Back On The Beat: Jeff's Opening Salvo for the 4/25 Books...

Has not posting in a week-plus left me chops a little rusty? I think so. Last month, Graeme mentioned how daily reviewing turned his brain into a non-stop reviewer-and-rater of everything that happened to him. And while I also had that, I currently find myself swinging toward the other pole--where almost nothing kicks the reviewing portion of my brain into action. I watched four movies last Sunday, for example, ranging from Duck, You Sucker! to The Black Gestapo and the closest I got to critical analysis was "nice explosions" (for Duck, You Sucker!) and "that was probably the best climactic battle between good and evil to ever take place on somebody's patio" (for The Black Gestapo). So if my reviews this week run to the "hey, these staples do an awesome job of holding the book together, don't they?" side of things, be patient.

52 WEEK #51: Why did it take the end of The Mystery In Space storyline to remind me how much I liked these characters? While I'm griping, trading in a sneering caterpillar that wears glasses and a radio for a gloating, gigantic butterfly beastie is a bit like exchanging a stringless cello for a permanently out-of-tune saxophone. Unless you end up with a supervillain with arms (for fist-shaking and building punching) and legs (for junk-kicking and face-stomping), your upgrade is just as unlikely to be ignored as before. OK, I guess.

Oh, and if they put out a special of all J.G. Jones' covers for 52 on nice paper and a maybe a few essays or something? I'd totally buy that.

ACTION COMICS #848: If this had been a story about Superman dealing with a superhero who doesn't share the Big S's attitudes about non-interference in developing nations, that'd be one thing (and a pretty good idea for a story, I think). But by making the superhero be both religious and faith-powered, the waters are muddied considerably and maybe unnecessarily; all those flashbacks of Clark Kent in church certainly helps with the page count, but the link seems to imply that only rationalist-based individuals should be trusted to decide the fates of others (tell it to the French Revolution, Mr. Nicieza). I'm Eh about it, and hopefully next issue will prove all my various knee-jerk reactions to be simply that.

AMAZONS ATTACK #1: Graeme and Hibbs both had problems with this book, but laid those problems at editorial and gave the creative team a pass. Although I've liked Pfeifer's work in the past, and think Pete Woods' art is damn fine, I'm not so generous. I thought all that stuff with Abraham Lincoln was obfuscatory bullshit that did nothing but killed time and cluttered the issue (at one point, Queen Hippolyta charges into the Lincoln Monument saying something like "Let us show them what we think of their 'Great Emancipator'" and I asked Hibbs, "So the Amazons are attacking because they're angry at African-Americans?" Similarly, on the first page where the dad tells his son about Lincoln, and his son goes "Cool, and then what happened to him?" which no kid ever says after lectures about famous people made into statues because the kid knows if Lincoln had gone on to invent Pac-Man and found Metallica, that would have benn mentioned.) I know Pfeifer is going for an "Independence Day" summer blockbuster feel to things (and he's fortunate to have an artist like Woods who can give the big splodey as well as smaller moments), but it's such a dumb choice it seems lazy.

On the one hand, Pfeifer and Woods deserve better. On the other, let's face it: slumming is slumming. Awful.

BLUE BEETLE #14: Steps a bit into too-cutesy territory maybe, and I'm not sure that I can buy a concept where everyone in the JLA believes Jaime but somehow it's still just him matching wits against aliens posing as friendly vistors. But it's also an issue that advances the plot, is a satisfying read on its own, and has some of the better-written characters you'll find in a superhero book today. Compared to its previous issues, I'd say lowish Good, but good nonetheless.

CONNOR HAWKE DRAGONS BLOOD #6: An enjoyable big finish which, unless I missed something, opens the door for Connor to manifest superpowers in the future. The six people who care about Connor Hawke (two of whom are Chuck Dixon) must be thrilled. I'm not quite one of those six, but I'm getting closer all the time, particularly when competently done OK miniseries like this come along and make an argument for it.

CROSSING MIDNIGHT #6: Fixes (at least for this issue) the one problem I had with the book up until now--the characters' relative helplessness in the face of so much mystical badassery. Considering the last three issues have been varying degrees of awesome, I can only hope that (a) the awesome continues; and (b) it picks up in sales enough to survive. If you ever wanted Miyazaki and Clive Barker to collaborate, you should check this book out. Very Good.

Modern Art! Makes me! Want to! Rock out!: Graeme loves The Salon.

It almost feels like an insult to say that THE SALON should be compulsory reading for any course teaching the history of 20th century art; it suggests that the book is some kind of dry, informative, educational text, which couldn't be further from the truth; someone who has absolutely no knowledge or interest in art could read this book and come away as in love with it as I did, without feeling as if they were being lectured or preached to. But nonetheless, one of the wonderful - and wonderfully sly - things about this book is the way that, almost without you noticing, it tries to explain the thinking behind the cubist movement and introduce you to Gertrude Stein and many of the movers and shakers of her artistic salon in Paris at the opening of the last century. It may distract with the amazingly inventive larger plot, but throughout the whole thing, conversation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque illustrates the excitement and drive that led to (and immediately surrounded) early cubism in a way that makes the whole thing relatable and understandable better than any art history teacher ever could. And I taught in an art school, once. I should know these things.

There is nothing wrong with The Salon. And I kind of mean that in the literal sense - This is one of those rare books that you read with joy and a sense of stunned awe at just how good it is. Nick Bertozzi's writing ambitiously mixes art theory with murder mystery with cultural history remixed with imaginative flights of fantasy (the effects of absinthe, for example, have to be seen to be believed) without putting a step wrong; the facts of the story may not be entirely historically accurate - I'm pretty sure that Gauguin's ultimate fate, for example, is not what actually happened - but it's true to who those involved were in terms of personality and outlook, and manages to relate those personalities truly to the reader while in the midst of a speedy and enjoyable pulp plot. Visually, Bertozzi doesn't disappoint either; with a cartoony line reminiscent of Paul Pope drawing New Yorker cartoons and a smart and effective use of color throughout the book, it's both beautiful and evocative, pushing the reader's take on the action gently but surely throughout the entire book. The design of the book, with chapters separated by small pencil drawings surrounded by white space, and frontispieces that work both as design elements and plot hints, is also something to be applauded - This is a book that as intelligent in its visual elements as in its written elements, and - unusually for books that you can say that about - in both of those cases, it happens to be extremely intelligent as opposed to "Rob Liefeld".

It's a book that surpasses the hype, and something that I read and immediately started raving about to anyone that would listen, probably much to their annoyance. Smart, enjoyable, funny and entirely Excellent.

I always thought they came from the planet Kling: Graeme on another 4/25 book.

These are the following things that I think about when someone says the word "Klingon" to me: * Funny foreheads. * Michael Dorn manages to make a career out of frowning. * Tribbles. * All of those very dull episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine where they talked about Klingon culture and things were very dark and they talk about "honor" a lot. * Please stop saying the word "Klingon".

This is something that I don't think about when someone says the word "Klingon" to me:

* The need for a five-issue miniseries about Klingons published by IDW, especially a miniseries that has a Klingon-language variant of the first issue.

Do you see how that works? My lack of massive Star Trek fanboyishness (I know enough to think that Deep Space Nine in the best of the series, but not enough to stay away from the Voyager reruns on Spike, which Kate is now addicted to) and my disinterest in the Klingons at the best of times leaves me pretty much outside of the target market for this series, and yet somehow it managed to disappoint me nonetheless. Part of the problem is, I think, the scattered nature of this first issue - We're given a fairly generic framing sequence where Klingons outside of any given timeframe talk about some mysterious decision that they need to make, complete with potted (and confusing) history of the entire Klingon race before we flash back to, oddly enough, a recap of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy" from the point of view of the Klingons. And throughout the whole thing, I was thinking, Who is this book actually for?

The history of the Klingon race sequence - less than a page in total - seems to be written for insiders with unexplained references to human genetic science that somehow split the Klingons into two species and a plot of genetic superiority, and the rest of the issue is a recap of a Star Trek episode that fans will be familiar with, without much spin or insight... Those scenes only really work for those who are familiar with the original series, because for those like me who had to google the details because we guessed that it was probably from the TV show, it's an obviously incomplete storytelling experience; you can tell that something's missing, and what's missing is something that probably comes from knowledge of the episode in question. Which is probably very nice for the already existant fanbase, but isn't it lazy to write so directly to the fanbase and exclusionary to everyone else?

(Artwise, the book is blocky, but in a good way - The figurework is good, but there's something offputtingly perfect about the images of spaceships that suggests use of 3D-modelling software, and breaks the feel of the story somehow...)

I don't know why I'm surprised that this is all about the fanbase; it does have a Klingon language variant, after all. Okay for what it is.

Dyn-ohhhhh-miiiiii... Oh, never mind: Graeme gets freebies.

The funniest thing* happened to me on the way to writing this post - I got called out by a publisher. Okay, not called out, exactly, but following my post about Savage Tales, the wonderful (and I'm not even being facetious) Joe Rybandt of Dynamite Entertainment and I ended up in an email exchange about just why I don't dig Red Sonja. Which resulted in his sending me some Dynamite books after I admitted that I don't really read them. And here's the punchline: I still don't like Red Sonja. But Battlestar Galactica? Not so bad. And The Lone Ranger? Really rather good.

When it comes to RED SONJA #21, I suddenly become a boyfriend trying desperately to get out of a relationship; it's not you, Sonja. It's me. Try as hard as I might - and I actually really did try, this time, surprisingly enough - I just don't get Red Sonja at all. I have problems reading it, literally; it's not just that the story doesn't make sense to me (Why are they fighting? Why do they all have cat heads? What's happening?), but I felt as if the typeface used for the lettering was chosen specifically to be hard to read, and the art is colored for maximum murkiness in far too many places. I'm sure that this book has its fans and that those fans have particularly good reasons to enjoy it, but for me it's almost entirely a confused Eh and no more.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA #8, meanwhile, demonstrates why TV tie-ins are problematic for series with continuity as tight as this one. It's not that this book is bad, per se - the script has moments where it catches the tone of the television series, and even an act-break with a last line that could come directly from Ron Moore himself, and the art is still a little too colorful for its source but with the occasional good likeness, especially on Sharon and Adama - but the story just feels false because its scale is too large to have been ignored by everyone during the second and third seasons. Similarly, setting this mini in the middle of the second season robs what little dramatic tension it may have - We know that everyone survives and that nothing of import can really happen, because we've seen what happens for the next year and a half. It's a weird flaw for this Okay book, and one that is semi-addressed by the upcoming "Season Zero" series, set two years before the start of the television series.

(Yes, the reader will still know what ultimately happens to the characters, but starting at an earlier point adds a couple of interesting wrinkles - The fact that we know how the characters end up works in its favor because you have the whole "How did they get like that?" question, and also, a two-year cushion is enough time to make changes with the possibility of changing things back later...)

Season Zero gets a preview in Dynamite's Free Comic Book Day special issue, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON ZERO #0/THE LONE RANGER #0. The Galactica strip is more effective than the current series, partially because it's in an unfamiliar familiar setting - we know the characters but not really, just yet - and partially because Brandon Jerwa's dialogue fits what you expect better than Greg Pak's (Not so sure about the artwork, though; too Top Cow for my liking...). It's a high Okay, but the issue is well worth picking up for the Very Good Lone Ranger short. It's not high art, but it is a well-done, fun sampler for the ongoing Ranger series - It has a damsel in distress, kids in danger, a bad guy with a glass jaw and a funny last line from Tonto, pretty much all that I'd want from a Lone Ranger comic book, and done with some very attractive art from Sergio Cariello. Convincing enough, in fact, for me to want to see what the regular book looks like. Somewhere, Joe Rybandt is claiming victory, as well he should.

Just don't try to convince me that I should try to read Red Sonja again.

* - It's not actually funny, I know.

Hiros, Loglines, and Continuity: Hibbs continues 4/25

Tired. Just a quick in and out tonight. JOHNNY HIRO #1: there's a real charm in this what-appears-to-be-a one off from Fred Chao via Adhouse books -- it has heart, and a decent amount of craft behind it. I had two real problems with it, however. 1) The Pidgin English that Hiro's girlfriend speaks ("Why you wear my HELLO BUNNY slipper?"). I don't know, maybe its cool for the Asian-named Chao to use it, but it still made me feel all PC and squirmy inside whenever she opened her mouth. Problem #2 is a bit more serious -- nothing Hiro does has any impact on the story, in fact, the entire conflict utterly resolves itself without any need for action from ANYone, rendering it a fairly frustrating read, in a narrative sense. To a large degree, the comic feels like it was actually built AROUND the news article referenced right at the end, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it makes the whole thing feel like an exercise, or, perhaps, a notion, rather than a STORY. Still, it IS fun and charming enough, and it's rare to see an Asian protagonist like this in an "alt comic" kind of style (semi-Paul Pope-y), so let's go with a (fairly low) OK.

CROSSING MIDNIGHT #6: Either last issue or the one before, this book found its style and legs, and this issue, in particular, really grabbed me. I think this may, in fact, be both the most original Vertigo comic being published right now, as well as being the best Vertigo title under-issue-#50 (which are often different things, right?). The problem is, and I think it’s serious, is it really is difficult to "log line" this title. "25 or less words on what the book is about". "The last living man on earth tries to find his girlfriend", "what if all of the characters from the fairy tales were real, and living in New York", "in the near future a journalist reports from War-torn NYC", "A preacher, his hitman girlfriend, and a drunken vampire look for God, to make Him pay", and so on. I've got nothing HERE, and partly because it doesn't even seem like all of the pieces are up on the board quite yet. It is really REALLY hard to sell something if you don't have that log-line. Here's hoping I figure an appealing one out soon, because, like I said, this has turned into the best Vertigo comic in about five years. GOOD.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5: You know what might have been a very smart idea? Having the second part of the JLA/JSA crossover say ANYTHING about being the second part of the JLA/JSA crossover on the cover. Or, I'd even settle for the cover being thematically linked to last week's JLA cover. Rather than the (let's be honest) fairly boring black-background, "Alex draws YET ANOTHER identical cover" style that we've got here. I'm of the opinion that the LAST time he did this run of covers (on the previous JSA series -- there he drew the "old" JSAers, now he's drawing the "new" ones) that they really hurt sales because customers couldn't adequately differentiate between the covers, and weren't sure if they already had them or not. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd guess he drew that last batch and this batch at the same time, and DC is running them only because they paid for them back then, and needed to get the cost off their books.

But then, I'm a cynical fuck.

Still, the INSIDES of this comic were fairly wonderful. This new artist, Fernando Pasarin, is really very very good. I wish the coloring was a little richer to bring out his work, but I seriously dug the art, especially that double-page spread of the (mostly) "classic" LSH lineup. I really like how you sort of get an idea of each of their personalities from body language alone.

There were some very fun character beats here (I especially liked the Reddy/Cyclone scene), and though I really and truly don't understand that shrine to the LSH in the Fortress -- since the currently published LSH series clearly isn't involving Superb*y, nor are these guys those guys, I don't think I'd be at all unhappy if they put that back into continuity.... if it could be done without breaking a whole lot of other stories. "And then the first Crisis hit and I never saw them again" doesn't actually cut it, as there have been post-Crisis legion-in-the-21st-century stories (Putting aside Booster Gold's origin, there's the L.E.G.I.O.N. stuff, with Tinya-from-the-future, and there was something like a year where the LSH/Legionnaires era was trapped here [and were instrumental in some other crossover.... Final Night, maybe? Or am I misrecalling?]. And I think there's at least two or three more I am forgetting. Sure this could be a "Superb*y punches a wall" thing (which would, by the way, SUCK), but if you're going to keep retconning, then they need to make it clear what the frak is going on. What IS continuity, and what isn't. Because I don't like this ever-changing backstory thing where being a long-time reader actually works AGAINST you -- and wow, I shouldn't have put that much text inbetween the dashes ("--") should I? But though I don't understand that shrine, I really did get a lovely tickle in my belly from it. I loved *that* DC Universe.

I should probably go read Alan Moore's first volume of SUPREME again to help me reconcile it, huh?

Anyway, although it makes my head hurt, I have to say I liked this issue a great deal. And I'll give it a probationary GOOD.

Fuck, 10:30 already. That's it from me. More tomorrow night.

What did YOU think?

-B

Anger is an energy: Graeme rants, then remembers he's supposed to review.

FALLEN SON: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #2: So, the other day Hibbs and I were talking about the fact that it already feels like the death of Captain America is yesterday's news. It's not just that the news cycle has, unsurprisingly, moved on from something that happened, what, a month ago now? But there's also a sense that, as a fan, I'm feeling kind of washed out with the whole storyline already. Which, considering that Captain America #26 - you know, the issue immediately following Cap's death with his autopsy and everything - doesn't ship for another month or so, really can't be considered a good sign. It's not Brubaker's fault, of course; Ed wrote the issues without knowing that there was going to be such a reaction to the storyline, but also - and more importantly for the purposes of what I'm about to talk about - without knowing that there was going to be a five-part miniseries about the Marvel Universe reacting to the news slotted in between the issues, and that that miniseries would see its frequency shift from weekly to, apparently, every third week for some strange reason (Was it meant to become bi-weekly and then it missed a week or something...?), further pushing his intended-to-be-immediate-follow-up back and back again. But it just feels like a really bad decision on Marvel's part to have delayed Cap #26 this long. Captain America #25 came out seven weeks ago, already; never mind that readers are going to be bored shitless hearing about how dead Captain America is by the time that the following issue finally comes out, any and all new readers who may have been tempted to pick up the next issue and find out what happens in part two of the story - That is, if they haven't thought that part 2 was maybe in Civil War: The Confession, or perhaps Fallen Son #1 - will probably have either forgotten about it considering that they were tempted three months earlier or have given up waiting for the damn thing to actually appear.

It's sad, but not surprising that the desire to milk the event for all its worth is probably going to end up hitting the original book hardest in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Cap #26 will have a higher readership than, say, Cap #24. But it'll definitely have a much lower one than it would've had it have appeared four weeks after Cap #25 and without six different tie-in books in between.

All of which is a long lead in to saying, Fallen Son #2? It's Okay. Jeph Loeb is much more comfortable with the set-up here, which mirrors both his parallel storytelling style of Superman/Batman and the classic Marvel set-up of superheroes dealing with big issues by doing mundane things. His dialogue still has the odd tics of the first issue, but filtered through a fairly passable Bendis impression, which was a welcome surprise. Ed McGuinness's art, meanwhile, continues to be an inflatable acquired taste, but it's one that I acquired years ago, and it's nice to see him cutting loose on superhero-on-big-monster action. It's nowhere near as bad as the first issue, perhaps because it's so much more of an old-school superhero book, and "anger" is a much easier concept to process in superhero terms than "denial" - but there's absolutely nothing about this book that says "You know what you need? Another three issues of this before the larger story can move forward."

Too Much Crossover: Hibbs starts 4/25

52 Week 51: Ah, the end is nigh. Quite a number of "happy endings" in this installment -- Buddy and Adam and whatnot -- and the solid point to the grand finale, in the form of the New Mister Mind. Frankly, I always liked the big glasses and the radio around his neck myself. Maybe I'm crazy, but the last few issues have been fairly satisfying, and I'm thinking we'll get a "good enough" resolution in... six days, sheesh. A lot of it is going to depend on just how the resolve the central "52" mystery (exactly 52 parallel worlds seems to a) miss the point of parallel worlds (that wouldn't even be three seasons of SLIDERS, would it?), and B) be a little too coincidental), but it seems that the latest issue of SUPERGIRL & LSH pretty much gives that away, anyway. All in all? GOOD. AMAZONS ATTACK #1: If a) I had the slightest idea what was happening in the setup (Apparently one NEEDS to read WONDER WOMAN #8 first... which isn't flagged either on the cover of WW or inside of AA itself), b) this (and WW3) didn't, by and large, feel like an attempt to preemptively kick the legs out from WORLD WAR HULK; c) felt this "mattered" at all -- since virtually no other book is tying into it, it can be "safely ignored"; d) felt like it had any narrative weight upon the DCU itself (the carnage we've seen in just the first issue would certainly make CIVIL WAR look like a liberal's wet dream when it came to Government reaction... esp. coupled with Black Adam and the IC Superboy actions recently from the DCU-bystander POV), then I probably would have really liked this.

It's reasonably well written (barring the smidge of introduction to edumicate people not reading WW what the hell is going on, and how Polly is back from the dead, anyway [from the "Our Worlds At War" crossover a few years back]), and, really, really nicely drawn (there's a real sense of scope on that first double-sized spread, ain't there?), but what kills it for me is my personal sense that DC editorial hasn't got the first fucking idea what to do with Wonder Woman, and appears to be casting blindly around for some sort of a direction that might resonate. Given how recently they just had gotten rid of the Amazons (A year ago this week in INFINITE CRISIS #7? Or do I misremember?), this seems like a pretty quick and absurd return for them. Everywhere I look, it sure feels like the DCU architects are saying "We have a plan!", then 3 months later its "Uh, that plan didn't work... we have a NEW plan!"

Basically, the fault of AMAZONS ATTACK #1 isn't anything in the execution of the book (except for the lack of explanation about some of the key plot points), but in the greater, ongoing problems of DC editorial and the direction and point of the DCU. That yields an EH.

FALLEN SON: AVENGERS: I didn't have a lot of faith in this, I have to say, going in, but as chapter 2 of a 5 issue mini (as opposed to the second stand alone issue, as the naming schema would seem to indicate), this moved along much better than I would have expected. The "Mighty" half was a little weaker on the theme, but Spidey and Logan's interactions were really Classic Marvel, and I liked it tons more than I would have thought. A strong OK

More tomorrow, what did YOU think?

-B

Graeme Reviews! and more things that should have punctuation at the end of the title: 4/25 begins!

Here's the first thing that's wrong with AMAZONS ATTACK! #1: That it doesn't begin with a caption that tells you very clearly that you really should read Wonder Woman #8 before you read the rest of the issue. Even though I've been keeping up with the relaunched version of the alphabetically-chested Amazon's book, I started Amazons Attack! wondering just what the hell was going on, a feeling I could've at least partially avoided had I known to read the latest issue of Wonder Woman first, where one of the major "Wait, what?" moments was explained away. Here's the second thing that's wrong with Amazons Attack! #1: That it needed a caption explaining that you should read something else to understand the issue. As much as I liked to completely rant about Civil War, it did something right as far as this whole "event miniseries" thing goes that DC's books don't - It started with a relatively clean slate for new readers. Sure, there was a lot of backstory that fans knew that enhanced the whole thing, but a new reader could pick up the first issue of Civil War and at least be able to follow what was going on and why. Compare that to Infinite Crisis, which started with the conclusion of at least four different miniseries, not to mention the various tie-ins from ongoing books... or worse yet, compare that to this book, which seems to launch entirely not only from ongoing events in Wonder Woman's current title (including two things that directly tie into events in WW #8 and only really make sense if you read that book - even though they don't actually make that clear anywhere in AA! #1), but also from a forgotten plotline that was last mentioned in Greg Rucka's WW run, what, two or three years ago? In what world does that make sense, launching a new "event" book - this ties in with Countdown as well, down the line, apparently - that is based in a plot that even Wonder Woman fans don't remember, and not explaining it for anyone who isn't familiar with that plot?

(For those who've read the book and still don't know what I'm talking about, it's Circe's daughter, who's currently being raised by humans - I think? - as per Rucka's run. If I understood the dialogue in this issue correctly, that seems to be behind Circe's plan to ignite war between the Amazons and humanity.)

This is exactly my big problem with DC's current superhero direction - Not just that it's aimed at pleasing the fans, but that it seems to be purely aimed at pleasing the fans. Stories shouldn't be centered around past continuity that doesn't get explained or introduced, and if your new series ties in with something else that's currently out there then, firstly, what kind of launch is that, and secondly, you should make that clear to your readers instead of just assuming that they're buying everything already.

Despite the clear feeling that this is a book created by editorial edict and without any clear creative direction, writer Will Pfeifer does a pretty good job with what he has to work with - the idea that the Amazons attack Washington and symbolically chop the head off the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial works in both a visual and comedically over-the-top blockbuster manner, and his writing has a nice rhythm to it. Pete Woods, meanwhile, provides art that yet again makes you wonder why he's not a superstar who misses his deadlines and yet wins awards every time he turns around. It's a testament to their talents that what should be a complete disaster turns out to be a pretty readable, Okay book. It's no World War III, at least, and shouldn't that be the main thing?

Hibbs does 4/18 (real fast)

Ow, back after 11 hours at the store – this week’s shipment kicked my ass. Man, do I hate it when FCBD books ship the same week as a big week of comics (and frickin’ PREVIEWS and WIZARD – those boys add some WEIGHT) And, OF COURSE, this was the day Rob needed to check out at 5pm so he could make it to some concert somewhere up north (I think…?)

Anyway, quick hit on last week before I go for the newest books….

WORLD WAR III: Except for the whole “You shouldn’t buy it!” thing, I’m in total agreement with Graeme on this – I figure you’re a big enough boy to decide on your own how much of a DC Universe fan/completeist to decide for yourself if it is worth your $10 or not. Me, I’m a big DC fan, and I thought this was a trainwreck of a comic.

Functional problem #1 is that it doesn’t seem to me that the two writers read each other’s scripts at all – the first two parts have the Martian Manhunter (the POV character) somehow having his telepathy wired into all of humanity at once, crippling him. This is flatly ignored in the second two issues. That kind of sloppy co-ordination makes an bad comic even worse – if THEY don’t give a damn, why should WE?

From my side of the page, it appears the writers were given a laundry list of plot points to address (and is it just me, or is it sloppy and stupid that ALL of the “One Year Later” changes seem to be occurring in a single week?) – that may be OK in a “crossing the Ts” kind of way, but it makes for shitty fiction, and is completely unengaging.

Then there’s the changes themselves – many/most of them don’t really make a whole lot of sense. What was that that happened to Supergirl… and why? Showing Jason Todd in a Nightwing costume without any explanation whatsoever (or even clarity that it wasn’t Dick) was awkward; Adam gets his “bad ass” credentials shown by killing “Terra” (wait, what? Who the hell was that?, but doing nothing at all against similarly un-super characters like, say, Wildcat or Green Arrow (honestly, what is Green Arrow going to do against Black Adam?), while at the same time showing the Marvel family to be completely ineffectual, it just goes on and on.

Then there’s stuff like the Aquaman sequence – apparently he summons… well, I have no idea who those giant guys were, certainly no one we’ve ever seen before – but how? He has no magical affinity that we’ve ever been shown before. Further, what exactly is he bargaining for? We’re shown the people in “Sub Diego” drowning – but it strikes me that there’s not a human alive who is going to take more than, say, five minutes to drown. Clearly that’s not possibly enough time for Arthur to summon some gods (?), make a deal, and complete a ritual. Why are the people drowning, anyway? It doesn’t seem to be connected to anything that Adam has done, or even the idea of WW3. But, OK, fine, he manages to raise Sub Diego – but why does THIS WEEK’s issue of Aquaman reference the cast having to swim back to Sub Diego, then?

This kind of top-down plothammering is absolute CRAP, and it cements in my mind that the DCU isn’t a place for me any longer.

And that’s a god-damn shame.

BRAVE & BOLD #3: Meanwhile, this is exactly the kind of book that makes me think I’ll be reading DC comics until I’m well into my dotage – fun, funny, action-packed, moral, trenchant. If the overall DC line had HALF of the charm and verve of this title, DC would be ahead of Marvel by twenty points or more. EXCELLENT.

OK, so that’s the PICKS, both WEEK and WEAK, how about for the BOOKS?

I’ll give you two things you really should pick up, as they’re solid comics: v2 of Ed Brubaker’s DAREDEVIL: DEVIL INSIDE AND OUT, where he amazingly gets Matt out of where Bendis left him in a way that doesn’t strain credibility as much as you thought it might. I also really like the second volume of Matt Wagner’s recent Batman work – BATMAN & THE MAD MONK. Boy knows how to draw, and how to pace a story.

Right, back tomorrow with the first look at this week’s stuff, and, probably, the second of at least six daily blog entries for this week…

What did YOU think?

-B

We mean it, man: Graeme doesn't love The Queen.

There's something really kind of sad about GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, the new Vertigo graphic novel by Mike Carey and John Bolton. Not necessarily in the content of the book itself, although it's hardly the greatest thing that you'll read this year - or even this week, arguably - but just the fact that it's being published at all in 2007. For anyone who's read almost any Vertigo in the past - especially any high-profile Vertigo - then this book seems like nothing so much as the comic book equivalent of a Vertigo tribute cover band. The plot is just a mash-up of old Vertigo series (Look, the main character is a mix of Fairy and human, just like Tim Hunter from Books of Magic! But she's a rebel who doesn't conform, and has a well-meaning teacher try and reach out to her just like Dane from the Invisibles! And there're Titania and Puck, just like in Sandman!) with Carey bringing nothing new to the mix whatsoever. The plot moves along in exactly the direction you assume that it will, with dialogue that rings hollow and as if the characters exist in service to the plot instead of having a life of their own. The art, meanwhile, is a lifeless glossy mix of photoreference and Bolton's obvious-and-slightly-creepy love for his main model's body (which, considering she's meant to be a teenager, is really kind of disconcerting). This is a book that would've seemed cliched had Vertigo published it ten years ago, so I'm not entirely sure why it seemed like a good idea now. Actually, forget I said that; this is clearly a grab for the fantasy dollar (and, in particular, the Sandman dollar; the press release that accompanied this - because, yes, I got this as a preview copy from DC themselves - begins with a pullquote by Neil Gaiman, and the back-cover copy states that the book "echoes the epic scope of The Books of Magic and The Sandman." Mind you, the back-cover also claims that Bolton's art "perfectly captures ...the lurid underbelly of modern London," even though there's nothing particularly lurid about the art, and especially nothing that suggests any specific place never mind London, so perhaps YMMV, as they say), but it's such a non-inventive one, literally retreading old ground and trying to recreate old glories, that it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Never mind that Vertigo has, for better or worse, kind of moved past its Sandman-corpse-fucking days (with the obvious exception of Fables, although Fables is, unlike this book, good. Mind you, wasn't the Fables anthology the last hardcover OGN that Vertigo pushed out...?) and yet this book reaffirms all the stereotypes and cliches about the imprint - What made Sandman so good when it started was that there wasn't really anything else like it available. It had a sense of identity and uniqueness - a reason to exist - that this entirely lacks. As melodramatic as it sounds, a book like this doesn't just rip-off Sandman, it's almost disrespectful to the series in doing so.

(Yes, I know; disrespectful to a comic book. What can I say? It annoyed me.)

And that's before you've even got me started on the Sex Pistols riff in the title (Justified by the dialogue in the book from our heroic rebel: "God save the Queen. And her fascist regime. I mean, this was my Dad's music, this wasn't cool. It was beyond cool. And it was all mixed up in my head with memories of him. A thousand, thousand lullabies."), even though the ultimate message of this book - Just say no, and love your parents - is the safe alternative that punk was pushing against, or the fact that, weirdly, the cover art is just two panels from inside the book with some nice design to try and disguise the fact; was the book late for deadline, or did John Bolton decide that he couldn't be bothered doing any more paintings for the project...?

It's a Crap book, and not worth the $19.99 that they're asking for it. If you have that money in your pocket and you haven't read Sandman, The Invisibles or any earlier Vertigo, you should pick up one of those books instead.

I try to make it up to Dan Didio: Graeme finishes 4/18's DC books.

I know, I know; it's APE this weekend, so I should be all about the indie comics this time out. But there are so many DC comics for me to write about this week, even though I have no idea why I ended up with quite so many... If it helps, expect me to write something about Nick Bertozzi's The Salon, as well as the new Eddie Campbell and Jeffrey Brown books, in the next couple of weeks. The Bertozzi book alone is very, very good and should be read by many. For now, though, step into the world where Dan Didio rules supreme. THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #3: With every issue of this series, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Mark Waid is writing this after looking through some Phantom Zone viewer into my brain. Not only is this an outright fun superhero book - a romp, even - but it's something that grows in scope each month. As the plot gets more and more grandiose and out there, this issue also sees some of the more human moments of the series so far (and from Batman, no less, trying to help Spider-Ma - no, wait, I mean, Blue Beetle - be a better superhero). It's an interesting growth for the book, and a welcome one; if part of this series is to act as an introduction to new characters and a selling point for you to check out their books, then you need those character moments in order to properly do that, and the interplay between Batman and Jaime makes me want to check out what the real Beetle book is like each month. It's also welcome because, as over-the-top as the plot is becoming, it's those character moments that make this issue enjoyable and memorable.

That said, Batidus? Worth a Very Good grade all by itself.

THE SPIRIT #5: And talking of ridiculous plots, this issue of Darwyn Cooke's (so-much-more-than-a-) revival of Will Eisner's crimefighter deals with a brand new snack for kids: pork, beans and sugar. And, unless I completely misread the book, the beans are pig testicles. As if that wasn't enough, there's also the hint of bird bestiality mixed in with this tale of intellectual property appropriation, and yet somehow... it all works. More to the point, it works on multiple levels, so that both kids and adults will get different (and equally wonderful) things out've the story, whether it be a straight-forward adventure or a satire on easily-conned, image-conscious consumer culture. As if he hadn't already shown that he was pretty much the master of monthly adventure comics, this issue Cooke gets to add "pitch-perfect American bastardization of 'manga' style" to his quiver of genres, too... Very Good, and like every issue of the series so far, pretty highly recommended.

BIRDS OF PREY #105: As Gail Simone nears the (surprise) end of her run, the book continues to get back into the rhythm that it lost around the same time that it lost Simone's original heart of the series, Black Canary. Maybe it's because of the use of Simone's other superteam (the Secret Six, who are arguably more enjoyable here than the Birds themselves), but there's a welcome swagger to this book that hasn't been here for awhile. What's interesting for me is that it's that swagger that makes the book for me, even though I have to admit that I'm not that involved with (or really that sure that I'm entirely following) the plot; the second book this week that had that effect on me. Maybe I'm an easy sell when it comes to witty repartee? Good, nonetheless, and I'm very much looking forward to Simone taking over Wonder Woman later this year.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #8: There are all manner of reasons why this should be a carcrash of an issue - It's a DC continuity nerd's dream to the point of ludicrousness, including using versions of current characters that haven't seen print for almost 20 years and continuing Brad Meltzer's fanboy-gone-mad-with-power style of writing the main characters. The art by "rising star" Shane Davis is fairly generic, papercut-face-filled, and in all ways that count, a return to Image Comics from the 1990s. The plot is, yet again, a slow build, and the dialogue is self-conscious and awkward. Yet, for some reason, it's Okay, perhaps entirely due to my inner DC-fanboy being sucked into the idea of a return for the Levitz-era Legion of Super-Heroes that gets offered up fairly strongly here. I'm so pathetic.

PICK OF THE WEEK is probably The Spirit, because Cooke manages to provide something that works really well for brand new readers who have no idea about continuity, no matter what their age may be. That kind of thing takes skill... PICK OF THE WEAK is, very obviously, World War III. Doing that kind of thing takes some kind of skill as well, but it's not a skill that we talk about in polite circles.

What has everyone else been up to this weekend, anyway?

Filling our bathtubs with t-shirts and 8 by 10s: Graeme is tired, plus 4/18.

Is it just me, or has this week been really, exceptionally, surreally long? Perhaps it's because last weekend was so pleasant that I wasn't prepared for the shock of the work week, perhaps it because I've been looking forward to APE and tonight's signing all week, perhaps it's because someone has been messing with all of our clocks and this week really has been 12 days long, but good lord, this has been a ridiculous week. Any time you wake up on a Wednesday and wish that it's a Friday, you know that you're going to be a zombie by the time that the real Friday comes around. And I'm not talking cute Minimates version of Marvel Zombies zombie, either.

(Actually, that reminds me - When the next Previews comes out, please leaf through to find the new McFarlane "Lost" toys. There are four characters in this new release: Sawyer, fully-clothed in action pose. Jin, fully-clothed in action pose. Mr. Eko, fully-clothed in action pose. And Sun, outstretched in a bikini. I'd complain about sexism, but that seems kind of pointless when you remember that McFarlane Toys were also responsible for turning the Wizard of Oz into a BDSM fantasy where Dorothy was tied up, blindfolded and slave to munchkins (Arguably not safe for work, depending on your work's stance on topless bondage action figures). Nonetheless, I'd love to know what the actress who plays Sun on the show thinks about her figure.)

NIGHTWING ANNUAL #2: Say what you like about Dick Grayson, but he's not the smoothest lover in the fictional world - Midway through this relationship retrospective, we see that Dick goes to Barbara Gordon as soon as he finds out that she's been shot and crippled by the Joker, has sex with her, and then tells her that he's getting married to someone else. Exactly how that goes towards this annual's unstated-but-clear goal of appeasing the fans who were appalled that One Year Later not only split this couple up but also didn't refer back to their cliffhanger engagement by proving that the two characters are, like, rilly rilly in love with each other and totally meant to be 2gether 4evah, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm also fairly confident that the sex scene from that sequence is more than enough misdirection for them to keep them away from the clear suggestion that Dick Grayson is, well, a dick.

That's what stayed with me most from this special. Not that Dick is a dick, but that it's one of the clearest pieces of fan service that DC has offered in awhile, and considering that you could argue that a lot of DC's post-Infinite Crisis moves have been fan service of one type or another (even if those fans have been the creators, in many cases), that's saying something. It's an interesting thing to watch - resetting the romance between Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon involves a couple of near retcons that actually make a lot more sense than what we've previously been seen (Putting at least a month between the big last battle and Batman leaving Gotham to go around the world to find himself makes a lot of plot sense, but arguably messes up 52's timeline, for example, and for the ending to make sense it helps to ignore Bruce Jones making Dick Casanova during his run - but then, ignoring Bruce Jones' writing generally makes sense anyway) - if uncomfortable at times because, really, who wanted to see Robin hide his hard-on from Batman under his cape?

(As soon as I wrote that, I realized that there is probably a large contingent of Robin fandom who wants to see that very thing. There we go with that fanservice thing again...)

Thing is, it's not that bad a book; Marc Andreyko's script manages to negotiate a minefield of continuity and editorial decisions and still come out not only as readable, but almost convincing; they're a dysfunctional couple, sure, but they're a believable dysfunctional couple no matter how many bad decisions that they're forced (by the creators) to make. 52's most consistent art team of Joe Bennett and Jack Jadson do what they did on the weekly book, and provide solid if dull support with the occasional striking image - they do a very good Batman on the opening spread - and the overall impression of the book is something that's weirdly Good despite the entirely cynical circumstances surrounding its creation.

And, yes, I'm a sap for wanting to see these two crazy kids make it work. But that's hardly a surprise.

Jeff Apologizes for Not Posting Lately and [Spoiler!] Reviews Some Stuff.

This week has flown by scarily fast. Almost a week since I last posted? The signing's tomorrow? APE is this weekend? I'm like the low-budget version of Rip Van Winkle (and what an underwhelming twist on that classic story I would be: "Last thing I remember is falling asleep after bowling with dwarfs. And when I wake up...it's one week later!") (By the way? If you go to the wikipedia entry for Rip Van Winkle--perhaps because you're unsure if it was dwarfs or ghosts or giants or what Mr. Van Winkle was bowling with--you'll see there's a spoiler warning before the plot sypnosis. Ditto for "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." I'm agog at the concept, and will now spend the next thirty-six hours imagining what kind of angry email someone who's had the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears spoiled for them might write.)

Since chances are good it might be another few days before I turn up to post again, lemme cover some stuff I've been reading recently.

DEATH NOTE VOL. 11: Looks to be heading for a big wrap-up, but, to be honest, I'm so taken by Takeshi Obata's art, I could probably read another ten volumes of this. There's a sequence where Near breaks out a suitcase full of Kubrick figures which he labels and shoots with a popgun that had me appallingly rapt--appalling because I was just as engrossed by a similar scene several volumes ago where Near uses an evilly-grinning finger puppet just a volume or two ago. (Fans of that finger puppet will be heartened to know he makes a reappearance here in Chapter 96.) Also, even though it's been used 9 million times, close-ups of Near's owl-like eyes followed by close-ups of Light's evil cat-eyes also fill me with a shocking amount of joy, no matter how often I see them.

There's other strange delights here, stuff that works more or less because it shouldn't work. For example, by this volume, the internal monologues of the characters trying to second-guess each other have grown so numerous they literally obscure the characters' faces. It seems like the sort of imbalance in the verbal-visual blend that would have R.C. Harvey's panties (girly-cartoon festooned panties, it should be noted) in a bunch, but it works here as a symbol of how the characters' obsessions are obliterating any other trace of them. Similarly, the scenes where two characters who are being bugged are communicating by writing on a piece of paper while carrying on a conversation for the benefit of their listeners is the sort of thing I can't imagine being done half as well in any other medium. Not only is it not boring, it's genuinely riveting and a testament to the velocity of Death Note's story: you can't help but be sucked in.

Anyway, a lot depends on how it wraps up, I would think, but if you're a big fan of the series, I'm thinking you'll also find this Very Good stuff.

KING CITY VOL. 1: I dug Graeme's review of this but even though he gave this book a Very Good rating, I wasn't particularly compelled to pick it up. Nonetheless,he lent it to me when I lent him Empowered so I figured it'd be worth a read, and holy shit, did I love it. King City is such a balls-out, energetic comic book achievement that I started making a list of all the people I wanted to get copies to even before I finished it. Only the fact that this is Graeme's copy prevented me from trying to loan it out a half-dozen times this week.

The near-futuristic setting and the wandering approach to a genre story makes it feel a lot like early Paul Pope to me, but Graham is goofier, less eager to impress, than early Pope and a lot of the scenes have a winningly comedic tone to them (I think one of my favorites is when the protagonist Joe tries to draw the mystery woman who has led him and his buddy into events way behond their understanding, and all he can really recall is her butt). Nearly all of the panels of the book burst with strange new products, bad puns, graffitti, cartoony vigor. In some ways, it may be the most impressive non-debut (Graham's got four other books under his belt) since Scott Pilgrim, and I highly recommend you start beating the bushes off your favorite Tokyopop dealer to find a copy. Very Good stuff that I really, really enjoyed. It charmed the hell out of me.

Okay, the wife is making hand gestures indicating we have to go to dinner now, so more later, hopefully tomorrow before I head to the store.

Political, science: Graeme continues 4/8.

Is it so wrong of me that I'm cursing the fact that I have to, you know, work today, when I'd much rather be sitting in front of C-SPAN watching the Alberto Gonzales testimony? In between all the things I'm supposed to be doing this morning, I'm already checking all my usual news and politics sites to see what he's said and whether he's been nailed yet. Even if there's nothing wrong with (a) wanting to skip work to (b) stay up to date with current affairs, I'm sure that there is definitely something wrong with (c) enjoying Gonzales squirm when presented with his own words and asked to explain them without coming right out and saying "Well, obviously, I was lying." But on less political matters:

There's this moment in MIGHTY AVENGERS #2 where it looks like Brian Michael Bendis is doing a very funny metatextual joke at the expense of Frank Cho. Janet Van Dyne, the "winsome" Wasp - and why does no-one else call her that anymore? When did describing people as "winsome" go out of style? - looks at the brand new all-woman mostly-naked Ultron and says "Does anyone think that looks exactly like me with worse hair?" I read that and thought, hey, Bendis is making a funny about the fact that Frank Cho can only draw one woman and just changes their hairstyle. Good for him! And then it turns out to be a plot point by the end of the issue, and I was depressed.

That said, this was a pretty Good issue. A low good, sure, but stronger than the last issue... Bendis is already visibly processing what worked and didn't from his first issue, the most obvious indicator being his dramatic dialing back the use of thought balloons (Not getting rid of them altogether, sadly - Don't get me wrong, I like thought balloons just fine; I just don't like Bendis's take on the idea, which is too cute by half). He's still overusing flashbacks, however. If he was writing this review, this would the point where I'd say something about his use of flashbacks -

EIGHT HOURS AGO: Hmm, this episode of Lost is interesting. Brian K. Vaughan's first one, huh? Maybe I should finish off that Mighty Avengers review. Frank Cho's art is technically very good, but oddly lifeless, though - The coloring really gives it some weight and saves it -

- and then we'd come back to me writing this review right now.

(Also, if he was writing this review, it would probably be more positive, and I would say more things in parenthetical asides. Like this one. And then, caught in the moment of demonstrating, I'd probably say something like "Oy".)

Both Mighty and New Avengers have become overly reliant on the cross-time-cutting (New much more than Mighty; wasn't almost all of the most recent issue a flashback?), and I don't really see why, or what it adds to the readers' enjoyment of the story. You could argue the opposite, in fact; in New, it actively undercuts the tension for the reader - you already know that the characters have survived their encounter with the other Avengers because you've seen them fine and healthy a day later already. It pretty much reads to me as if he's trying to keep himself interested more through structural trickery than through the stories he's writing, somewhat offputtingly, but I'm holding out hope that we'll either see him pulling back on the gimmick and/or explaining his use of it before too long.

Nevertheless, this was a fun enough book. Like this week's Justice League, you can see Bendis trying to write the stories that he read as a kid, but his own style tweaks that formula whether intentionally or otherwise. Not that that stops it being interesting or enjoyable; if anything, it may make it more enjoyable than your average monster/robot/superhero slugfest. It's not a book to change your life or even your reading habits, but I think that Bendis has passed the point of wanting to make those anymore; books like this make me think that he's instead at the point of comfortably trying to give them what they want, as long as he can make it work for him, as well. And, if nothing else, it is entirely devoid of someone telling you how Civil War changed everything, meaning that it's automatically better than almost every other mainstream Marvel title right now.

War, huh, etc: Graeme wishes that he wasn't a survivor of World War III.

I'm sure that everyone else in the world remembers the sense of unease when DC talked about WORLD WAR III for the first time. There was, if you will, a disturbance in the DC Nerd Force when this four-part-series-all-released-in-one-day was announced - a deep intake of breath at the idea that maybe 52 wasn't going to get it all done after all, and that they needed four extra comics to tell the story and explain everything that had happened in the missing year. In an effort to try and calm the fanbase, Dan Didio explained that you didn't have to read any of World War III's four issues (and, really, where's the thematic consistency in that? Three issues for World War Three, people. Come on, that's easy) in order to understand what happened in 52 that week. Having now read all of World War III and 52 Week 50, I have to agree. In fact, I'll go further: 52 Week 50 is much, much better if you don't read World War III. In fact, I'll go further than that: Don't waste your time or your money on World War III.

Now, I'm not the most market savvy of internet comic geeks, but I can't help but feel that both Countdown and especially World War III show just how badly that DC have misunderstood the success of 52 - I don't really think that the book sold just because it was weekly, or because it was continuity porn (which seem to be the main selling points of Countdown and WWIII, respectively), but because of the creators involved in 52 (namely, DC's four biggest writers) and the novelty of what was originally sold to us as a self-contained 52-part "novel" that would explore the DC Universe in more detail than we've seen before, setting up the new rules of the world post-massive status quo-changing crossover event. That's pretty much still the case for me, and probably most of the audience who has stuck with 52 this far; to be honest, with two weeks of 52 left, my main concern has nothing to do with finding out how Firestorm got to be merged with Firehawk or why Manhunter became a defense attorney, but instead that none of the core storylines are going to reach any kind of adequate conclusion. Which isn't to say that I don't doubt that there is a section of DC's core fanbase out there wondering about all of those dangling plots from the One Year Later jump, just that it wasn't 52's main draw. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I kind of wanted the unanswered questions from each leap forward to be handled in the series that they were initially raised, anyway; that way, the creators who came up with the questions could answer them, and the readers wouldn't find themselves forced to buy another series for a chunk of the story. But that's why I don't run multi-million dollar franchise-enabling publishing companies.

Here's the thing - 52 #50? It's Okay, at best; it stays with the series' inability so far to close any of their plotlines, as well as their tendency to devote entire issues to a plot as they attempt to pull it to a close (See the Steel/Luthor battle in week 40 or the Ralph Dibny finish in week 42, for proof of both; if you look at week 50 in the context of the series and ignore the "event" that was added on after the fact, this isn't any more of an important issue or storyline than those, although it does have a much more satisfying conclusion than either - The final solution for Black Adam has an oddly optimistic and inventive bent that suggests Morrison or Waid's input). But part of the reason that it works as well as it does is because it holds together as a complete chapter in and of itself, if that makes sense - There's an internal consistency that keeps the whole thing moving along. As soon as you start introducing "important things you may not have known" about scenes from the issue, as WWIII does, then you start to undermine the core book. Especially when the new scenes that you're adding are, to put it mildly, horrible.

World War III as a series takes the art aesthetic of 52 as a series - which is, essentially, "It's not great but it's on time; it'll get the job done" - and applies it to the writing as well. It's a series that, despite two writers (whose writing is entirely interchangable; I couldn't tell you which writer worked on which book without looking at the credits) and four artists, struggles to even stay readable most of the time. Everything about the series misfires: The staging is pedestrian and haphazard (There isn't any real narrative flow to each issue, never mind the series itself; it reads entirely disjointedly, as if scenes have been placed randomly into pages), the dialogue is - at best - wooden and the narration (by the Martian Manhunter, who gets to bookend the action of the series thanks to retconning 52 #45 and being "behind the scenes" in 52 #50) even worse:

"Theft. Lies. Deceit. All in the name of justice. The two sides of human nature, once more represented. Smaller acts of malice performed in the service of the greater good. It is not the Martian way. It is not my way. Or... is it?"

The story in the four WWIII issues undermining 52 in terms of plot makes a certain sense, if you think about it - The addition of a spin-off book that (despite the intentions of 52's creators) essentially being sold as "If you want more of 52, you can get it here!" undermines the initial complete-in-and-of-itself nature of 52's time capsule concept as a series and also undermines whatever goodwill and consistency that the series has built up for more or less the last year by adding an additional 4 books of unknown quantity (due to the unknown - ie, no involvement from Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Geoff Johns or Mark Waid - creative team) to the fan's shopping list at essentially the last minute.

The worst sin of the series, however, has nothing to do with the workmanlike execution and everything to do with the core idea behind the series itself, because we don't get any of the major One Year Later changes actually explained to us. The entire point of the series - something that Dan Didio even repeats in his DC Nation column in the back of each issue this week - and it completely and utterly fails at it. Sure, we get to see some of the changes happen, but they don't get explained. Martian Manhunter has a new look because he mindmelded with Black Adam and then blacked out! Okay, but why? There's Jason Todd dressed up as Nightwing! Yeah, but why? Supergirl ended up in the Legion of Super-Heroes' future then comes back and gets split in two... but how? And what does that actually mean, anyway? Aquaman turns into a sea monster after raising Sub Diego... but why? And so on, and so on. That the changes happened isn't news - We've known about them for a year now - so just showing us them doesn't do any good. This was supposed to be the book that explained everything that we've seen, but it couldn't even do that right.

To add insult to injury, the series finishes with a cutaway to the Monitors, those harbingers of crossovers yet-to-come:

"Some have lived. Some have died. Others have... changed."

"They must evolve or they will not be prepared. Their darkest hour has not yet arrived."

So, yeah. Your $10 on getting "the full story" of what happened to the DC Universe during 52 week 50 ends with a badly-written advertisement to keep buying more DC books. It's kind of fitting, I guess, because if you made your future purchasing decisions based purely upon World War III, it's very possible that you'd never buy another DC comic ever again.

(All of the above said, the worst part of the series is arguably the most laughable - Don't buy the book, but look at the first page of #4: It's a fifteen panel grid of close-ups of the various superheroes while they wait for the final battle, and you see the icons of Green Lantern or Wildcat grimacing, or Hawkgirl holding a mace and... What's that in panel 6? Oh, that's right - It's a close-up on Power Girl's breasts, with her top torn open to reveal more of her blood-spattered cleavage.

Whoever made the decision to let that stay in the book? Classy. Really, really classy.)

Without a doubt, an incredible misfire from DC. Really, really Awful.

Gasping towards the finish line: Graeme finishes 4/11 and just in time, too.

I'm sure that you've heard of the concept of saving the best till last, right? Well, this isn't like that at all. This is more "Saving the completely bland until last," for the most part, as I present the books I read over the last seven days that I had no strong feelings for one way or another in one big dollop just to get it over with. LONERS #1 (OF 6): I'm undecided on this Runaways spin-off. On the one hand, it's definitely competently done; CB Cebulski's script has some nice moments and Karl Moline's art is solid enough... But on the other hand, there's nothing new in here. It reads like the characters' appearance in Runaways mixed with the middle storyline from Young Avengers, and as good as that sounds in theory, it's been done before, you know? It's Okay, but I kind of wanted to be wowed, or at least surprised, more.

MARVEL ILLUSTRATED THE JUNGLE BOOK: There's something weirdly depressing about this book. It's not really the stories themselves, which are fine enough but feature a mismatched art team where P. Craig Russell's delicate inkwork overwhelms the usual grumpy power of Gil Kane's pencils (although these stories do come from the late 70s, early 80s, when Kane had a tendency to push work through that wasn't up to his standards, if y'ask me - There are places here where the sum is equal to its parts, but not too many), and scripting that's as much expositionary Cliff Notes versions of the stories as I (perhaps mistakenly; it's been a long time, and I wasn't a fan to begin with) remember them. But the "backmatter," as it's now called - Ralph Macchio's bombastic advertisement for the later books in this line, and the previews for said books, with their tone of "Sure, they may be classic stories... But done by new artists who RAWK like only Marvel can!" - seemed kind of out of place with what had come before, as if you were having a nice leisurely conversation with a well-meaning older relative telling you stories you've already heard ten times before and then he's pushed off his chair by your unsettling brother-in-law who wants to tell you about this great new band he's just found out about called Limp Bizkit. Eh, and better enjoyed if you stop reading as soon as the last story finishes.

NEW AVENGERS #29: Wait, so this issue reveals that Brother Voodoo is involved with the whole New/Mighty Avengers showdown, and apparently New Avengers #31 will have the most shocking last page of any Marvel comic this year, and Marvel is milking their Marvel Zombies franchise as much as possible... Oh my God we're going to have Zombie Captain America as reanimated by the ancient terrifying power of Voodoo within three months. Holy crap. This issue was pretty much filler; nothing about the main plot was moved forward, and instead we had some posturing and the occasional good line. Pretty much the definition of Eh, which is a shame after the last couple of strong issues.

NEWUNIVERSAL #5: So, I was reading on The Engine the other day that Warren Ellis is avoiding "Heroes" because he knew, upon seeing the first episode, that it would be following a similar route. It's a shame, in a way. I mean, he's right, but Heroes does one thing very right that this series get very wrong - the pacing. We're five issues into this series, and instead of offering any kind of resolution to the origin stories of the characters - or, really, any kind of growth for the characters we've met so far - we get an introduction to another new character. So, it's not Heroes: The Comic Book. It's the comic book version of Lost, but without the spooky music. A pretty low Eh.

NOVA #1: I know that I should like this. Nova is pretty much "What if Spider-Man was Green Lantern?," so I'm sure that I should dig this even if the Green Lantern he's modelled after is now Kyle Rayner instead of Hal Jordan. But there was nothing worth reading here - No originality, no humor, no spin on what we've seen before. There's still a mix of concepts here, but now it's "It's Nova -- but just as grim as Civil War!" and, to be honest, if you're going to have a "He's a cop in space" story, even a "He's the last cop in space" story, then I want it to be fun, Goddammit. Eh.

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #6: So, we get Punisher putting on the Captain America mask as teased, but it has nothing to do with him actually claiming the Captain America identity... Instead, it's all to do with him trying to stop others from ruining the legacy. That swerve is the nicest part of this issue; as good as Fraction's take on the character is - and it's much better than I'd expected, as I continually tell you - this issue is just a bit thin for my taste. That said, I know that there's going to be more explanation and chances for more than just Ariel Olivetti cutting loose in the next issue... You can tell that this is definitely Act 1 in a three-act-structure. Okay.

WONDER WOMAN #7: Welcome to the latest episode of "Where was the editor?", our continuing series where I present comics that you read and wonder exactly where that strong guiding hand was that could've prevented what you just read. It's not that this book was bad, mind you - It was Okay although, considering the reaction of many people on this internet, I may be the only person who thinks that - just very, very muddled. There's a stronger story here, under the confusing scenes and gimmicks of Circe jumping in and out of mirrors or a trannysupervillain bar (Not as exciting as it sounds), and it's frustrating to read this version of the story instead of the one where you're sure it could've been, you know, actually good. I don't think that it's that Jodi Picoult is new to comics that's to blame, as much as it is that she's dealing with too much at one time to make sense of any of it - I would've preferred this to have been its own thing, as opposed to the obvious "set up the new status quo post-Heinberg and also that whole Amazons Attack! mini-series and tie in with Countdown while you're at it" clusterfuck that it's turning into; Maybe she should've been given All-Star Wonder Woman instead of the cursed main-continuity version? In any case, now that Gail Simone has been announced as the new writer come the end of the summer, I have to join the growing number of people who're ready for this title to be relaunched again just to get rid of the taint of this screwy latest run of the book.

Now that I've finished the week, PICK OF THE WEEK is All-Star Superman #7, which shares TRADE OF THE WEEK (as All-Star Superman Volume 1 HC) with The Professor's Daughter, which came out last Wednesday after all. PICK OF THE WEAK, meanwhile, is probably Iron Man, and that's just because I'm not on the same bus as everyone else at Marvel, it seems... Coming up this week: APE! Signings! Onomatoepia! Which may mean less reviews than normal, so forewarned is forearmed, or something...

In which I fall in love with a brushstroke: Graeme in a tree with Kubert, Hawkman.

So last night, I had a dream that proved that my subconscious was frantically grabbing what little pieces of pop culture that I'd exposed myself to over the last couple of days - My life was being narrated by This American Life's Ira Glass, and illustrated by Joe Kubert. Needless to say, everything was much funnier than it is in real life, and looked beautiful. Kubert's art was pretty much the main reason that I picked up SHOWCASE PRESENTS HAWKMAN VOLUME 1, the phone-book-sized collection of the first Silver Age stories about the man with the feather fetish. I've never been a major fan of the character or the concept, but the idea of getting lots of prime Kubert art in black and white for relatively cheap was a very easy way to get me to part with my money. Having read the book, it's easily the best thing about it - As much as many artists of the Silver Age had an ability and strength (to say nothing of work ethic) that many of today's Young Guns and Ten Terrific could learn from, Kubert is one of only a handful who matches that to a style that's breathtaking even today. Even though he only handles a few stories at the start of the book (The series obviously had a rocky start, running three issues in Brave and Bold before disappearing for awhile, before another three issue run, then another disappearance, then a run in Mystery In Space before finally graduating to its own title; Kubert was only on the strip for the Brave and Bold issues), it's Kubert who you'll remember when you're finished with the 500+ pages: His lush brushwork, his mastery of the balance of black and white on the page, the care and attention he takes on things that other artists would've just hacked out without a second thought... It's impossible to read this book and not be convinced each and every page that he worked on, that he's one of the greatest comic book artists of all time. Completely amazing, beautiful work that makes the normally-competent Murphy Anderson (who handles the remainder of the series in this book) look stiff and lifeless by comparison.

What you may be missing in the afterglow of that love, though, is the lowkey charm of Gardner Fox's stories. Yeah, it's definitely one of the lesser of DC's Silver Age books but, just like his Justice League stories, you can't help but be swept along with the old-fashioned "adventure with a lesson built in" nature of the whole thing - Look at Hawkman use that old-fashioned weapon from his museum and learn the name of said weapon and as much of its history as can fit in a caption! The science-fiction aspects are enjoyably campy in retrospect (We don't celebrate "Independence Day," but "Impossible Day"! We Thanagarians don't use wedding rings - We use wedding earrings! But only for women! We have our own words for "hour" and "week," but like using "day," if that's okay with you!), which kind of sums up a lot of what makes the stories as enjoyable as they are - it's not that they're good, per se, but they're funny and charming for maybe the wrong reasons. It doesn't stop them being entirely readable, of course, even when Murphy Anderson is drawing. For the first third of the book, though, you'll barely notice that there are any words; your eyes will be fixed on the shot of the talking bird in the beautiful pen-and-ink tree. Or the staircase rendered in loose, thin brushstrokes. Or the profile shot of Carter with his helmet, where the shadow falls perfectly to draw your eye across the panel. Or... Well, you get what I'm saying. It's enjoyably Okay overall, but worth it for the opening stories alone.

The Carpenter and the Walrus: Jeff Does the Non-Comics Thing for a Sec...

Forgot I'm at the store on my own today, so the liveblogging? Ain't happening. Wow. I'm just full of broken promises this week, aren't I? And while the tank's still on empty as far as comic books go, here's a film or two I've seen in the last week, and maybe I can still wrangle an uncomfortable comic book comparison or two:

THE LOOKOUT: I think my wife may have developed a "thing" for Joseph Gordon-Levitt after watching Brick, because this film suddenly jumped to the top of our to-see list once it came out. It's a very solid film written and directed by Scott Frank (for whom the warm spot in my heart for adapting Out of Sight is mitigated by the very cool spot in my heart for writing Dead Again), caught somewhere between a crime film and a character study. Gordon-Levitt plays a brain-damaged guy working as the janitor and night man at a small time bank who's embroiled in to a plot to rob the bank. As I say, it's a very solid film with a near-great performance by Gordon-Levitt who nicely underplays the part, and a script that's an astonishing piece of craft. Despite all that, it's no more than highly OK--Edi and I talked about the film a day or so later and realized neither of us had thought about it for more than a second after seeing it--maybe because Scott as first-time director plays his visuals a little too safe, or maybe because, as sometimes happens in tightly crafted crime pieces, people act only as little cogs that move the plot forward. Worth a rental, though.

SHOOTER: Yeah, I never heard back when I asked if anyone saw this and now I know why: after you walk out of this movie, you'll go to great lengths to pretend you never saw it. This "adaptation" of Stephen Hunter's deeply engrossing Point of Impact cuts everything out of Hunter's book the filmmakers thought the audience would find dated, corny, overly complex, or satisfying and puts in a whole bunch corny, overly simplistic, dull talky stuff that will age badly.

Here's a good example: in the book, after Swagger is double-crossed and shot, he manages to make it far downstream, makes his way into some scrublands, and finds and kills a boar, whose protein rich liver he is able to eat raw, giving him the strength to go on even though he's steadly bleeding out. It's a cool scene, filled with fun facts about eating why the liver is one of the few organs you actually can eat raw, but okay, I can see how it might look a little ridiculous to your average filmgoer and the filmmakers needed something different. Okay. So in the film, Swagger manages to make it far downstream, steal a truck, make his way into a small little town, finds some tin foil in a dumpster, shorts the lights in the country store so he can't be seen by the clerk, buys some sugar, salt, water, and a turkey thermometer, goes on to create a rejuvenating concoction, and injects this concoction by shooting himself up with the turkey thermometer in a gas station. Yeah---that looked a lot less ridiculous, guys. Nice job.

In fact, there's a distressing amount of emergency shopping in Shooter--so much so, you wonder if they should've called it Shopper, instead. Once Swagger makes it to the home of his dead buddy's ex-fiancee and convinces her to help him, he gives her a massive shopping list of stuff she'll need to conduct surgery and remove the bullet. (Of course, this involves eighteen cans of whipped cream, so that Swagger can use the nitrous as anesthetic--and no, I'm not kidding.) Later, when Swagger and the FBI agent who's decided to help him have to prepare for an assault on the trap that's been set for them, they go to a big-ass department store and race up and down the aisles with their shopping carts, pulling in huge swathes of shirts and nails and other goods they'll MacGyver into C4 and napalm and booby traps. The message is clear--when your precious government is riddled with corrupt black-op agencies working for the highest bidder, the only way you can fight them is by shopping. It's a strange updating of Hunter's Second Amendment oriented thriller--one wonders if the Swagger of the movie drives a pick-up with a "You can take my charge card when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers" bumper sticker.

Oh, and the action scenes are dull and there aren't enough of 'em. Truly Awful.

GRINDHOUSE: I'm supposed to see this tomorrow but I couldn't hold out any longer and caught a matinee yesterday. I could bore you with a million different thoughts about the thing but I'll stick to one central point: Rodriguez and Tarantino may now own the grindhouse, but apparently John Carpenter built it. Rodriguez's Planet Terror is riddled with classic Carpenter flourishes, from the self-composed keyboard hums, to the disastrous fate that befalls a child, to the mixture of jokey, aw-shucks humor mixed with outrageously disgusting effects. (Admittedly, Rodriguez pulls from a bunch of different other sources as well, but the Carpenter stuff is the stuff that really sticks.) Similarly, Tarantino's Death Proof tries to throw a lot of different stuff into the mix, but the long, near-interminable conversations between the first four girls mirrors the far crisper, naturalistic conversations among the four girls in Halloween. Throw in Eli Roth's trailer, and Grindhouse is a veritable John Carpenter tribute joint.

Which is all fine and good. I quite enjoyed Grindhouse, but every failing that Grindhouse has (including, arguably, its financial one) comes from emulating just about everything Carpenter did while ignoring how Carpenter had to do it. I don't know if you've ever listened to one of the Kurt Russell-less John Carpenter commentaries, but Carpenter gives (in a bored, laconic tone) some advice that really reinforces how much money mattered in his early films: in one commentary, he talks about running the title credits on a black background because it's that much more time you can fill up without having to shoot any film. Carpenter had to come up with ways to get his films to run ninety minutes because he only had the budget to shoot eighty-some-odd minutes of film. By contrast, Rodriguez and Tarantino have trouble keeping their movies to length, because anything they can think of--endless credit sequence of naked women feet, genital-leaking rape scenes, that chick from the Black-Eyed Peas bending over a car engine--they can get.

That said? Quite enjoyable, highly Good, and unlike The Lookout, there's stuff I'm still pondering a day later. As I said, I'll spare you the rest of it, but you could fill a book with the comparison and contrast and strange subtextual rumblings running through Grindhouse, and hopefully someday someone will.

I am I am I am Superman and I know what's happening: Graeme gushes about 4/11.

So, I read Tom Spurgeon describe All-Star Superman as "one of the best superhero comics of the last 30 years" this week and thought, wow, that's pretty high praise. And then I read ALL-STAR SUPERMAN #7, and re-read the first six issues (released in collected form this week as ALL-STAR SUPERMAN VOLUME 1 HC) and thought, you know, maybe he's not giving them enough credit. As much fun as the series is in single issue sittings, there's a lot to be gained from reading the first half of the series in one go. You catch the running themes (multiple identities, mortality, the multiplicity of the Superman character type) much more clearly when you can sit there and connect the dots. Although the series is constructed so that even though every issue is a story in and of itself, each issue is structured to play off what has come before and set up what comes after - the fifth issue, for example, ends with Lex Luthor embracing death because he's murdered Superman before the sixth shows the first time that Superman had to deal with mortality experienced from three different periods of Clark Kent's life (with the third perspective an Easter Egg for longtime Grant Morrison fans, who've read DC One Million and know that Superman Prime is our Superman in the far, far future); even the cliffhanger ending of issue 7, the first real two-parter of the series (Even though #2 and 3 were kind of a two-parter), manages to provide a conclusion for the main plotline with the defeat of the Bizarro World before branching out into the two-page set-up for the next issue. It's not that the series is being written for the trade, as the kids say, but just another illustration of how much thought and care has been put into its creation.

This is, without a doubt, a labor of love for Grant Morrison. You can see that, more than anything, he believes in Superman; this is a book, first and foremost, about Superman as a force for good and not something that worries about deconstructing the character or making him relevant for modern times. That's not to say that it's dated or retro, however... As much as the book's focus on Superman as not only perfect but almost unrelatably so may bring to mind the Silver Age take on the character, this is timeless instead of old-fashioned. Morrison's talked in the past about approaching super-heroes on a mythic level, but this is the first time for me where he's actually achieved that, perhaps because of the lack of the self-consciousness that shines through on the rest of his mainstream superhero work (Compare an issue of this with his Batman, for example, or his Wildcats - in those books, he's almost trying too hard to live up to his reputation, where here everything just works. There's a calmness and focus, instead of "Grant Morrison, he's so crazy"). Which isn't to say that there isn't imagination on show here, but it's imagination used in service of the story - and imagination where the ideas come slower but are more followed through, as opposed to his other work - which makes all the difference.

A lot of the calm that the book exudes - fittingly, considering the unflappable, serene nature of its star - comes from the art, which shows off Frank Quitely's very personal sense of design, pacing and space better than anything else he's done; We3 may have been more formally inventive, but All-Star Superman gives him the ability to compose a page and control your eye without the need for hyperactive bullet-dodging cyber-rabbits. It's widescreen art, but not in the traditional comic sense of the term - the panels stretch across the page to show surroundings, movement and the characters in a beautifully cinematic way, gracefully and allowing the reader to feel that everything is real, or at least, exists outside of the confines of that particular panel. There's a sense of life in the work, if that makes sense. "Digital inker" and colorist Jamie Grant's work helps dramatically in that, it has to be said - especially in the sixth issue - subtly reinforcing Quitely's linework while giving it more depth and weight, and completely earning his name being on the cover.

So, I'm reading these seven comics last night, and realizing that there's not a wrong step in any of them. The tone is perfect for Superman stories, the plots the right mix of adventure and overwrought emotion, the execution an ideal balance of humor and grace. It's so stunning a series that delays between issues don't seem to matter, because you know that the wait will be worth it, and when taken along with Jeff Smith's Shazam series, a successful one-two punch for DC of superhero comics that make you feel like you did when reading comics as a kid, even though you're an adult. Excellent, and then some.

No reviews for me tomorrow (or Sunday, for that matter) - It's Kate's and my wedding anniversary today, and we're celebrating five years of Kate not coming to her senses and dumping my comic-readin' ass by heading out of town for the weekend. Expect to see me recharged and full of snark in a couple of days, though.

Wampeters, Foma and Superheroes: Graeme on 4/11, Vonnegut.

Firstly, Kurt Vonnegut, RIP. I was a massive fan of the man; my favorite book of his was Timequake, which just struck me as exactly the book that he'd wanted to write all along, all anecdotes and ponderings under the attempt of science-fiction, mixing Slaughterhouse Five with Palm Sunday. I went through a period, when I was still in art school and my mind was still trying to suck everything in to figure out who and how to be, when I read his stuff voraciously, book after book after book, entirely out of order. I remember clearly getting to Breakfast of Champions and being surprised and depressed by the misanthropy of the book, of the way Vonnegut seemed to feel when writing it; I kept reading even though it felt as if he wanted to kill himself and punish all of his characters for being in his head, and can remember clearly feeling relieved when he saw the light of... what, I'm still not sure. Optimism? Humanism? Not-killing-yourselfism? in the middle of the book. It's one of those things that you're sure that Clarence the Angel would point to, if he found you trying to throw yourself off a bridge on Christmas Eve, even if he couldn't tell you why it was so important, either. I saw Vonnegut on the Daily Show, last year, and was struck by how frail he looked. Sure, he was 84 at the time, and I hope I'm still around and healthy enough to make talk show appearances at that age (Not that I'd want to make talk show appearances, but you know what I mean), but... man. I wanted him to be as vibrant and healthy as his writing, you know? Sly and funny and so, so human. Ah, well. So it goes, as he said. Onto happier things:

SPIDER-MAN AND THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1: Jeff Parker proves, once again, that he's the go-to man at Marvel for stories that don't suck or ask you to buy into totalitarian police states where superheroes can literally get away with murder, with this new, entirely unnecessary-yet-fun miniseries that just coincidentally stars the House of Ideas' two summer movie franchises of the year - What's surprising about that isn't so much that it's a movie tie-in, but that it's a movie tie-in that's not going to be released in trade in time for said movies; either Marvel have screwed up their schedules, or they're beginning to look at the direct market and single issues as a viable source of money in light of Civil War sales... Or maybe both. Who knows?

Anyway, this is pretty much what you'd expect from a non-continuity story by Parker and Mike Weiringo; it's light and throwaway purposefully, focusing less on the angst and more on the derring-do and imaginative adventure of the whole thing. You can tell that Parker's worked on the all-ages Adventures books, because this has a similar feel, and there are a number of scenes that set up the characters and their relationships pretty clearly for new readers (Ben plays a trick on Johnny to show off their rivalry, Spider-Man is insulted by people who later praise the FF to show their particular public standings, and so on) without being too obvious about it. There's something wonderfully old-fashioned about it, in the best way - It's written as if it's someone's first comic, but in such a way as to not alienate old readers who'll instead appreciate the character bits.

Likewise, Weiringo's art is a joy; clear and easy to follow, attractively cartoony while being dynamic enough for readers who've been at this for awhile. He's one of Marvel's secret weapons even if they haven't really realized that for awhile, and a pitch-perfect match for Parker's writing. Both of them seem uninterested in post-modern takes on superhero icons, preferring instead to offer up stories that aren't tied to any particular movement or zeitgeist and have no agenda other than to entertain. Depressingly enough, that probably guarantees that this will be seen as old-fashioned and unnecessary by the majority of fandom, but feh. Their loss; this is Good and in many ways closer to the movie versions of the characters than the regular books. Here's hoping the potential new audience finds this and gobbles it up, instead of Civil War Chronicles or whatever.