequence), though it does spend a lot of time telling us why Scarecrow needs to be removed from Batman’s rogue’s gallery. It also sorta seems like the “who killed the C-Listers?” plot is a bit back-burnered now, doesn’t it? Either way, I’ll still go with GOOD

HARD TIME SEASON TWO #7: The “49 years later” blurb was, I guess, clever, if a bit insular. I’d tried reading, but stopped hard and cold when the Big Blocks of Text appeared, and thought “Meh, who cares how it turns out, anyway? It is cancelled!” And, so, an Angel dies. INCOMPLETE.

OUTSIDERS #37: Eh, not really down with all of the lecturing and posturing. EH.

WALKING DEAD #28: Strong stuff, and a shocking lot of action in a book that has largely been character study all of these issues. Hope this resolves before we get to the actual rape, though. I also wish that Kirkman could be a responsible creator when it comes to shipping and solicitation. Still, GOOD.

INVINCIBLE #32: On the other hand, I’m bored here. The shipping delays are killing any forward momentum here. EH.

CIVIL WAR: FRONTLINE #1: I was pretty much OK with the main story, though there was an awful lot of covering the ground from CW #1 – while every comic IS someone’s first, I can’t really imagine someone buying this and not the parent book…. Or at least being aware of the major points. Backup #1 (the Speedball thing) was also OK, but the comparison to WW2’s forced relocation of the Japanese Americans in backup #2 was woefully wrongheaded, and, I thought, pretty offensively dismissive to that dark period of America. Sour taste in my mouth gives me a low AWFUL, sorry.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #9: PAD goes to wrap up some of his own 10-year old plotlines, and while it isn’t badly done, it feels pretty irrelevant to me. EH.

LAST PLANET STANDING #3: This is selling really well for us (well, at least relative to a SPIDER-GIRL spinoff), which is surprising because this is as old-school “hoo-haa” as you can get. Competent, if not thrilling. OK.

MARVEL TEAM-UP #21: Some of the worst art I’ve ever seen in a Marvel comic, stunted and stilted. The story would have worked better, I think, as an 8-pager in SPIDER-MAN UNLIMITED or something. All in all, AWFUL.

PUNISHER #34: Yeah, a good laugh, I guess. OK

NEW X-MEN #27: I never really “got” Stryker as a villain, and here I do even less. EH.

BLOOD OF THE DEMON #16: Just look at the cover. There, you’ve read the comic, and not had to spend $2.99. AWFUL.

JSA #86: I feel like I’ve been reading this storyline for 6 months or more – this wasn’t worthy of more than 2 issues, really. EH.

ANGEL SPOTLIGHT WESLEY: Never really watched more than a few episodes of the ANGEL TV show, so I don’t know who these people are or anything. Read OK, despite that, though.

ANNIHILATION SILVER SURFER #3: I’m not feeling any of this crossover, but, then, I don’t really like “cosmic” OR any o the characters involved. Still, I suppose this is “significant” because Surfer becomes the Herald of the Big G again? Not that can last too long… EH.

JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #22: My problem is when Gypsy does all of that detective work to uncover the connections to Deacon that “no one could ever prove”. JL stories should play to the strengths of the characters, not make them all super-competent in fields outside their own. EH.

LUBAS COMICS AND STORIES #8: As I think I’ve said before, I find the work of the Hernandez brothers to be technically thrilling, but it never emotionally touches me. This is a problem of me, not the work, I think. OK.

CHICANOS #8: I think Risso’s art is swell, so I always like these little detective stories. Still, not obviously better than OK.

BATMAN JOURNEY INTO KNIGHT #10: It just goes on and on and on, and it’s all so uninteresting. Awful.

BATMAN SECRETS #4: The padding issue, where nothing happens. I quit liked that page of just the two-shots, though. OK.

JONAH HEX #8: Besides the jarring transition between artists in the middle of the book, I thought this was another fine done-in-one issue. A very high OK.

FANTASTIC FOUR FIRST FAMILY #4: Pretty, and even poignant in places, but it seems pretty drifty and pointless. EH.

FURY PEACEMAKER #5: EH.

EXERMINATORS #6: For a second I had a flash where this was a clever and interesting comic, but just for a second. Then I realized how many coincidences permeate the story, and how it isn’t going anywhere, fast. Look at how much plot and event occurred by, say, SANDMAN #6 or PREACHER #6, if you want to see how a Vertigo comic should be done. EH.

MANIFEST ETERNITY #1: Ugly AND dull! A real winner! AWFUL.

X-MEN THE END MEN AND X-MEN #6: This took 18 issues to get to? Sheesh! AWFUL.

STAR WARS LEGACY #0: Oh, it is the ALL NEW OFFICIAL HANDBOOK TO THE STAR WARS UNIVERSE, and not a story. Foo. Even for a mere quarter, I really don’t care. AWFUL.

SHADOWHAWK #12: Hadn’t read an issue of this since #3 or so, but the first thing that struck me was how little progress had been made since then. These just aren’t very compelling characters. EH.

NOBLE CAUSES #13: Haven’t read this in a while either, but here I had very little idea of who was what – couldn’t figure out why that video tape was so exciting, for example. Art really stank, which is odd given the nice sketchbook section at the back. Huh. EH.

PICK OF THE WEEK: I think what I liked best was WALKING DEAD #28 – but I still think Kirkman is a shmuck for not getting his scheduling shit in order.

PICK OF THE WEAK: Ugh, I’ll go with MARVEL TEAM-UP #21 – also by Kirkman, huh.

BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK: Man, this is not a great week for trades. Pretty much everything is flawed or compromised in some way. I’ll go with FANTASTIC FOUR IRON MAN BIG IN JAPAN by the late Seth Fisher, as my pick, except it really isn’t that good. Still, got to pick something…

So, what did you think?

-B

Moon, in the sense of "Ass";. So poetic.

So, the problem with my last few weeks is that, between being sick and being overworked and being host to the start of a family invasion of San Francisco (Anyone here who has a problem with people from the west coast of Scotland, your frustration level is potentially going to rise over the next few weeks; My dad is already in town, soon to be followed by both of my sisters and their respective spouses and children. I’m very, very sorry), I am completely behind in the world of comics. The most recent thing that I’ve read was the new Scott Pilgrim – which I loved, albeit with a few reservations, not least of which is that it felt like an ending. As much as I enjoyed it, I’m not sure that I came away from it wanting to know where the story is going to go next, or even feeling as if there’s that much suspense about whether everything will work out for our now-seemingly-invincible eponymous hero – which is a couple of weeks old… which means that reviewing what I’ve been reading lately would be very dull for all of you kids who have probably already heard what the shocking ending of Wednesday’s Civil War #2 is. I was going to give the whole reviewing thing a pass this weekend. And then Joe Quesada gave me the ultimate straight line, while talking about the new Moon Knight series at this week’s Wizard World Philadelphia.

“If you think it's been bad for the first two issues, it gets worse."

Oh, Joe. Having read the second issue, I’m not sure that’s even possible.

Ignoring David Finch’s overly-rendered but completely undynamic art – which, if nothing else, has improved from his Avengers Disassembled days when he couldn’t lay out a page to save his life – the book’s real problem lies with Charlie Huston’s writing, which seems to personify so many current superhero comic trends as to make me think that it’s actually a very subtle parody of mainstream comics these days: Decompression? Check out the one page that consists of twelve wordless panels where three things happen: a character licks his lips, the same character takes three steps forward, and a MoonKnightarang flies through the air. It doesn’t hit anything, of course – that happens on the next page. Terribly written captions that make Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman seem like poetry? How about this (spread across nine different captions in nine panels): “Blame God. And ask, how much more he wants. How many battles? How much blood till it’s enough? Disarm him. You only need a minute. But you hate him so much. Don’t you? And you’ve wanted this for so long,” Terribly written dialogue that read like Brian Bendis as played by Chris Claremont? Try this excerpt from a monologue towards the end of the issue: “I myself once worshipped at the altar of Dionysius. But then, who would know this better than the man who rescued me from my former abasements of self? That cowed avenger who bore such a striking resemblance to this stony-faced specter. If you will forgive me the play on words. Could it be that this unveiling forebodes the return of the Lunar Legionnaire?” Don’t worry, it’s not all about the technical aspects; there is also the hyperviolence that people seem to be concerned about in some of DC’s superhero books recently, as the flashback fight between Moon Knight and some unnamed bad guy ends with the “Lunar Legionnaire” hacking the bad guy’s face off and holding it up to the sky, triumphant.

Apparently, according to the Newsarama article linked above, this Moon Knight series is a “water cooler” book. Unless the talk around the water cooler is “Boy, did you see how bad that book is?”, then I’m completely lost. I couldn’t see anything to enjoy in the second issue at all. There was no joy, no excitement, no anything beyond the desperation to make Moon Knight something other than a kind of goofy Batman rip-off. If I say that the only thing that the book has going for it at all is that it stops Wolverine: Origins from being Marvel’s worst book, then that pretty much gives you an idea of just how Bowel-Shakingly Ass it is.

God, I can’t wait to read some good books again. What would you recommend, dear readers?

Reviews and Whatnot: Jeff's Reviews of the 6/1 Books...

First, I just want to thank everyone who posted on my last two entries. Normally, I try to respond to everyone who posts feedback or comments but I was just too lazy during my last few days of vacation to work up any sort of moxie. Nevertheless, whether it was Clint gloating over his Rom: Spaceknight purchases, Donnie's Wimbledon Green observation or Treacher bringing the Treacher, they were all really appreciated. Second, X-Men: The Last Stand. I'll scrupulously avoid spoilers but I will say I didn't like it much. At all. Part of that was the cynicism: I honestly think the filmmakers were trying to give the comic geek audience such a nerdgasm in the first ten minutes (right before the awful title credits and right after) nobody would notice the messy plot, the awful dialogue, and just what an uninspired hash was made of most of the staging, setting and action scenes.

But also part of the problem (which some script review of AICN pointed out months and months ago) is that someone in the chain of higher-ups thinks Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman are the X-Men and that's just a HUGE mistake. Not only is Berry terrible here (and I have to give her credit, she's been awful three times in a row and in entirely different ways each time), but Jackman is the unconvincing poseur prettyboy I feared he'd be back before I saw X-Men: I didn't mind that Wolverine's the gruff guy with the heart of gold in this movie (after all, Claremont turned Logan into that long ago), but it's sad that Jackman has fallen into the Tom Cruise trap of making acting less of a physical act and more of a physical achievement. And there's nothing more unlike Wolverine than the idea of control and discipline that such achievement embodies. At best, Wolverine comes off like Hugh Jackman dressed up and acting like Wolverine for Halloween or something, and that's a huge comedown from the first two films.

Also (and this is kind of a spoiler so I apologize), on film, the Fastball Special looks like one of the dumbest fuckin' things ever. Did anyone involved with the movie bother to look at the comic books, or did they just go off a description provided by Avi Arad's reader? "So Colossus just, uh, throws Wolverine, huh? I guess we can do that... Just grab him by the pants and spin him around or something?"

Yeah. Didn't like it. Not cringingly awful, but far from a pleasure to watch.

Third:

52 WEEK #4: I kinda blew off Hibbs when he talked about how competent the first issue of 52 was, but I certainly saw his point after reading this issue: if the first had been as bad as this, I'd have stopped reading by now. The biggest sticking point was The Question cracking wise like he was Spider-Man (The Question making old-school Gauntlet jokes? Um, could we drop the Poochie factor by about 15%, please?) but the storytelling overall was just kludgy and awkward and not good. Hopefully just a hiccup, and probably sub-Eh (since that's what I gave issue #1) but I'll stick at Eh, anyway.

ACTION COMICS #839: I really liked the hook of having Superman feel his non-physical powers kick up to potentially Silver-Age levels, and Busiek & Johns appear to be playing with some of the ideas from Superman Returns (if the latest trailer I saw is any indication). I'm digging it. Good stuff.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #532: It's a clever cliffhanger in that you know Peter's not going to end up unmasking himself, but JMS does a great job of presenting why the people closest to him think he should, and why he'd listen to them. I'm not saying it justifies the year-plus of plot hammering to put him in this situation, but it was a Good issue.

APOCALYPSE NERD #3: First issue where I actually liked the main story, but it looked like they printed the issue straight from a fax machine or something. OK, I guess.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #0: At a quarter, definitely worth the money, but pretty much a mook's game, overall. The continuity in the first two seasons of BSG is just so taut (as my brother once put it, "they can't have somebody fart without everyone smelling it for the next three episodes"), the creators of the licensed material can't doing anything that will really matter (I think the tie-in novels are gonna be screwed for that reason, too, FWIW). There's also some other stuff to bitch about, but not for a quarter. OK but doomed, doomed, doomed.

CRISIS AFTERMATH THE SPECTRE #1: Nifty art but the Spectre with a goatee? No. Just...no. Thought the whole thing was more or less good (a comic where the Spectre quotes Voltaire is a step in the right direction) until I realized it was the first of a three issue mini--then it seemed disasarously slow. OK, coulda been better.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DRAGON #5: Khari Evans' art seems to have lost a little of the storytelling zing (or bling, perhaps) that gave the previous issues some spark, and Palmiotti and Gray's smart-ass bullshitting (The Daughters of The Dragon know the Punisher! And the Mole Man!) has gotten a little tired. Probably would've been much better as a four issue mini, but I haven't entirely lost hope yet. OK.

HERO SQUARED ONGOING #1: Anyone else end up with four silent pages at the end of their issue? Considering the absurdly high word count in the previous eighteen, I'm assuming it's a technical glitch and not, I dunno, Captain Valor going deaf. I really like the central conceit of this book (a romantic quadrangle between a superhero, a supervillain, and their unpowered parallel universe equivalents) but I'd be lying if I didn't admit it feels more like comfort food (Giffen and DeMatteis's hyperbreathless talky comedy) and less like a genuine meal. Good, but has the potential to be better.

INCREDIBLE HULK #95: Really sad how the editor mentions on the letter page the serendipity of finding a previous storyline with The Hulk and The Silver Surfer that has resonance with the current one, and talks about that like it's the most amazing discovery ever. (It's called "continuity," Mr. Editor-Guy. You should look into it. ) As for the story, I wish the art was good enough so I could've had my "yeah, I know I shouldn't suspend my disbelief, but there's the Silver Surfer using his surfboard as a gladiatorial shield and that's kinda rad" moment. Eh.

MY INNER BIMBO #1: Sometimes--for me, anyway--the story (the one the storyteller tells) isn't nearly as interesting as the metastory (the one the reader tells themself about why the writer is telling this particular story). Here, for example, the story--ostensibly about a sixty-year old man, his seventy-seven year old wife and a manifestation of the man's childlike inner bimbo--is too exposition-heavy and suffers from false starts, unbelievable dialogue and Evel-Knievel-over-Snake-Canyon leaps of logic, making it easy to put down and kinda head-hurty overall. But the metastory of this--trying to figure out just what the hell Kieth is trying to work out with this stuff, how much of it is emotionally autobigraphical, what reaction he's expecting--is fucking riveting. If it can come together, and the story can surpass the metastory, My Inner Bimbo could be a startling and devastating piece of work. As it is, this first issue is Eh (unless you like reading stuff that you just don't get a chance to see very often and/or don't mind entertaining yourself with all sorts of strange and potentially libelous ideas about a creator's personal life, in which case it's Good). It's certainly exceptionally bold work, either way.

PUNISHER THE TYGER: Wow. I don't really know what I was expecting, but that certainly wasn't it. Garth Ennis and John Severin have crafted a quiet little story that can be read as a rosetta stone for Frank Castle's obsessions (by and large, the story takes place when Castle is ten years old and learning about the sex, violence and crime lurking under everyday urban life) and also as its opposite: the story suggests we can't understand what makes Frank Castle the way he is any more than we can understand the creator of the tiger of Blake's poem. Severin does lovely period art, and his way with faces and expressions is perfect for such a strongly character-driven story, but it's Ennis's writing--particularly Castle's narration--that really knocked me out. It's writing that comes off as tough by not trying to be tough, and richly understated. This may be the best work Ennis has done for Marvel: Very Good stuff, and worth checking out.

THING #7: Slott's pretty good with the metacommentary. So does that mean this issue, where Ben fails at everything he tries to achieve by taking Alicia back in time, is a commentary on Slott's attempt to bring a more retro classic take on comic book storytelling? OK, because I thought the laughs were kind of cheap and the plot was really second-guessable, which usually isn't the case. But it was cute.

ULTIMATE EXTINCTION #5: Weird. You know what the action scenes of nine million bald women and fifteen million gun shots and twenty-one million blood spatters reminded me of? Those loading screens on Capcom fighting games: weirdly hyperkinetic and static at the same time. Maybe that's appropriate for this story, which took fifteen issues and three miniseries whipping itself up into a frenzy and then felt at the end... I dunno. Not perfunctory, exactly, and not flat but....done? Like a Michael Bay movie makes you feel: like you got your money's worth (and then some) but, given your druthers, the whole thing would've been over about twenty minutes sooner. OK.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #30: I like Millar's work the most when it (or he, via his best friend the Internet) isn't trying to grab you by the nads and telling you about how, by Christ, don't you understand, this is the most amazingly cock-shittingiest book you'll read this year. So I liked this issue, which seems no more absurd or hyperbolic or bowel-shakingly melodramatic than a regular superhero comic book should. Highly OK, in short.

WARREN ELLIS BLACK GAS WRAPAROUND #3: Underwhelming, despite a very good job by Ellis putting genuine tension in the couple's banter. (Are they on their way to becoming Tourette's-talking zombies? Or are they just under a shitload of stress?) But it's at best dutiful, and far from thrilling. Like Moore, Ellis enjoys taking genres apart and like Moore, Ellis's endings can feel like afterthoughts. However, apart from some of his work with Image, Moore's work never feels as emotionally stingy as some of Ellis's dabblings do. If pressed, I'd assume Ellis is going for terse and emotionally understated. But there are places where emotional understatement isn't particularly satisfying, and a zombie massacre story might be one of those places. Eh, unfortunately.

PICK OF THE WEEK: PUNISHER THE TYGER. As you can tell, I was really impressed with this.

PICK OF THE WEAK: I got nothing. I didn't read anything truly awful this week or if I did, I couldn't work up enough bile to care. (TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #38, you're off the hook.)

TRADE OF THE WEEK & MANGA FIX: Jim Kosmicki asked for a more in-depth review of BECK because he'd read the first two volumes and just didn't see the appeal. So I was kind of hoping this week's release of BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD VOL4 would allow me to really turn out a laudatory review that could show him what he was missing. Unfortunately, after reading vol. 4 of BECK, I think I'm not going to be able to do so.

For one thing, like Vol. 3 of Scott Piigrim, this volume of BECK has its flaws--I found the transitions in the early part of the volume to be particularly jarring, for example, but a lot of the scenes in the middle just piddle out, there to show little more than how miserable parts of Koyuki's life are. Vol. 4 of BECK is not a laudatory, life-changing volume of manga if you've read the previous volumes and didn't much care. In fact, it'll probably just reinforce any already existing indifference.

But, if like me, you really loved the first three volumes of BECK--my god, is it satisfying! Sakuishi is able to capture all of the psychological freneticism of other manga without relying on the tranformation of characters into super-deformed versions, or the art into stick-figure diagramming to mirror the awkward embarrassment of situations: Sakuishi front-loads all of that into his style and his design of his lead, gangly, big-eyed Yukio, so even the broadest comedy feels almost deadpan. Additionally, we don't have to spend too much time in Yukio's head--we may get the occasional panel where he tries to cheer himself up or remind himself of what's important--but the creator doesn't have to sell the reader on it because it's all right there on the character's face.

But the real appeal of Vol. 4 is watching a character you feel for start to come into his own after three volumes of working his ass off and struggling to get by, and I found that tremendously satisfying. Some of that, I'm sure, comes from my own history as spindly kid outsider, but some of it comes from the pleasure of watching characters you care about become the people that they want to be and the price they have to pay for that. I don't know how anyone can't find the appeal in that.

Despite any criticisms I may have (and, oh yeah, that free Beck download is a sucky remix of a song I didn't like in the first place), BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD VOL4 is absolutely my pick of the week. Recommended, oh my yes.

Howzabout you?

Gabbity-Gabbity-Gab: Got Around To It: Jeff's Reviews of 5/24 Books.

So, did anyone catch Art School Confidential yet? Edi and I caught it on Sunday and thought I would talk about it in a non-spoilery way before gabbing on last week's books. ASC is a weird little film and, frankly, I don't think it's at all successful in what it tries to do. But what's interesting about it is that everything that makes it a failure as a movie would've made it successful as a graphic novel (particularly a Dan Clowes graphic novel). As you probably know from any slight interest in the film, ASC follows freshman Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) as he enters Strathmore Art Academy and learns that neither unremitting ambition nor sizeable talent is going to help him make an impression on his instructors and fellow students, nor will it help him lose his virginity to Audrey, the girl of his dreams (Sophia Myles). As for what will help him, that's the meat of the movie and I'll stop the nickel tour here. I will say, however, that Clowes' and director Terry Zwigoff's substantial pessimism for the human condition trips them up here, as the early parts of the movie clearly chalk up Jerome's fixation on Audrey to his high standards and self-consciousness about sex. Consequently, it's hard to care about Jerome's romantic longing when the filmmakers all but tell you Jerome really just needs to lighten up and get laid.

Such cynicism isn't the real problem, though. What really kills the picture are the sketchy nature of the scenes that don't really flow into one another as much as file listlessly past you on the big screen, the presentation of stereotypes without insight or development, and an inability to suggest the passage of time in a genuine living environment--an inability that's usually the classic mark of a bad film.

But at about the two-thirds mark, I realized that it's precisely that feeling of static isolation and disconnectedness that gives Clowes' comic work such a punch. In his comics, characters move through the world without being part of it, either lost in their own thoughts and conversations or voyeuristically gaping at events happening around them which are either cartoonish, brutal or grotesque (or usually all three). And it's their isolation--and the isolated nature of the events around them that suddenly leap out then unexpectedly fade away--that gives the work its eerie power or, when combined with a character's vital and profane anger, its humor. (I'm thinking here of Ghost World and David Boring, in particular.)

Unfortunately, in a movie, you can't just have characters go through their first semester in higher education without giving the sense of a chaotically changing community. For that matter, you can't set scenes in art school studios in the dead of night with no one around--there's always someone up at four a.m. playing 4AD records and smoking up a storm, no matter how late--and you can't have a dorm room with three roommates on what appears to be an otherwise empty floor. Critics have complained about what a cipher Jerome is, but ciphers work fine in cinema, as long as the world around them is full and rich and vivid. (Fellini, Lynch or Cronenberg are three of the more extreme examples of this.) Nearly all the strengths of Clowes' narrative cartooning end up working against Art School Confidential and it's a crying shame. On the other hand, if you've read a lot of Clowes, you can pretty much imagine what his graphic novel adaptation would look like and that's kind of cool.

Christ. Okay, for those of you still alive, on with the books:

52 WEEK #3: Is the cover some clever allusion to Lex Luthor Red and Lex Luthor Blue? I can't decide if that'd be totally cool or totally suck. Probably a little played out after the Alex Luthor thing, but it could work. I found this issue to be a bit draggy but that's because I don't like Steel much and the Black Adam stuff didn't feel that new to me. (As a Marvel fanboy, I find it kind of a bummer that Black Adam is basically Sub-Mariner but done right precisely because he isn't Sub-Mariner, if you get my drift). OK, but I'm not all a-tingle.

ANNIHILATION RONAN #2: Sure, it's a little, I dunno, haphazard, maybe, in its plotting but lovely art+beloved C rate cosmic characters (The Shaper of Worlds? Glee!)=Good in this fanboy's obviously biased playbook. I liked it.

BATMAN #653: "Heroin. Cocaine. Weed. Opium. Valium. Crystal. Acid. Ecstasy." Two-Face's list of vices trumped by the appeal of villainy runs so long I wanted to call James Robinson's N.A. sponsor. Also funny is Batman's bagging on every other hero in Gotham--"The Creeper? Have you ever tried talking to him? Ragman? He smells like old socks. And don't get me started on The Rose & The Thorn..."--while recruiting Harvey, when all we really needed was an expressed desire on Batman's part to put things right again. Most of the heavy lifting (Hello, who cured Harvey?) is relegated to scenes we'll probably never see and some of the choices were kinda retarded but it still was highly OK, and highly funny.

BLUE BEETLE #3: I'm really enjoying this title. Getting us to care about characters we've just met in mid-One Year Later change-up is no small feat. Good stuff.

BUCKAROO BANZAI #1: Ouch. Gimped by some really bad storytelling (I love the part on page 2 where the adoring fans greet Buckaroo and then everyone just stands around staring uncomfortably at each other) and just a big ol' globby mass of uncomfortable dialogue, most of which sounds more like Three's Company than Buckaroo Banzai. ("It was my late husband's--for protection!" "Everyone should carry protection.") But, let's face it, the original was more than a little bit of a clumsy mess too, and I got the idea the writer was trying in places to mimic the original's sour mash of different goofy dialogue styles. It's more or less Eh, and maybe even a bit higher than that, but you'd have to be a die-hard Blue Blaze Irregular to make it through without feeling a migraine coming on.

COMICS JOURNAL #276: Between Part One of the Bob Haney interview (in which we learn Chevy Chase's dad is Bob Haney's brother-in-law, among other things), Joe McCulloch's (a.k.a., Jog of Jog The Blog) initial installment of regular feature "Cape Fear" and 34 pages of early Krigstein comics, this is perilously close to a must-buy. Good stuff, although I've barely made a dent in it.

CHECKMATE #2: After goofing on the first issue, I'm abashed to admit I kinda got hooked on all the interdepartmental politics shown here. And yet, there's no real urgency to it--the struggle for the team to remain part of the U.N. is hardly the stuff that'll keep me up at night. And Kobra? Has anyone except a writer looking for a nice, all-purpose terrorist group ever been really impressed with Kobra? OK, but it's gonna have to go quite a bit further before I'm a fan.

DAREDEVIL #85: I'm still grooving on it and this issue had some really cool stuff in it, but the change-up at the end kinda stalls out a little bit--if you're not going to put The Kingpin at the center of the attempt to manipulate Murdock (and I like that he apparently isn't) you've got to come up with someone a little cooler than Hammerhead and the Harlem crime lord from an old Captain America run. Still Very Good, though.

EXILES #81: In concept, the ongoing battle against Proteus seemed close to perfect--it spans a huge number of alternate worlds with real consequences to the team in nearly every turn--but in execution, it's grown pretty flat with each issue falling into a predictable "Proteus tricks heroes of the new reality into fighting The Exiles until finally the mistakes have been realized but not in time to stop Proteus from getting away" routine. A drag, because if Bedard and Co. paid as much attention to the structure as they did to their latest batch of forgotten Marvel toys, this would be awesome instead of Eh.

FOLLOWING CEREBUS #8: The conversation between Chester Brown and Dave Sim in which Sim examines his reasons for being excluded from "The List" of top cartoonists and the extent to which the members of "The List" are consciously trying to dismiss Sim's work to their own advantage is both impressively candid, depressingly paranoid, and perversely readable. But Following Cerebus also includes a surprising mix of whatever Sim finds worthy of interest--Roberta Gregory, jam comics, the mini-comic opus One for Sorrow. If the first few years of The Comics Journal had been all about Gary Groth trying to figure out why people didn't like him, it would have read a bit like Following Cerebus. Good, albeit distressing, stuff.

HAWKGIRL #52: In this month's installment of Boy, We Hate Hawkgirl: Simonson and Chaykin have Hawkgirl defeated by a gangster nicknamed Four-Eyes, perfectly setting up next issue's clock-cleaning by the gangster Fat Kid With Asthma. Also, Hawkgirl tries to remember some fighting advice given to her by Bruce Wayne but falls asleep before finishing her thought. And then the issue ends with the thrillign cliffhanger of Hawkgirl waking up and stretching. Awful as awful can be, if not even more so.

NEW AVENGERS #19: The saga of the mysterious being named Michael enters what feels like its fifttenth continuous year, and I kinda couldn't care less. Also, right above the barcode on the cover, it says "Rated A." Is that "A" for "Adults?" "All-Ages?" "Apathy-inducing" "Avengers, New?" Marvel's rating system sucks serious ass. (Maybe it's "Rated A" for "Ass?") No worse than Eh but unbelievably dull.

NEXTWAVE AGENTS OF HATE #5: My favorite Celestial with that awesome thumb-pattern making the loser symbol? Funny. The other cheap shots at Marvel heroes? Also funny. But either Ellis's best ideas got shot down or he just can't be arsed to come up with anything funny that isn't unbelievably scatological and/or profane--adorably cute killing machines are just the sort of hackneyed gag I'd expect from, I dunno, Chris Claremont. Eh, and it's a god-damned shame.

POWERS #18: If you're still invested in the lead characters, there's some stuff in here that will make your balls sweat. (In a good way, of course...) And that should be enough to forgive the awkward framing sequences (I mean, really, that was the reason for the whole spoken-word monologue thing?), the drastic plot shortcuts and the powerful whiff of anti-climax. So if you can wrap your head around all that, Good.

SCOTT PILGRIM AND THE INFINITE SADNESS TPB: Sadly, this book came out in what is clearly one of my mouthy "Yeah, but..." weeks. On the one hand, SP&TIS is fun, funny and impressively ambitious--I loved (as I always do) the videogame stuff, the witty dialogue and particularly the boss villain who's unbeatable because he's a vegan. (Fucking. Hilarious.) On the "yeah, but..." side, the ambitious alternating flashback structure didn't work as well as it should have (why did Kid Chameleon fall apart again?), too many of the characters looked alike (despite O'Malley's thoughtful attention to design) and the endless number of new characters felt less like a rich and bustling world and more like a confusing parade of in-jokes and shout-outs.

Is SP&TIS worth buying? Will you read it several times? Does it give you the sense of an artist working his ass off to improve himself at every turn? Fuck, yes. But does it make you wish O'Malley hadn't been staring down the barrel of a blown deadline so he could've taken the time to really fine-tune the material? For me, the answer to that is also: fuck, yes.

Despite the "Yeah, but..." Very Good stuff and my TRADE PICK OF THE WEEK.

SECRET SIX #1: Normally, I find the superhero based stuff in the real world kinda groany and preachy and squalid, but it was actually pretty kick-ass here. Throw in some cool characterization and a very cool cliffhanger and you've got a very strong returning first issue. Good stuff and if you liked Villains United, you should really like this.

SQUADRON SUPREME #3: Profoundly anticlimactic. Also, Straczynski tries so hard to tackle the issue of race in a way that won't come off as patronizing and trite that it comes off as ultra-patronizing and trite. Eh.

SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #18: The hints here about the "A.I. wars of old" certainly point to Waid as the author of that Magnus-Morrow scene I liked, so that was kinda interesting. And we're finally seeing some movement on the Brainiac 5 subplot. But without Kitson's ultra-clean linework and sense of body language to distinguish all the many characters, I found myself on the edge of overwhelmed and at the point of tuning it all out. (Monthly superhero team books set in the far future must be an unbelievable bitch to draw.) Highly OK, but I think the title is going to always be wobbly as a monthly and that's a drag.

TEEN TITANS #36: Really a shock--and not an unpleasant one--to have Morrison's Doom Patrol run moved so quickly from Byrne's "never happened" take to the front-and-center approach it's given here. I'm not entirely sold on it--several issues into One Year Later and it doesn't feel like this book has a direction other than an incorporated Doom Patrol pitch from Johns--but I really, really want to be sold on it and that's something. Definitely OK.

TESTAMENT #6: For a few pages of this issue, Testament becomes the book it's pitched itself as--a metafictional take on religion that challenges the reader to think of established concepts as dynamically fluid archetypes--and then the rest of the time it's Biblical references tossed onto a Procrustean bed that isn't even close to a good fit. Would that this work had gotten the editorial attention and guidance needed to help shape it. Eh but goddam that Liam Sharp can draw.

X-STATIX PRESENTS DEAD GIRL #5: Falls apart at the end (doesn't most of Milligan's stuff?) but falls apart funny. And wow, Laura Allred's colors on this, with the tints on Tyke's glasses and the shadows on people's faces, are really top-notch. Good but not great, I wish the market could support this sort of insanity on a regular basis. It's fun.

PICK OF THE WEEK: DAREDEVIL #85, because it had me on the edge of my seat right up 'til the very end.

PICK OF THE WEAK: HAWKGIRL #52, because Simonson & Chayking handle the title like it's a PG-13 version of Wendy Whitebread, Undercover Slut.

TRADE PICK: SCOTT PILGRIM! SCOTT PILGRIM! SCOTT PILGRIM! Even if, compared to the first two issues, it's more like SCOTT PILGRIM. SCOTT PILGRIM SCOTT PILGRIM(!). It still blows the rest of this week's releases right out of the water.

Okay, that's all from me for a while, I promise.

Hibbs does 5/17

Huh, it looks like it's just me this week, as late as I am in posting. Just wrapped TILTING AT WINDMILLS, and Ben and Tzipora are still at the park, so let's see how much I can get written... 52 WEEK 2: Yeah, character piece. Or pieces, whatever. Liked this issue quite a bit, esp. the Morrow and Magnus scene (Lester says Morrison, I say Waid), and it moved right along, doing exactly what a weekly comic should do. My problems were all in the art -- a) that's such the wrong angle for Ralph's nose to wiggle, and, anyway, it's kind of out of tone to do that at your wife's grave, b) that crappy paste up job on the wall in the Morrow scene, and c) the hot lesbian in lingerie in Montoya's bed. Seemed pretty gratuitous, and out of character for a mean drunk. Mm, and, not knowing what they have planned later down the line, I think I would have pushed the Wondergirl scene a few weeks back. I don't know how she could have pulled together a worldwide thing like that in 10 days, or whatever it's been? Still, otehr than that: GOOD. Oh wait, I forgot -- the "History of the DC Universe" backup? Bad. Really really bad. Any "history" that has to begin with "See, there were these multiple earths, and then there weren't" is bad news.

ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #4: I thought the fold-out was really really effective. Not just as a piece of art, but more as a story-telling trick. That worked tremendously. Art's nice, as always all the way through. But, I don't like this Batman, and I don't really like this Robin, and while I'm sure that's the point, it's not something I would choose to read for pleasure. AWFUL.

ANNIHILATION: NOVA #2: Man, that's an ugly new costume. EH.

BATMAN YEAR ONE HUNDRED #4: Yeah, dug that all the way through. VERY GOOD.

FELL #5: Mm, yeah, strong issue -- perhaps the strongest one yet. I really liked the density, and the backmatter. This is EXCELLENT.

MAN-BAT #2: I literally yelled "Oh...no, ick!" out loud upon encountering the racial stereotyping (just one of many) of the Irish Desk Sergeant saying "boyo". I know several Irish people, and I've never once heard one say "boyo" ever. At least he didn't go "ti-ti-ti-ti-ti" and do a leprechaun dance. Really badly written tripe, AWFUL.

MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #1: The "kids" Avengers title, with the really bizarre addition of Storm to the team. I mean, Wolverine is on the "big kids" regular team, sure, but TWO X-Men just feels wrong. I kinda liked the Giant-Girl character (she had the only good lines, really), but the set-up of them being a government team just didn't work for me. Me no likee. EH.

MOON KNIGHT #2: The first issue's flashbacks worked because they built to the big reveal, but this issue it just felt padded. I also may be alone in just not liking David Finch's art. EH.

ROBIN #150: OK, so he had to do all that rigermorle and acrobatics to get in, right? How did he get out with a hogtied 200 pound man? (Superboy punched a wall!) Other than that, I liked this quite a bit. Really, the big problem is that this is OYL -- Tim and Bruce have bonded, the trust issue should be off the table now. Still, a low GOOD.

SHADOWPACT #1: I really really like seeing Willingham draw again. I wonder how long that can possibly last? Clever use of OYL (though I'm not sure it really matches up with IC or 52), and just generally, I liked it. So far, so GOOD.

SUPERMAN/BATMAN #25: Yikes, that's what this was all about? Seems like kind of a waste, and quite a bit of a cheat to this reader. Extremely EH.

Hm, they're home. Let's put this back burner for the minute....

....OK, back, 28 hours later. Just got back from doing the comics at the store. WHat's left? Fuck, too tired to review more, so let's wrap up.... oh, and I notice that Lester just posted, making my rush to get this up probably wasn't needed...

PICK OF THE WEEK: FELL #5, no contest. A solid read, loverly illustrated, done-in-one, with lots of good Backmatter... and under $2. God Bless Warren Ellis is all I can say...

PICK OF THE WEAK: Yeah, ALL-STAR BATMAN & ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #4. Despite the cool storytelling of the fold-out.

BOOK/TP OF THE WEEK: THe new KRAZY & IGNATZ is pretty terrific, HOTWIRE COMIX looked pretty interesting on the flip test, and we sold a LOT of copies of Y THE LAST MAN v7, but, pretty much hands down, the finest book of last week has to be Linda Medley's wonderful CASTLE WAITING HC. Gorgeous gorgeous work, with a fine light comic touch. "Solicitine" almost certainly goes on too long, in the context of the book, because it side-tracks the story away from Jain and the Castle, but, still, it's all damn fine stuff, and heavily recommended. It's also a very nicely designed book, too.

So, that's what I thought, how about you?

-B

The Pilgrim Dilemma (and other things unrelated to Jeff's reviews of 05/17 Books...)

Sorry, 52: this week's release of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 3 is the first book in a long while that would make me hurry to the shop on a Wednesday. In fact, only the dread logic of "the sooner I read Vol. 3 of Scott Pilgrim, the longer I have to wait for Vol. 4" is keeping me from showing up before the store opens on Wednesday and filching my copy. (Hmmm. "Filching." That's another word deviant sex practices have ruined forever. Edi and I are rewatching Season Two of Arrested Development (which even on a second viewing is astonishingly funny) and the writers may have included every gay innuendo in the English language except "filching." With luck, that's in season three.)

Wrote a few reviews yesterday, but they read like gibberish. However, since nobody else is posting and some of last week's books also read like gibberish (yes, I'm looking at you, Superman/Batman #25), I'll give it another shot, with the caveat that I'm not responsible for anyone who mambo dogfaces in the banana patch, yes? Let's to it.

52 WEEK #2: Liked it better this week, and the home game version of 52, "Who wrote what this issue?" is fun to play with your favorite cranky chum. (I thought Morrison wrote the Morrow and Magnus scene which was great, but Hibbs assured me it was Waid. The ensuing recounting of our respective reasoning was, I think, pretty fucking amusing but far too profane to be mentioned here.) And thank god Montoya did what the Question asked and showed up at that warehouse--having a scene in the third issue where the Question popped out of an underwear model's vagina hollering "Who ARE you?" might have been a little too much. Highly OK, but not out of the woods yet.

ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THEBOY WONDER #4: I can't quite parse my feelings about this in any clever way so lemme try an analogy. Let's say I started showing up to work at Comix Experience without pants and Hibbs didn't fire me. So who would blame me for continuing to show up without pants? In fact, who would blame me if I decided to start teabagging customers whenever they bent down for a comic book?

Change "me" to "Frank Miller," "showing up to work at Comix Experince without pants and Hibbs didn't fire me" to "turning in the Dark Knight Strikes Again and being asked to do All-Star Batman" and I think my analogy becomes clear. And as long as I'm not the one getting teabagged, ASSB&RTBW is hilarious.

I mean, Jog, a.k.a. King Sensible, posts why the gatefold here was inferior to a smilar earlier use in Shaolin Cowboy. And while he's probably more or less right, I have to admit: I laughed out loud when they did it here, in part because that fucking gatefold just...kept...unfolding. I also laughed both times at Superman running(!) at superspeed across the ocean, looking like a Don Martin character drawn by Jim Lee. In fact, I enjoyed it so much I hope Miller pushes this approach even further although the possible bar-lowering effects it might have on Miller's future superhero work gives me pause. (Or is it that merely the strange sensation of something unexpected resting on my forehead?) Good in a "burning your heroes in effigy can be fucking hilarious" kind of way.

ANNIHILATION NOVA #2: Or, issue #2 of Everyone Hates Nova. It's not a bad book--the creators are very clued in to Giffen's wit, so there are some amusing moments here and there, and the story is cohesively focused on character driven drama in a way a lot of today's Marvel comics only pretend to be. But considering everyone in the book seems to have open contempt for Nova (including Nova!), I just can't help but feel the creators would rather be plying their ultra-competent skills on just about anyone else. OK.

AQUAMAN SWORD OF ATLANTIS #42: Jeezis, that whole "No, I'm not Aquaman, I just have the same name and look like him but I'm a totally different guy" thing is really dragging down the forward momentum on this book. And each issue has more characters from the DCU for Arthur to explain himself to, so I assume the grand conclusion of the arc will be Arthur meeting the Justice League and explaining to each individual member, "No, I'm not Aquaman, I just have the same name and look like him but I'm a totally different guy." A real shame, because the underwater Conan/ERB scenes are very enjoyable. OK, but let's get a move on, huh?

BATMAN YEAR ONE HUNDRED #4: I didn't review any of these issues because (if I'm remembering correctly) issue #1 came out when I was in Argentina and I was always an issue behind. But now that it's at the end, please let me recommend this fine Paul Pope miniseries. Compared to most of Pope's work, it's very one note--imagine that issue of Batman: Year One where the cops are hunting Batman in that bombed out building and multiply it by four--but he plays that note incredibly well. If you like to see Batman punching cops, you'll really like this mini. And if you like to see Paul Pope punch up his pacing and design to prove he's capable of turning out a technically accomplished thriller, you'll also really like this mini. Very Good stuff.

CONAN #28: The closest we're ever going to get to a Will Eisner issue of Conan, what with the story being Kurt Busiek's tribute to Robert E. Howard's life and with Eric Powell's expressive, character driven linework. Sadly, however, this issue reminded me of Eisner at his most schmaltzy: the poor dreamer who saves everyone is remembered by the village where he grew up as a coward and a fool, and only the people who know better are aware of how his his power and his talent saved them all. It's well-intentioned and clever, to be sure, but I found it blucky and, at its core, emotionally dishonest. Eh.

FELL #5: Ellis promised us a whiz-bang interrogation room scene last issue and I think he and Templesmith delivered. I'm not sure I bought all of Fell's emotional beats--I feel like Ellis can't decide whether Fell is a nice guy who can be a fucker when he needs to or a fucker who comes across like a nice guy than he really is--but all the body language stuff was fascinating and the simple drama of the situation worked for me. Very Good.

MAN-BAT #2: Shit, is Bruce Jones ripping off the Leopard Man again? Now that I think about it, this whole miniseries is just going to be one big rip-off of that film (creature on the loose is blamed for rash of murders that turn out instead to be the work of a demented serial killer), isn't it? One of the few times I've ever wished there was an afterlife, if only so Cornell Wilde, Ardel Wray, Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton can deliver the eternal beatdown Bruce Jones so richly deserves. Awful.

MANHUNTER #22: Well, it's off to the quarter bins I go--I found the first One Year Later issue compelling (although not really enough to read the second issue, I admit it) and I dug this issue, too. With its emphasis on humor and the interaction of a wide supporting cast, this book kinda reminds me of She-Hulk, and also of Marvel books from the '70s where the narrative was kept aloft by the buoyancy of all the subplots. Oh sure, it's too late now but I thought this was highly OK and will be kinda sorry to see it go.

MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #1: Last week, I vowed to read Jeff Parker's all-ages work for Marvel. This week, I vow to continue to do so...as long as it's not Avengers. Admittedly, this is probably not Parker's fault as just about everything about this issue screamed "revised pitch for our animation department" from the set-up of an endless number of robot enemies for future Saturday morning bash-ups to the incredibly weird line-up (you can all but hear the Ted Knight voice intone: "Popular person! Black person! Other popular person! Iconic person! Female person! These are...The Avengers!") Sub-Eh, but sadly that's pretty much all anyone expects of Marvel's all-ages line so, I dunno, maybe it actually should be rated higher or something.

MARVEL LEGACY 1970S HANDBOOK: As you can imagine, for an old school Marvel fanboy like myself, this was pure chewing satisfaction. Pretty much an excuse to show off some great covers and make some easy and amusing cheap shots at some of the sillier Marvel concepts or dangling plot threads left dangling to this day. (As the only remaining fan on the planet of Skull The Slayer, I was delighted to see an entry on Slithicus or whatever the hell his name was). Expensive for such cheap thrills, but I enjoyed it. Very much OK.

MOON KNIGHT #2: Last issue's ultra slow-mo action sequence had that neat little reversal at the end but this one didn't even do that--it just dragged things out. Far from horrible--I like Finch's art and Huston's convinced me that he gets the character--but next issue better get things out of first gear or we're in trouble. OK.

SUPERMAN BATMAN #25: If these had shipped on time...if we'd gotten twenty-five issues of this title in just a hair over two years, I probably would be lauding this run for being a fun, dumb ride (like I did when I reviewed the first five or so issues). But this was a fucking mess, a script apparently hacked out between conference calls and or waiting for the restaurant valet to get the Lexis, that also had the gall to congratulate itself on its many "accomplishments." Really, really disappointing, even for fans of the nonsensical. Awful.

PICK OF THE WEEK: BATMAN YEAR ONE HUNDRED #4 was pretty cool stuff. And it all shipped on time! (I think.) Yay!

PICK OF THE WEAK: SUPERMAN BATMAN #25. Say what you will about Bruce Jones, he doesn't have the nerve (as of yet) to pass off a slice of dried out ham on moldy bread as a five star meal. But not only will Mr. Loeb, he'll also take himself the liberty of writing in a 25% tip on your bill because he found his service to be impeccable.

TRADE PICK: CASTLE WAITING HC is a tremendously gorgeous volume. But I thought it had been solicited as complete? Maybe I misunderstood. It and KRAZY & IGNATZ 1937-1938 were the only volumes that caught my fancy this week. (Well, and that awesome James Bama cover on ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #16, but that's not a trade, is it?)

MANGA FIX: I have a pick, but I don't really have my thoughts collected about it and it's not anything recent. Let me get back to you next week on this one.

Tomorrow: SCOTT PILGRIM! SCOTT PILGRIM! SCOTT PILGRIM! Or, alternatively, Friday. But more likely than not, tomorrow.

52 week 1 (via Hibbs) & shipping this week

52 WEEK 1: Well, I'll be the odd man out on this one. Perhaps I'm just able to compartmentalize my thinking a little more than Jeff or Graeme, but (except for the first two pages, where they kind of force the point) I was able to divorce my brain from INFINITE CRISIS pretty easily and look at this comic on its own merits. The first thing I like was the "re-compressed" story-telling -- there's a lot of characters in here, and a lot of things going on, and I thought this was agreeably dense.

I also liked the "heroic structure" -- we have 2 characters that have bottomed out (Montoya, Ralph), a hero who lost his way (Booster), an anti-hero (Black Adam), an unalloyed hero (Steel... heh, unalloyed), and a question mark (The Question) -- this is a lot of potentially juicy character arcs as each comes to "Heroism" from a different place.

That 52 appears to be more about character than event is, to me, the real selling point of the book, and, while, sure, it is a 52 week "event", I think this may be a balm for "event storytelling" if they keep this kind of character-driven focus.

I'll happily stipulate that this isn't a comic for the ages -- it probably won't win any Eisners (though I can see it being nominated for Covers, or, possibly, publication design), but as a reason to come into the comic book store each week for the next year, well, it seemed like a worthy start to me.

If there are problems, they come down to continuity ("How/why did he..."), some waste (those first two pages would have been better with a little exposition, I think), and a better "cliffhanger" (the issue kinda just stopped), but, all things considered, and not being a cynical bastard for just one minute, I'll go with a tentative (though lowish) GOOD for this first issue.

Here's what's shipping this week:

100 BULLETS #72 2000 AD #1484 2000 AD #1485 52 WEEK #2 A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #34 (A) ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THEBOY WONDER #4 ANGEL SCRIPTBOOK #3 ANNIHILATION NOVA #2 (OF 4) AQUAMAN SWORD OF ATLANTIS #42 BATMAN LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #205 BATMAN YEAR ONE HUNDRED #4 (OF 4) BETTY & VERONICA SPECTACULAR #74 BITE CLUB VAMPIRE CRIME UNIT #2 (OF 5) BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #113 BOMB QUEEN #4 (OF 4) CAPTAIN AMERICA #18 CONAN #28 CYBERFORCE #3 DMZ #7 DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #340 DORK TOWER #33 FALLEN ANGEL IDW #5 (OF 5) FEAR AGENT #4 FELL #5 GODLAND #10 GREEN ARROW #62 HAUNT OF HORROR EDGAR ALLAN POE #1 (OF 3) JACK STAFF #10 JEREMIAH HARM #3 JUGHEAD #173 MAJESTIC #17 MAN-BAT #2 (OF 5) MANHUNTER #22 MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #1 MARVEL LEGACY 1970S HANDBOOK MICKEY MOUSE AND FRIENDS #289 MOON KNIGHT #2 MS MARVEL #3 NEW MANGAVERSE #5 (OF 5) RED SONJA CLAW DEVILS HANDS #3 (OF 4) RETRO ROCKET #2 (OF 4) REX MUNDI #18 ROBIN #150 SCOOBY DOO #108 SGT ROCK THE PROPHECY #5 (OF 6) SHADOWPACT #1 SIMPSONS COMICS #118 SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #162 STAR WARS REBELLION #2 SUPERMAN BATMAN #25 TALENT #1 (OF 4) TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #11 TRANSFORMERS GENERATIONS (IDW) #3 ULTIMATE X-MEN #70 WOLVERINE ORIGINS #2 WONDERLAND #1 X-MEN #186 X-MEN FAIRY TALES #1 (OF 4)

Books / Mags / Stuff ANIMATION MAGAZINE JUNE 2006 #161 BACK ISSUE #16 BEAR VOL 2 DEMONS TP BLACK PANTHER BAD MUTHA TP BLURRED VISION VOL 1 GN CAPTAIN AMERICA WINTER SOLDIER VOL 2 PREMIERE HC CASTLE WAITING HC COMIC CREATORS ON X MEN SC CONAN VOL 3 TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT & STORIES HC FAMILY GUY VOL 1 GN (OF 3) FORTEAN TIMES #210 FRANK MILLERS SIN CITY LIBRARY II HC HOTWIRE COMIX AND CAPERS GN ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #16 JUXTAPOZ JUNE 2006 VOL 14 #6 KRAZY & IGNATZ 1937-1938 SHIFTING SANDS DUSTS CHEEK POWDERED LEES TOY REVIEW APR 2006 #163 PHANTOM LEGACY GN VIDEO WATCHDOG JAN 2006 #125 WALT DISNEYS VACATION PARADE #3 WAR FIX HC WINSOR MCCAY VOL 7 EARLY WORKS WOLVERINE CLASSIC VOL 3 TP X-FILES VOL 3 TP X-MEN FIRESTAR DIGEST TP X-MEN POSTER BOOK Y THE LAST MAN VOL 7 PAPER DOLLS TP

This week's ASSHAT is a tie -- either JACK STAFF #10, which should have arrived in, uh, September? Or the JUST-less-late,-but-FAR-worse-because-it-missed-Christmas of the SIN CITY LIBRARY v2 boxed set. Fuck, that's a REPRINT, too!

What did you think?

-B

Crab & Crab Again: Jeff's Reviews of 05/10 Books...

Yeah, sorry, I just don't know what it is, but I haven't been too crazy with the comic book love lately and I don't know why that it is. Part of it is probably "kid in the candy store" syndrome. By the time Hibbs came in yesterday (around 2:00), I'd already read all the new books I'd wanted, and even thought there was some pretty decent stuff, yet when he asked me about the week's books, I was all.... "Meh."

Two things that aren't meh: Guitar Hero, which generous reader and snark king Mojo was kind enough to lend to me, and Wheeler's awesome list of Marvel's 50 Best Characters (link cribbed from Spurge). The former is a game for the PS2 which lets a rhythm-impaired ninny like myself slink around the living room mangling "Smoke on the Water" and "Ziggy Stardust" on a guitar-sized controller (to the almost-exquisite looks of horror from my wife). The latter is a palliative to my mid-season blahs about superhero books, caputuring the grandeur and the goofiness in exactly the right doses, e.g.:

46. Swarm, Fritz von Meyer Created by Bill Mantlo and John Byrne. Swarm has appeared in comics only a scant handful of times, yet he has massive cult appeal. To understand why, there's just one thing you need to know about Swarm: He's a Nazi made of radioactive bees. Shakespeare only wishes he'd come up with stuff this good.

Ahhh, that hits the spot, doesn't it? (His entries on Beta Ray Bill, The Sub-Mariner and Doctor Stranger are even better.)

As for the books:

52 WEEK #1: After the face-plant of Infinite Crisis #7, I lost some enthusiasm for it. Contrary to what any marketing plan on Earth would tell you, I just kinda wanted a month or something before the next mega-event, but the DCU has reached Ultra-Theme-Park mode, where there's no lines because all the rides run together, and if you need to barf, just lean wayyy out of the car to avoid splashing your fellow riders and pray you don't get your skull stove in.

But I picked this book up with at least a little optimism and regretted putting it down with slightly less. For one thing, two of the main characters seem very, very different from how I remember them--last time I saw Ralph at the end of Identity Crisis, he had patched up his life (in admittedly a potentially psychopathic way) by continuing his good-natured chatty relationship with his dead wife, and the last time I saw Booster Gold (somewhere in IC) he'd gotten serious when his best friend died and managed to use his information of the future to help win some crucial battles. Here in issue #1 of 52, Ralph's a suicidal wreck (because he also lost his house?) and Booster's back to the role of happy-go-lucky shill, having to be reminded to shed a tear for everyone's losses even though, again, he lost his closest friend at the start of all the craziness.

I mean, on the one hand, I don't really care--I thought the ending with Ralph in Identity Crisis was, like the ending of The Killing Joke, so off-note as to be geniunely disturbing, and selfish boob Booster is more interesting and provides a stronger narrrative thrust to this issue than newly serious Booster would have--but on the other hand, isn't the point of daisy-chaining all these events together to make you feel like the same set of people are undergoing a continuing set of events and changes?

There were things I liked, mind you--the Montoya and Black Adam scenes, while really nothing new, were okay, and then there's the Question who I'm always glad to see (even though I should probably know better by now)--and I honestly do appreciate the amibition of the whole idea, but if this is as good as it's going to get (assuming the writers and artists had the most lead time on the first issue than they will on the subsequent ones) I can't imagine I'm going to be sitting here a year from now feeling like I really got my hundred-plus bucks worth.

But I could be wrong. I really, really hope so. Eh.

ANNIHILATION SUPER SKRULL #2: Seems less like a comic book and more like a folded and stapled antibody squirted out of an internal organ of Marvel Comics somewhere: designed to attack anyone looking for decent art, writing, and/or a title character/concept that makes even a little bit of sense, this book will help innoculate our industry from those pesky civilians with it insular Awfulness.

CABLE DEADPOOL #28: Because he did so much work for Marvel in the early '90s, I associate Fabian Nicieza's work with mindless dreck, but it's been clear for a while my bias is pretty much utterly wrong--this issue has some actual insights about the nature of governments and revolutions that, while far from revelatory, make it stand out from the majority of the superhero work out there and reminds me of the stuff Marvel used to turn out at its best: material with some actual thoughts about the world going on between the fight scenes and the punchlines. Good.

EX MACHINA #20: BKV has crafted a perfect niche for himself by telling stories that excel at really keen little touches--like a bit of historical research, or clever dialogue, or this issue's bit about the slave/master relationship between a radio bomb and the transmitter--to the point where the reader doesn't sweat the small stuff like plot or the occasionally huge gap between intention and effect. (Did any reader anywhere have any attachment whatsoever to Journal? And if so, how?) Good, but in that way that really charming people can be, in that they don't really need to do much to win you over.

FATE OF THE ARTIST SC: Really should be reviewed in the trade section, but since First Second launched all six titles on the same weekend (and then nothing for another six months! Just like a real comic book company! Woot!) and Graeme's review said everything I would've said (and, of course, said it better) I might as well hit it here so I can review another First Second book in the Trade section.

Fate Of The Artist is not only far and away the release of the week but at this point in time, it's the release of the year, and, I think, the best book Campbell's released in about a decade. When I first read the review copy a few months back, the book struck me as ineffably sad (although streaked through with rueful humor) as the artist prepares himself for his inevitable fate by ruminating on artists dead and forgotten, or remembered but not for their work, all while recounting his family's exasperated recollections of his absent-minded, pointlessly specific, self-amused artistic ways. I thought the book full of regrets that were twisted about, like ballon animals, in an effort to amuse.

But rereading the book yesterday, what caught me was how deeply funny it was, starting with the hilariously bold conceit of composing a self-elegy--Lycidas as written by...Lycidas!--and moving on through all the funny anecdotes, pastiche comic strips, that damn dog Monty, etc. Through all of it, there's an appreciation of how funny life can be, even at its most frustrated and unfulfilled, and that appreciation is infectious, giving the work not only the most difficult of emotional victories, a love of life that feels genuine yet unsentimental, but also something unique--a comforting sense of dread. Finishing The Fate of The Artist, I realized that if I was lucky, I would get to deal with sorrows, regrets, fears, fights and alienation, and if I was smart, I'd look forward to all of it.

As I said, it's the release of the week and quite possibly the year. Excellent work, and highly recommended.

FIRESTORM THE NUCLEAR MAN #25: I was 98% Marvel fanboy until sometime in the very early '80s, so I've never really given two poops about Firestorm (just as, I would bet someone who was 98% DC fanboy during that time could barely give half a poop about Nova). So I found this issue OK, albeit scientifically wonky. But the scene where Jason is able to briefly communicate with Dr. Stein makes me think this book is being sold to fans of the charcter with the rather depressing carrot of "Just keep reading and we promise we'll give you the character you want to read about! Someday! Maybe!"

MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #12: I was reading this book when Hibbs came in and he said, "You know, looking at that cover, I knew you'd beeline right for it." And it's true: The Human Torch chasing a flying hot rod driven by Dr. Doom? How could I pass it up? But also, after heaping praise of Jeff Parker's work in the Marvel Romance Redux books, I was acting like a stupid snobby fanboy bonehead for not checking out his all-ages work.

And while not as great as the cover (mainly because it's a Doombot piloting the flying hot rod, not Dr. Doom himself), "Doom, Where's My Car?" is funnier and more enjoyable than all of the JMS issues of FF I've read so far. And it's got the Thing punching things out with a giant golden gorilla, which is an in-joke, the terminally old-school readers like myself can enjoy. Good and I'm interested in checking future issues of this out (and maybe even a digest if Parker has stories in those, too).

NIGHTWING #120: It's the hat trick of Crap: every issue, against all odds, is even worse than the last. This issue has Nightwing losing his shit and fighting with Jason Todd on the catwalk (a phrase which one can't even type without hearing that awful Right Said Fred song in one's brain--perhaps a deliberate bit of meme warfare on Jones' part to avoid bad reviews being written) which the entire fashion industry of New York City loves and blah, blah, blah. A comic so bad I think I actually blacked out before I finished reading it--or else it was so dull I can't remember. Anyway, impressively hideous work here, the type of stuff that makes you never want to look at a title again, no matter who's working on it. Ick.

SUPERMAN #652: A little pat--Lois's speech when she learns Clark's regained his powers was so flat and rote it made me think of the stuff you read on the back on cough medicine bottles--but the fight scene had a nice sense of tension and forethought to it. It's not great but it is Good, and I hope it can keep some zing to it now that things are getting back to "normal."

X-MEN DEADLY GENESIS #6: What can I tell ya? I liked it--it managed to push my old X-Men fanboy buttons solidly enough that I'm looking forward to the team taking on Uncanny--even though it had at least one pointless death too many for my tastes (apart from removing an annoying stereotype, why was it necessary for Vulcan to kill Banshee, exactly?). Still, Good.

WOLFSKIN #1: Didn't really pickle my pig's feet. It looks like Ellis walked into it with the question, "What would happen if you crafted a typical barbarian fantasy but turned the genre's inherent xenophobia on its head?" and walked out with the answer, "FOR IMMEDIATE DEPOSIT." The Ryp art looks lovely, as usual, although kinda strange, as if the colorist tried to keep the art from flattening out by wiping out some of the penlines. Eh.

PICK OF THE WEEK: See, why am I so demoralized? A lot of Good ratings this week and everything. I'll go with X-MEN DEADLY GENESIS #6 because I was expecting lameness from the mini and I was pleasantly wrong.

PICK OF THE WEAK: NIGHTWING #120, as Bruce Jones continues his campaign of making me regret I ever liked his work.

TRADE PICK: Well, duh, FATE OF THE ARTIST. But I also read Joann Sfar's VAMPIRE LOVES and thought it was really funny and sweet look at the lovelifes (lovelives?) of callow phatasmagorical youth--imagine Charles Addams drawing a Geoffrey Brown book and you're halfway there--and a great purchase that's also worth your time and coin.

MANGA FIX: Monster, Vol. 2 does a truly impressive job of letting the air out of the premises's tires as nearly everything I liked about the first volume--the hospital politics, the creepy cause and effect between Doc Tenma's goodness and the gruesome murders, the ambiguity of the killer's identity--gets tossed aside in favor of what I'm dreading is a Fugitive-Meets-The-Silence-of-the-Lambs approach as Doc Tenma takes it on the lam to chase the serial killer he feels responsible for. Will the next fifteen volumes merely be Tenma running into emotionally damaged people and helping them learn how to love life again while chased at every turn by Inspector Lunge and chasing Johan? Christ, I sure hope not: growing up in the '70s all but burned that formula into my forebrain!

That said? Possibly because I enjoy looking at Urasawa's drawings of jowly old men almost as much as Urasawa enjoys drawing them, I still liked this. But I can only hope that Urasawa throws something into Volume 3 that'll make up for all the squandered potential.

Speaking of squandered potential, I thought Iron Wok Jan had become ultra-formulaic but the latest volume (#18) really spices things up with Jan and the gang dealing with a Chinese cooking tong and its ultra-mysterious leader. The art seems to have lost a lot of its nuance (certainly the reproduction has) but, weirdly, I think it lends makes the storytelling weirdly compelling. (In some places, it almost looks like Don Simpson is ghosting the art, and there's some really crude zipatone effects that are really eye-catching. And I think at one point somebody's breasts have motion blur, which was pretty funny.) Plus, I learned that eel is never served as sashimi because its blood is poisonous. In short, Iron Wok Jan #18 is still ultra-formulaic, but it's one step closer to being ultra-fun again and I, in my crabby, crabby way, couldn't be happier.

And you?

51 Weeks To Get Better: Graeme reviews that 52 book no-one's talking about.

By now, everyone knows the pitch for 52, right? It’s a world without Superman, a world without Batman, a world without Wonder Woman… but not a world without heroes. But here’s something else that it’s a world without: Introductions. This might be somewhere where my inner DC fanboy counts against me, but I felt as if all of the main characters in this issue, with the exceptions of Booster Gold and Black Adam, didn’t get anything close to a proper introduction here, being reduced to stock roles (Steel is the responsible hero, Montoya the self-destructive ex-cop, Ralph Dibny the suicidal grieving widower) with vague dialogue that alludes to past storylines and series without properly explaining them – This might be something that’s going to be dealt with in later issues, and with a weekly schedule and 52 issues to do it in, that’s definitely a viable option for the writers – giving the book, for me, a feeling of inaccessibility for anyone who hasn’t read Gotham Cental, Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis. Without those books, I feel as if certain scenes would feel flat and uninvolving, but I say that as someone who has read those books, so what do I know? As someone who has read those books, then: I’m not convinced. On the first read through, it seemed pretty underwhelming (and also shorter than the average book – it’s not, however, I checked); I’m not sure what I was expecting from this first issue, but it wasn’t the slow burn beginning that this provided for the most part. On second (and third) readings, the relatively quiet start makes more sense, as the characters are presumably dealing with the apparent end of the world that Infinite Crisis was, and the odd pacing doesn’t annoy so much. The multiple author model, which works well in a couple of places – there are some nice scene transitions in an otherwise confusing opening (Why is Renee in the same bar in the same clothes for three days running? When some guy there makes a comment about “If the roads are open,” does that mean she’s been trapped there by something? Has Ralph really been going back to the ruins of his house for cell phone calls about missing superheroes for three days straight?) – and allows for the fun guessing game of who wrote what (My guess: Grant Morrison definitely did the main Booster Gold scenes, or else someone else can do very good fake Grant dialogue. Mark Waid’s doing Ralph Dibny. Greg Rucka is handling Montoya, and Geoff Johns is doing Steel and Black Adam, at least in this issue), but it felt as if it was written by committee. I enjoyed the Booster Gold scenes a lot – Grant (or whoever is writing those scenes this issue) manages to make the character cynical and a schmuck yet somehow someone fun, and his panic upon realizing that he really doesn’t know what the future holds gives him an interesting plot to follow for the next year or so. It’s just that… well, Booster’s scenes are more or less all of the meat in the issue, everything else either being vague hints of what’s to come (Being an Elongated Man fan, the potential Ralph Dibny mystery interests me, although the solicits for upcoming issues has me very, very nervous for what’s coming up there) or apparent generic filler (Most of the Steel scenes, which I’m guessing are going to amount to something more than “It’s tough to be a hero. I’m a hero. I’m a good man. It’s tough” later on at some point).

Even within those other scenes, there were too many plot strands that didn’t tie together well – the Black Adam scene in particular stood out as having nothing to do with anything else, although the Montoya scenes also felt as if they’d come from a different book – and lessened what could’ve been a stronger issue by diluting the focus on the immediate aftermath of Infinite Crisis within the superhero community that the Booster, Steel and Ralph scenes had. It wouldn’t have killed anyone to have pushed the start of some of the plots out to the second or third week in order to have had a more coherent first issue, surely?

(Then again, I’m also of the opinion that the two page silent opening scenes, taking a visual cue from the final pages of all of the last pre-One Year Later issues of the DCU books, was a waste of space that could’ve been better spent on some kind of recap for new readers bringing them up to speed on the cast and context of the series, so obviously I’m on a different train of thought from DC Editorial here…)

Visually, Joe Bennett thankfully provides stronger pencils here than he did in last week’s Infinite Crisis #7, even if he only achieves something that’s pleasant but unspectacular to look at. It would’ve been interesting to see what an artist with a stronger personal style could’ve done with the big superhero memorial service at the end of the issue, for example, but I think there’s a bar being set here: Workmanlike but reliable means deadlines getting hit and that’s what this series is going to be all about.

As with last week’s Civil War, there’s an editorial at the back of the book where the editorial head honcho pats himself on the back about how important and groundbreaking this new book is; in this case, Dan Didio calls 52 “the monumental DC Comics series that redefined what readers would and should expect from comics,” which is the kind of statement that he might regret making 52 weeks from now, or even sooner if ship dates start being missed on a regular basis. Still, whether he’s right or wrong is a question that can only be answered at this time next year. This time this year, all I know is that 52’s first week is pretty much Eh when considered out of context of all the hype, and kind of Crap when you sit it next to what we’ve been told it was for the last few months. Either way, it’s a missed opportunity to catch new readers with a new method and frequency of mainstream superhero comics, and even if things do get better in later issues, how many people will want to start a series on Week Twelve?

(I now fully expect Hibbs to have loved this book, just to be make me look grumpier than ever…)

Next week: Hopefully more things come out that I want to review. This week, if I can find the time to write it up, reviews of all of the other First Second books that came out this week, because even though Eddie Campell’s Fate of The Artist is both my Pick of The Week and Trade of The Week, the other books are worth looking through as well...