Yikes, count me out: Hibbs dabbles with 5/16

Just one real fast while it's fresh in my mind: COUNTDOWN #50: Forget everything I said last week, I really didn't like this one. At all. There's five scenes in here, and I'll leave the bookenders for last. There's a (very quick) Mary Marvel bit which is unobjectionable; there's a sequence with Batman and Karate Kid that doesn't (on the surface) appear to have anything directly to do with COUNTDOWN, and seems a bit more like an ad for the JLA/JSA crossover... unless that doesn't resolve in any significant fashion in which case, wtf; and there's a Rogue's sequence which is adequate, but a bit overlong for the information it needs to unfurl.

Then there's the Jimmy bookending stuff.

Uh... what?

Obvious question, first: Jimmy knows Batman's secret identity? And the entire history of his legacy? And that Jason impersonated Dick for a little while? Even if I accepted #1 & 2, how is #3 even possible? Kal that much of a blabbermouth?

But there's a writerly sin here, too, page 4, last caption, totally highlighted as the end of narration, boom end on "he's willing to kill". With this in mind, why the hell is Superman sending Jimmy in alone? For that matter, why isn't Superman apprehending him for his crimes? Hell, for THAT matter, why is Bruce sparring with Karate Kid a few pages later? His now rogue partner is involved with a meta-human death, and Bruce isn't man-on-the-scene? Really?

(this is actually why you probably don't WANT the Big Three in play in these things -- they're so overly competent, you have to write around them to get anything done)

But the bigger sin is in the end Jimmy scene, even more specifically on that last page. First off, the clumsy fake-cliffhanger of the last two panels (!) comes exactly out of nowhere, and has nothing to do with the rest of the scene, and since we can be relatively assured that Jimmy Olsen isn't going to die (at least this early in the game, and, frankly, probably ever), it's a wholly false cliffhanger. But even worse is that the whole thrust of the Joker scene concludes with information THE READER ALREADY KNOWS (well, or at least, and reader who actually knows who Duella Dent was in the first place... but they're the only ones who might possibly care, all 52 of us) (Heh)

Actually, back to the "cliffhanger" -- I just flashed that it made me think of DC CHALLENGE, a really horrible DC mini-series, where round-robin writers took turns trying to top themselves ("Bwah-ha-ha, how will [Adam or Sean, I don't recall who is next in rotation], get out of this?")

If it had just been the middle bits, I wouldn't have been enthusiastic, but, y'know, it was all OK, but those bookends just soured me on the whole deal. AWFUL.

Parenthetically, COUNTDOWN #51 had pretty poor first-week sales at CE; LAUNCHING at only 75% of 52 typical first-week sales. This concerns me especially, because I had thought the first issue at least would attract more eyes, and I ordered in the 133% range (the first three months are returnable, however... albeit costing us 29 cents a copy. I FOC'ed Week 47 (my first chance) right down to the minimum required for returnability (100% of 52), but I'm still going to be returning chunks. There's a mathematical point where eating the cost of returns isn't worth the tradeoff of not having to eat unsold product (call it like 4:1), but the problem is determining what the bottom is on this. If I look to COUNTDOWN #51 as analogous to 52 #1, in terms of ratios of preorders to rack sales, then project forward, COUNTDOWN will end up well below half of 52; the only question is will it "hit bottom"? By 52 #12, I pretty much had the right number, will history repeat itself here, or will I know by, say, #4 this time? (God, I hope so)

I felt liberated by the returnable experiment of 52 -- I ordered more copies than I thought I could sell, and it paid off handsomely. Here, I feel shackled by it -- in order to cover my bet, I can't bet below a minimum that I *know* is way way too high.

Wow, I typed way more than I wanted to. More... maybe Thursday? I still have to finish this @#$% TILTING, and we've got a visit to a prospective school for Ben tomorrow, too, which will swallow most of the afternoon, so, unless I feel itchy, maybe I should shoot for every other day (ha, again)

What did YOU think, anyway?

-B

PS: Bionic Woman trailer? Ugh.

Harvey Dent has it easy: Graeme gets Empowered.

It's almost fitting that reviewing EMPOWERED has left me completely conflicted and at war with myself, considering that the book itself did exactly the same thing. Is it an annoyingly self-conscious, have-its-cake-and-eat-it book, or an honest examination into fanservice that betrays a knowing hypocrisy? Is Adam Warren creating a heroine that undercuts the fetishism of superheroes, or coming up with something that's even more fetishistic than usual? Did I enjoy the book, or really really hate it?

Too many questions! Makes... Hulk's... head... hurt!

The thing is, Empowered may be the most purposefully self-loathing comic that I've read. Which, considering I've read Ivan Brunetti's work and am a massive fan of Evan Dorkin, is saying something. But there's an art to the way that both of those creators deal with their obsessive compulsive needs to point out and apologize for their own shortcomings, and also a self-awareness; they point out why they think they're shit in such a way that both apologizes for and undercuts the problematic material. Empowered, on the other hand, apologizes and then goes on to do it again. And again. And again... at which point, for me at least, it becomes a weirdly-distancing crutch and excuse for not even trying anymore.

There are a couple of things that Warren, through eponymous heroine Empowered, apologizes for throughout the book - Firstly, the short chapters that start the book, and secondly, the masturbatory-material origins of the characters and the book itself. Both are kind of frustrating to see, because they both speak to the idea that the creator was helpless to do anything about them, which is entirely untrue. If you feel the need to create new pages to apologize for the choppy nature of the chapters at the beginning of the book, why not either (a) leave those chapters out of the book altogether, especially as they don't really add much in terms of "continuity" or plot, or (b) spend the time you've spent creating those new apology pages to create other new pages that help put those short pieces into something resembling a more coherent longer form, you know? Or, if you feel the need to not only apologize for the bondage cheesecake nature of the book, but also point out to the readers that the book has its origin in being commissions for fans with "special interests", then why do the book in the first place? Why work on something that you don't want to stand behind without saying sorry before you're even done?

I can't help but feel as if the apologies aren't so much genuine apologies but attempts to head (deserved) criticism off at the pass, which may be what frustrates me so much about them. Well, that and the feeling that instead of just acknowledging the problems with the book, Warren had taken some steps towards, you know, fixing them. Well, that and the other that, and the fact that despite everything, the book is really rather readable.

This is where I get conflicted and hedge my bets: Empowered, for all of the above, is still pretty Good. A lot of the faults are overpowered by Warren's art, which was always good but has never looked better than it does here, reproduced from pencils only, and his writing, which doesn't transcend the porny origins of the work but at least has fun with them. His dialogue is smart and witty, and even though the characters are little more than well-illustrated stereotypes with barely a little tweak, you end up liking them nonetheless.

I was going to say "you end up pulling for them," but figured that maybe that wouldn't be the best phrase to use, considering.

It may not be a perfect book, it's definitely not a book for everyone, but it does what it does well. If only it could do so without distracting you by saying sorry every two seconds.

Don't you know I could never leave your side, girl?: Graeme takes on a touchy (for him) subject.

I should probably start by telling you how much of a relief it is to be able to say that the new Boom! Studios book COVER GIRL #1 is Okay. It's co-written by Kevin Church (alongside Andrew Cosby, who does Eureka for the Sci-Fi Channel), you see, better known to the internetosphere as Beaucoup Kevin and a man I've received more than the occasional email from in the past, and that kind of thing just adds a whole new layer of discomfort to reviewing something. I was pretty much prepared, if I hadn't liked the book, to just pretend that it didn't exist or something as an avoidance tactic. You know the kind of thing - Kevin would email and ask if I'd enjoyed Cover Girl, and I'd respond and ask him if he was talking about America's Next Top Model or something, hoping to throw him off the scent (And talking of America's Next Top Model - It's going to be Renee at this point, right? Everytime they get to the judging and Nigel Barker says "Yes, she's beautiful, but not young enough," I feel as if it's really ridiculous faux-foreshadowing - fauxshadowing? - designed to try and trick people into thinking that she's about to be thrown off the show). Luckily, anyway, I don't have to.

And, sure, there's still some awkwardness that I can't be more enthusiastic about the book. In part, it's because I really wanted to like the book before I read it, because it's Kevin and I know how excited he is about it (A feeling - the wanting to like it, I mean - that I think has been shared across a lot of the comic blog world; I can't help but wonder if Boom! missed an opportunity by not doing more of an outreach thing to bloggers and playing up Kevin's involvement more), and that kind of goodwill really shapes how you read something in the first place. But, alas and alack, there're problems with the execution that stop me from wholehearted embracing the thing, mostly with the pacing - or, perhaps, the expectations given to the reader by the cover, and how that affects the way the pacing seems.

See, the book's called Cover Girl. And on the cover, there's a "girl" taking up half the page, with a gun and looking all sassy and big-chinned. So, it's not unreasonable to find yourself reading the book in expectation for her arrival, as you've kind of been given enough information to assume that the book's really about her. The problem with that is, she doesn't appear until the last page, and - unlike, say, Martin Sheen in the first episode of The West Wing - her presence isn't felt prior to that point, either. So you find yourself - or maybe it was just me - reading the issue somewhat frustratedly, waiting for her to appear or at least be mentioned, and treating everything else as filler or a slow, slow build. That's probably unfair; I think that the series is really supposed to be about Alex, the actor who is on almost every single page of the first issue, but because of the cover and the title, that's not what I thought I was reading when I started it, if that makes sense.

But to judge the book on what it is, rather than what it isn't: It's fun. Kevin's dialogue owes a lot to J.M. DeMatteis's Justice League stuff, I feel - There's a similar beat and surface comedy to it - and it's going for an "insider Hollywood" feel, which is always the source of some obvious humor. The art is a weird mix of really nice faces and awkward staging (If you could imagine Ariel Olivetti and Scott Kolins having an art baby, it'd probably be this artist) despite some muddy coloring, and there're enough unanswered questions to make me want to pick up the second issue to see what happens next. So, yeah; it's Okay, and worth checking out even if you don't know the co-writer.

Your Turn To Curtsy, My Turn To Critic: Most of Jeff's Reviews of 05/09 Books....

Someone spun the Savage Critic Wheel of Unwellness this week and it's still pointing at me--I've felt like ass on a stick for the last 72 hours and I'm not happy at about it at all. On the other hand, if I end up calling in sick on Monday, I can stay in and watch Mario Bava movies all day. So things could be much, much worse, I guess.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #540: This isn't over yet? Seeing as I've read, I dunno, maybe six to eight other Spidey books between last issue (shipped on 3/21?) and this one, the narrative drive seems significantly diminished here--if this had been a weekly event or something, maybe it'd be easier for me to still think that maybe May will die or maybe Peter will kill the Kingpin. But currently? Nah. Between that and the feeling that artist Ron Garney at his most evocative feels like John Romita, Jr. at his most tepid, and I'd call this Eh.

BLACK PANTHER #27: Books like this make me really miss Jack Kirby (hell, I'd settle for Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott at this point): although overused to the point of visual cliche and pushing characters' reactions into utter melodrama, Kirby's dynamism could nevertheless give stories like "The FF come home from a cosmic adventure; get attacked by giant cosmic bug" a much-needed vitality. As it is, this has absolutely no "oomph"--I felt like I was reading the storyboards to a dull French cartoon--until the last page which, to be honest, borrows all its oomph from elsewhere. It's a competent but very Eh little issue.

BLADE #9: Silly but more or less effective until the end when it's revealed, if I'm reading it rightly, is that the people Blade thinks are the bad guys are in fact the good guys. As twists goes, it's pretty uninteresting--not only is it pretty shopworn, but it's really hard to imagine Blade giving a damn: it might work in a book where the hero is a crusading do-gooder (like Superman) but the current incarnation of Blade seems driven more by vengeance and it just seems...limp. The rest of the book is fun, though, so I think it's in the OK park, overall.

COUNTDOWN #51: Ugh. I'm surprised by how much of this feels wrong, and not in a "Oh My God, you have perverted the laws of God and man," kind of way but in a "why are you going out with your pants on backwards and your underwear on your head?" kind of way. I mean, after all the coverage of 52 where nearly everyone everywhere praised JG Jones' astonishing cover work and singled it out as something that quickly solidified the book's identity on the stands, why would you kick off your next weekly series with a cover more appropriate to a "Justice League and Friends" coloring and rainy-day activity book? After widespread ackowledgement that the best parts of 52 were from the organic growth of the writers' interests, why would you have your first issue read like a bullet point memo from the desk of Dan Didio?

I mean, the book itself, based on the quality of the bland art and the clunky, exposition-heavy dialogue, is really just Eh, but that whiff of publisher hubris in the air--the idea that people are going to like what Dan Didio has in store for them because, dammit, he's Dan Didio and who cares about the cover artists and who cares about the A-list writers and who cares about all the lessons learned over the last year (except, oh, yeah, lose that real time thing)--is enough to make Graeme call it Crap (because it's even worse than he feared) and Brian call it a low Good (because it's much better than he feared) when it's really just Eh. If nothing else, I think that points to how much good will DC and Didio have burnt away post-Infinite Crisis and how much work everyone on this book has cut out for them. I was willing to give 52 between 10 to 12 issues to get things going; based on this issue, Countdown's got about 4 to 6. Hop to, guys.

GARTH ENNIS CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD #3: This is the first issue I picked up and it was better than I was expecting--I guess maybe something more like Dicks, I guess--but between the near-wistfulness in Ennis' descriptions of Heaven and Jacen Burrows' suprisingly Dillonesque art, I thought this was the closest thing to Preacher I've read in a while--and not just Preacher as it tends to get remembered (twisted humor and over-the-top explicitness) but as I remember reading it (three amusing characters shooting the shit). A real pleasant surprise, although it might be a bitch to hunt up those back issues now. Highly Good.

GHOST RIDER #11: Dumb, dumb, dumb, but did have the benefit of having one sequence so over-the-top in its dumbosity (Ghost Rider rips out a guy's heart, causes it to burst into flames and then jams it back into the guy's chest) that the comic was, for one shining moment, enjoyable. Makes me wish they could figure out a way to set this on Awesome and Dumb rather than Awful and Dumb--this book is apparently selling no matter how terrible it is, so why not go for it?

GREEN ARROW #74: Yeah, whatever. I'm not really down with the marriage of Green Arrow and Black Canary so no matter how well it's done, it's essentially lipstick on a pig to me. But I would've preferred a bit less of the fiery couple checklist ("Arguing, then passionately kissing?" "Check." "Teh sex for hours and hours?" "Check." "The 'you make me want to be a better man' speech?" "Check.") and maybe a little more, I dunno, interesting stuff. Eh.

GRIFTER MIDNIGHTER #3: Reading this, I got the sense Dixon is auditioning to be part of the Wildstorm Cool Kids Club--"Hey, guys! I can write stories where nothing happens with a bit of smart-ass prickish narrative flair! See?"--but it reads like someone who--as Mark Twain said of his wife's swearing--"got the words right but don't know the tune." The art is pretty though, with a very lovely green miasmic color scheme going on, so I'd bump it up to Eh.

IMMORTAL IRON FIST #5: I am so in love with this book right now--any quibblage I've had in the past about action is gone now as this issue hurtles along from one neat scene to the next. And as in awe as I am at the skill with which Brubaker and Fraction have opened up the potential for the character, I think I'm even more astonished by David Aja's art which reminds me a lot, I think, of Gene Day on Master of Kung Fu but possessing none of Day's occasional stiffness (as I recall, it was only when characters stopped moving that Day's work suffered). There's still one or two things I think could be added to the mix, but I'm a lot more confident that they're coming. This book is Very Good stuff, although you might bump it down a grade if you have no former appreciation of the character and up a grade if you do. It's really a terrific, gorgeous-looking superhero book.

INDIA AUTHENTIC GANESHA #1: Another book that had me musing about Kirby, as this book is far too reverent and uninspired with regard to its source material to be at all interesting. Deepak Chopra's introduction has a little more juice to it since he's writing about the symbolism underlying Ganesha, but that's about all you're gonna get that has any vigor to it. Disappointingly Awful.

NOVA #2: Didn't bother with the first issue, but this issue was shockingly good. It's not just a post-Civil War comic that does a better job presenting Tony Stark as a complex figure than any other Marvel book out there, it's also a good Nova comic--featuring characters from the original series, concerns from previous incarnations that feel less like a continuity bog and more like the writers doing their research and crafting a fully-rounded character with some history. Admittedly, as a '70s Marvel nerd, my rating of Very Good is, like Iron Fist, rooted in absolute awe that characters I like are actually being handled with care by talented creators who know what they're doing, but I think the casual superhero reader would like this as well. Wow.

ULTIMATE POWER #5: If only this book had come out three or four years ago when I was still interested in either The Ultimates or Supreme Power...it could have totally turned me off to both ideas back then and save me some cash. Now, I just shake my head and wonder how either book is going to have any readers left in six months. Awful.

Take back your Marvel! Ay!: Graeme looks at the House of Ideas for 5/9.

There's this crazy song called "South America, Take It Away!" on the radio right now, by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters that is entirely distracting. The four of them are singing "Take back your samba! Ay! Your rhumba! Ay! Your conga! Ay-yi-yi!" and it's one of those things that makes you actually stop, listen to the song and think, people got away with writing things like that?

Anyway; the cat is beside me and dehydrated and sullen, but she's stopped throwing up for awhile, which is nice. Taking advantage of the break in vomit, let's talk Marvel books.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #540: Well, the art's nice, so that counts for something, right...? That's about the most positive thing I can say about this issue, because the writing is pretty horrendous; Peter Parker as revenge-driven badass who's willing to kill isn't something that you can sell easily to me, and J. Michael Straczynski does one of the worst possible jobs of selling it imaginable, especially when you factor in a Mary Jane who also, apparently, wants Peter to go and beat people up. Maybe twenty years ago, when grim and gritty superheroes were the in thing, this may have seemed more interesting, but right now? Eh.

ANNIHILATION SAGA: I read this because I didn't read the actual Annihilation series but read lots of positive reviews. Maybe, I figured, this recap would give me a taste of what I'd missed. If that's the case, then I missed a convoluted space opera with characters with ridiculous names (Paibok the Delinquent? Really?) that seems pretty uninvolving. I'm guessing that it was all in the execution, because this wasn't much beyond Eh in plot terms.

BLACK PANTHER #27: Unlike Hibbs, I've got no problems with this book becoming Fantastic Four II for the next few months, but I just wish that it could be a more coherent Fantastic Four II. This issue seems to have ADD, introducing plot elements without really exploring them (If the Negative Zone prison from Civil War is being overrun by hungry insects, shouldn't that be, you know, a big deal?) before switching to an entirely different - and, let's face it, kind of unnecessary - plot for the cliffhanger. It's as if Reginald Hudlin is trying out potential ideas in front of you, trying to see if he can come up with something he likes, and failing. Another Eh, I'm afraid; it's not bad, it's just not good, either. It's just there.

MARVEL ZOMBIES: DEAD DAYS: There's a point in this prequel to the surprise hit of last year when you can almost see Sean Philips decide to go with a simpler art style (It's page 6, if you're wondering - There's more detail and care in the work in the first few pages; maybe deadlines got tight?), and it seems to be an omen for the book itself. There's just no there there - If you've read the original miniseries, then you literally know everything that happens here - and not enough humor to make it a worthwhile recap, either. Kirkman seems another writer who seems to have fallen for the "Reed Richards - Scientific Douchebag" meme, as well... Hasn't anyone else read any of the same Fantastic Four comics as I have? Did I grow up in an alternate universe where this was better than yet another Eh?

NEW AVENGERS #30: Bri, Jeff and I were talking about Bendis in the store the other day, and we all agreed that even when Bendis's books aren't any good, that they're always interesting - He's one of those rare writers that keeps pushing himself, which is always worth paying attention to even if you don't care for the direction in which he's pushing himself. All of this comes from Brian's review of this book on Friday, where he says that Bendis has finally taught himself how to write a team book, and he's not wrong. Maybe more interestingly, he's taught himself how to write two team books - this and Mighty Avengers both do the same thing in different ways, and that's something that follows through into the Mighty team's appearance in here, which seems curiously the same but different from how they appear in their own book. Anyway, this issue is also another rare Marvel book that makes me think that (a) Civil War wasn't a complete waste of time (Bendis makes the underground aspect and chaos work here) and (b) there's more than just crazy last-minute plotting going on here. Very Good, even before I get to the return of Clint Barton...

NOVA #2: Also the other day, Hibbs gives me this book: "Have you read it? You should." Lester chimes in: "It manages to take the dick Tony Stark and the hero Tony Stark and find a middle ground." Given my weird and irrational dislike of post-Civil War Iron Man, that was enough to sell me on it, and you know what? He's right. Maybe it's the freshness that comes from the outsiders' perspective on the "new" Marvel Universe, maybe it's the mix of melodrama and dumb supervillainy, but this is way better than the first issue, and a pretty successful attempt to join Civil War and Annihilation together and make both of them matter. Who knew that this would actually be Good?

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #7: I don't know how many times I'm going to end up saying that this is better than it has any right to be before I accept that maybe it's just a Good book... but, again, this should be a mess; the Punisher deals with neo-Nazis trying to kill immigrants while also trying to steal back the legacy of Captain America from the Hate Monger. Sounds really, really bad, right? But somehow, Matt Fraction's mix of sincerity and humor pulls through and makes me ignore the entirely-distracting 3D-generated backgrounds in Ariel Olivetti's artwork. I keep expecting to read an issue and finally think, "That's it! I've had enough!" but it's not happened yet...

I have to agree with Bri's assertion that post-Civil War Marvel seems to have more direction and success (storywise) than post-Infinite Crisis DC, but I also wonder how much of that is still going to be the case in a few months...

Oh man, what a plan: Graeme reads some Dynamite books.

Another day of insecurity in the McMillan household started with the cat being sick again, much in the same manner as she was back the last time I told you all about my feline troubles, so we've more or less spent the last few hours anxiously checking in with her to see if she's given up with the hairball vomiting yet. Thank whatever deity you choose to believe in that there's always the escapism offered by comics, that's what I always say.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: CYLON APOCALYPSE #3: I don't get this series - or, for that matter, any series that's based on the original TV show instead of the new one. I mean, no matter how good it is or how true to the show (and this is both not that bad and pretty much how I remember the show, including characters with the dated 70s mustache), it just doesn't feel as if it's going to appeal to anyone other than the hardcore fans of the old TV show, which was never the most original or even that interesting thing in the first place. So, Okay if you like that kind of thing, I guess.

THE LONE RANGER #1 - 5: After I enjoyed the Free Comic Book Day preview, I ended up reading the first five issues of the revival of one of my dad's favorite fictional characters in one go, and two things came to mind. Firstly, it's Good stuff. Secondly, if I hadn't read them all at once, I'm not sure that I'd've had the patience to follow through the story - This is slow going stuff, but very satisfying in larger chunks; it's pretty much a drawn-out origin story, but an enjoyable one - Writer Brett Matthews shows off his Whedon-pedigree in the dialogue, and artist Sergio Cariello offers a classic line reminiscent of Kubert and Russ Heath - that's going to make the inevitable collection worth picking up even if you generally don't enjoy westerns, like me, even if you're not willing to hang around for the single issues.

RED SONJA: VACANT SHELL: Good Lord, but it's a Sonja comic that I actually dug. A lot of that is actually down to Paul Renaud's clear and confident artwork (with coloring by Renaud himself and Chris Chuckry) that's like Adam Hughes and Frank Cho mixed together, but even the nicest cheesecake art has to be in the service of a good story, so more credit is probably due to Rick Remender, who provides a pulpy and appropriately violent amount of monster-vanquishing and sword-swinging. It's entirely unlikely to change anyone's life, but it finally made me see that there's occasionally something to the whole redhead-in-a-metal-bikini-who-wants-to-fight-everyone thing, and that makes it a low Good in and of itself, unlike...

XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS #1: If I admit that I've never seen an episode of this show, not Hercules. Maybe that's why I don't get a lot out of this, nor understand the explanation of just why Xena is evil these days... For fans of Lucy Lawless, this is probably better than the Eh it is for me. For those who never saw the show? Best avoid, but it's pretty unlikely that you'd be picking it up in the first place in that case.

Tomorrow: Marvel books! Why did Brian Hibbs tell me to read Nova #2? The answer... may shock you! And probably an update on the cat, too, so as to spare the blushes and fear of you dear readers.

"I rolled a 8": Hibbs on the 5/9 Initiative

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #540: Well, technically, this one is "Back in Black". One of the things we've been complaining about the IC/52/COUNTDOWN books over at DC is "wait, when is this happening?", because it seems like even the people in charge have no bloody idea. And we see the same thing going on in the Marvel Universe between this storyline and the Initiative and even World War Hulk. It seem to ME that #539 and this issue (and presumably the rest of this arc) is taking place immediately after CIVIL WAR, and pretty much on the same day. It makes my head hurt to try and keep it all straight, honestly. Its even kind of harder because this is "Bad ass Spidey" -- he'll happily break your bones, or threaten to kill you, or whatever -- but meanwhile, NEW AVENGERS is showing "nervous joking Spidey". And while we're meant to be rooting for Peter, it seems to me that in the context of a post-CW Marvel, he's acting exactly like a vigilante, and it is hard to find a context in which this works right. If he IS a "most wanted" by SHIELD, and if SHIELD is the Bad Guys, then SHIELD *needs* to be stopping him to prove their point, so Peter prolly shouldn't be chatting on a CEL PHONE with MJ. Unless SHIELD are the Good Guys, in which case, you'd think they'd be using ever resource to HELP Peter -- if a police officer's mother got shot and put in a coma, the entire force would be out helping him right?

My Suspension of Disbelief roll gets fudged even further by staging a big part of the action in Grand Central Station, including a "kill the killer" sequence which, while just what Fisk would do, he wouldn't be doing it in the middle of Grand-Freakin-Central; he'd have had rigged the guy's gun or something to explode after doing the deed.

IN other words, things are happening not because they make logical story sense grounded in the previously laid out "rules" of the fictional universe in which they are set, but because they're what has to happen because that's what the plot outline SAYS must happen.

Which is pretty much the definition of "bad comics"

As a $3 unit of individual storytelling, this is adequate stuff, maybe even better than that; but as a part of the larger ongoing story, really, this is pretty AWFUL

BLACK PANTHER #27 CWI: If there's a single book in all of the post-CW stuff that is truly foundering for an identity, I'd call it this one. While I suppose having "FANTASTIC FOUR II" makes some marketing sense, it's not what I, as a consumer am interested in a book titled "BLACK PANTHER". As a FF comic, it reads reasonably fine -- despite the move to magic right before the end, you can't really ask for more reasonable action. There's even a few genuine laughs here (I particularly liked the "Oh, I'd have thought you'd have a plan for that." "We do: Sue" sequence), and the book ends in a potentially interesting place -- at the end of the MARVEL ZOMBIES mini-series and the attack upon Skrullos by the Galactus-Zombies. Which means it isn't just FFII, it is also EXILES II. None of that means I didn't like it -- I actually thought it was definitely no less than a high OK, possibly a low GOOD -- just that it is really really weird that this storyline is happening in "BLACK PANTHER"

NEW AVENGERS #30 CWI: Based on the last few issues of this, and the start of MIGHTY AVENGERS, it feels like Bendis has finally gotten the trick of writing a team book. The only thing that didn't work too well for me (other than general "when is everything happening, in relationship to 'Back in Black' and 'Fallen son'?", but it's less of a pain for me than in ASM for some weird reason) was the staging of the "Good Intention" spell and Jessica's reaction -- she's acting all funky and no one but the audience notices? Meh. But, yeah, I thought this was a solid read, the use of jumping around in the linear narrative is working well, and I enjoyed all of the banter and action. Can't ask more from a super-hero funny book, so GOOD.

NOVA #2: Almost forgot this one, since it doesn't have the "CWI" on the invoicing. There was something about this issue I really liked -- the coming to CW from the outside, or Stark's myopia, or Justice's regrets, or the possession scene, or the trigger-happiness at the end. Or maybe all of it, and how it was a pretty dense read too. I'm surprising myself here: GOOD.

PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #7 CWI: Heh. Yeah, that was cute. OK

THUNDERBOLTS #114 CWI: Working for me a lot better this issue; I really do like how the villains just can't seem to work together. If you're going to have 22-pages of pretty much nothing but battle, this is how I like to see it. OK.

Other than Spidey, nothing worse than an "OK" in the bunch; contrast that to what OYL looked like, or the state of most post-52 DC books -- its not a wonder than Marvel is kicking DC around the playground these days.

What did YOU think?

-B

Stealth mode: Graeme realizes that he really, really likes Fracbaker.

I really don't think that I've gushed enough about THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST yet; the fifth issue came out this week and, as with the earlier four, made a quiet but substantial leap towards my heart. There's something (appropriately?) stealthy about this book, and the way that its blend of epic story, action set-pieces and comedy redefines the character and your (well, my) expectations about him that were set by his appearances in Power Man and Iron Fist growing up - although that part of his history isn't ignored, by any means, and Luke Cage's appearances in the series are highlights without being overwhelming. The writing in this book manages to play to both Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction's strengths, but the voice is so consistent, and so consistently not-Brubaker and not-Fraction, that it doesn't necessarily feel like a book written by two people; instead, you get this third writer, whom I'll call Med Fracbaker, who can apparently not only do it all, but do it all with a smile on his face (This fifth issue is full of moments that are just funny, which isn't something that I really would've expected from an Iron Fist book). Luckily, they're matched with an artist who can also pretty much do it all - David Aja's art has moved from a near-Michael Lark realism in the first few issues to something simpler, yet kind of more effective, by this point, but he's also getting more playful and interesting with his layouts; the last couple of issues have each included a page that takes advantage of the particular properties that only comics can offer (The staircase scene in #4 was really, really good. Simple, but effective; this issue's repeated panels with one panel of flashback is another comic-specific trick, rhythmically, but again it works without being showy). Even outside of that playfulness, though, Aja manages to convince you of what he's drawing whether it be two friends eating take-out or crazy martial arts fighting onboard a moving train, which isn't as common as it should be, and definitely more welcome because of that.

Iron Fist is, pretty much, the superhero book for people who don't like superheroes right now. It's not just that it's done skillfully, but that the "it" that's done skillfully is pretty ambitious in scale. It's an adventure book that takes place across multiple time periods (The majority of the flashbacks at the start of the series seemed like world-building, but as we get closer to the conclusion of this first arc, they're becoming more and more important to the core story), mixing genres and the mysterious with the mundane, and doing it all with a sense of humor and its own ridiculousness, without being ashamed or apologetic for that ridiculousness. The fifth issue continues the work that's been done in the previous four, but manages to make this middle chapter satisfying in its own right (Again, not as common as it should be); it's Very Good, and a reminder that the series really is, quietly, one of the best things Marvel's putting out there these days.

We hate it when our friends become successful: Graeme looks at a movie tie-in, cries.

SPIDER-MAN AND THE FANTASTIC FOUR #2: Here's the thing - I really, really like Jeff Parker's writing, and I really like Mike Wieringo's artwork but, for the second issue in a row, this product of their holy union falls surprisingly flat. The art is a strange indicator of my feelings about the rest of the book; the first page gives you something that both looks like Wieringo and not like Wieringo at the same time. It's the fault of the inking, I think... Wade Von Grawbadger's line is maybe too thin for Wieringo's work, taking away the solidity and weight of his pencils and - in the third panel, and elsewhere throughout the book - offering up weirdly distorted versions of the otherwise consistent faces Wieringo provides. It's not that it's bad, in any kind of scale, but it's... off, somehow.

The writing suffers from a similar problem. Jeff Parker has these characters down, and the dialogue between characters has just the right tone of comedy, but somehow the story still ends up as curiously uninvolving. What is it? The abstract nature of the threat that seems at odds with the otherwise old-school feel for the book (When Johnny Storm comments, "Man, I'd kill for some Galactus about now," it's hard not to agree with him)? Maybe - The relatively action-free, benign threat feels too light and inconsequential for a four-issue series, the kind of plot that would've been dealt with in one issue back in the old days (or even today, in a Marvel Adventures book)... and that's before we get to the contrivances that mean that the main characters aren't affected by the plague that seems to affect everyone else in the book, even other superheroes, further undermining the weakness of the plot.

It's a shame; I want this book to be successful. I want this book to work, and to have a million fans who read it and think "Hey, that whole Civil War thing, not so great compared with fun books"... But it's just not there yet. It's Okay, but given the people involved, I really wanted it to be much better.

It started slowly and I thought it was my heart, but then I realized: Graeme watches the Countdown start.

And this is where Brian and I disagree again.

COUNTDOWN #51: If you're wondering just how long it took DC's next weekly miniseries to become annoying, the answer is three pages. Sure, I was slightly irritated by the cover, which swallows 52's logo (As dumb as it may sound, that really doesn't sit well with me; 52, due to the cutout logo, news scroll along the bottom of the page, and JG Jones' amazing covers, had a very particular visual identity for their covers. By essentially reusing the logo for this series, it feels like a bastardization of that identity, especially without the scroll and the fact that there won't be any cover auteur to try to give this series its own cover look. It reinforces the half-assed, cash-in feel that this series already had to fight against), but it took me until Darkseid appeared and said the following line that I got really pissed:

"I see the time fast approaching when existence itself shall be recreated, and Darkseid shall be its architect."

Surprisingly, it's not Darkseid's use of the third person when talking about himself that annoys me - that's actually kind of charming - but instead the idea that all of existence is about to be recreated. Didn't we just go through that, last week, at the end of 52? And if we didn't, then we definitely went through it the year before that, at the end of Infinite Crisis. Add that to the cover blurb "So begins the end!" and I wanted to give up already. DC, I am a complete fanboy for your superhero universe, so it pains me to say this but still: Stop with the fucking reboots already. As soon as they become an annual process, they're meaningless - not only do they stop being epic stories in their own right, but they completely invalidate any attempt at dramatic tension in every single story that you publish; it doesn't matter what happens to anyone or anything if you know that "existence itself shall be recreated" before you celebrate another birthday, and even the threat of that doesn't have any real weight whatsoever coming exactly a week after the last time that it happened.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the rest of the issue is, for me, the worst tendencies of recent DC, but moreso - It's full of continuity porn and characters that appear without introduction and act without explanation. A character gets killed, and I have no idea who she is, how she got there, and why I should really care... As a first issue, it's pretty much a failure, because no-one unfamiliar with the characters could really follow just what's going on, and more worryingly, nothing that's happening is interesting enough to intrigue those unfamiliar into sticking around to find out. There's the occasional line of nice dialogue, and the art by Jesus Saiz is solid enough, but it's a mess in terms of giving the reader enough to feel substantial or worthwhile, somewhat surprisingly; In that we know that Jimmy Olsen is supposed to play a large part in the series, why not start the year with him, a character that almost everyone in the world who's heard of Superman knows, instead of Duella, Jason Todd and various mentions of the multiverse? Paul Dini's a smart guy, so I really don't get why this book doesn't put its best or at least most recognizable foot forward, instead of this Crap effort.

It's way too early to say that this series is going to be a failure - 52 also started pretty roughly, I seem to remember, and the second issue of that series was definitely more successful than the first - but after reading Countdown's opener, I am suddenly very worried that this really is going to uphold the standards of World War III, rather than 52. I'll pick up the next issue - Hell, I'm a fanboy, I'll probably pick up all of the series and hate myself for it - but I'm certainly not that hopeful about it...

Is there a natural "Countdown" joke for the title? Hibbs starts 5/9 off.

52 was special in a way because it was the "first of its kind" -- I think a pretty significant percentage of the comics buying population "bought into the experiment"' that is to say, once you reached, say, Week 12 or so, you decided whether you were "in for the year" or not. That's pretty much what my sales charts say -- there's peaks and valleys (and some absolutely unexplainable dips, but wait for those until I have all 13 weeks I'm capturing on 52, before I present the data, probably in a Tilting), but the through-line of week-to-week sales is really remarkably strong. I really really thought we'd lose half of the readership between #12 and #30, and that simply didn't happen.

I think I made the comparison here, earlier, between 52 and COUNTDOWN, and LOST and HEROES -- HEROES upped the ante for what a long-form drama (on Network TV, because, of course, THE SOPRANOS, or THE WIRE, or even, really, THE SHIELD and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA showed what the promise actually was) could be. That's pretty much the expectation of the audience, that each thing will be better and stronger that what proceeded it.

LOST really needed to step up its game (and, yeah, it pretty much has with the last few episodes -- I'd personally put the turning point back at the Tales From The Crypt one), but who knows if, because of the downtime, the audience it once had will come back?

So, I've thought, since the moment they announced this book, that COUNTDOWN needed to launch really really strong, in order to overcome the innate suspicion of the audience.

And yeah "#51" is a pretty good first issue.

There's action, there's mystery, there's a lot of universe building, and I like a fair amount of the initial characters, and/or underlying continuity enough to be happy.

I had problems, though, of course. First, I thought it was pretty left-field to have Duela Dent and Jason Todd be the main players in this first issue, particularly with the whole casual "I may be from a neighboring earth, but..." comment. I was ready to chalk that up to "well, yeah, she's claimed 20 different identities since her first appearance" (and there's never really been any real resolution to who she really IS, for the 428 of us who actually CARE), but then there was the whole Monitors-with-guns thing (which is, really, stranger than strange.... I already want them to go away!), and they cack her, and, WTF, THERE'S STILL NO CLARITY ON WHO SHE EVEN WAS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

I mean, doubleyou-tee-eff, to the extreme.

The Mary Marvel scenes were nice, but, huh? when was she in a coma? Did I skip over some stray line in 52 Week 50? She was in that, right? I don't remember her getting hurt that bad?

Dramatically, I'm not sure if the plot works. The Countdown is to the Great Disaster, and only Ray Palmer can stop it. Well, OK. So he will. Certainly, we're not going to end up with a post-Great Disaster DCU. Who would want to read that? So, there's not a lot of underlying tension to this.

And my big worry is, like 52, they don't actually have fifty-two comic books worth of story for this. Again, to go back to the (wrong-headed) Television analogy, I don't think that BATTLESTAR GALACTICA or LOST actually has 22 episodes worth of "story" any given "year" -- 12-16 episodes seems like the much smarter way to go. 52 maybe had twice that range of actually interesting-within-themselves issue. And the other third was "filler".

I won't pay $3 for plate-spinning (not that I pay full retail, but you know what I mean), so I'm not willing to embrace COUNTDOWN the way I embraced 52 -- I decided I was ON the ride real early. COUNTDOWN I will be taking week-by-week.

And based on week 1, I'll be getting week 2. A tentative (and low) GOOD.

-B

Time Enough At Last: Late Reviews from Latey McLaterson...

This shows you how behind I am. I actually wrote my original opener: "So much time and so little to do!

Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it."

three days before Graeme wrote his similar opening, and now of course it'd just looks foolish if I tried to use it.

A lot has been going on, however, some of which I should be able to fill you in on by the end of this week, but while the wolves have stopped clawing at my door:

52 WEEK #52: Despite having so much stuff that typically drives me crazy (time travel! expositionitis! arbitrary plot turns!) I ended up enjoying this very much. In fact, it ended up making me wanting to sit down with all 52 issues and read it all in a go--which I assure you is something I never even conceived of in the previous 51 weeks. I also dmired the elegance of having actions moving backward in time run right to left while the play of time runs left to right (like that double-page spread of Supernova chasing Skeets) which is such a natural use of the comics form it seems completely intuitive reading it. I don't know, maybe I've been won over by all the ass-kissy interviews over on Newsarama, but it really does feel like a big old goofy valentine to the DCU and a triumph of professionalism. (So all the weirder that Dan Didio's DC Nation page thanks everybody BUT the creative team, right? Plus the special thanks to Kristan Morrison, which you just know has gotta be one helluva juicy story, and it gives you an idea of that while DC can do this sort of thing--make a weekly comic and a huge sprawling year-long story--it may not be able to do it without talent, editorial and production ending up at loggerheads or something.)

So, yeah, I'd go with a Good for the whole experience, I guess? It was fun.

ALIEN PIG FARM #1: First issue promises this book to be Dukes of Hazzard Meets Alien which sounds just so crazy it might work. But after getting burned by City of Others #2 (among the more stupid acts of fiscal optimism in my comic buying history), I'm even less down with Steve Niles' patented brand of lazy-ass horror fiction than before. I'll give this issue an OK (it's certainly the best comic co-plotted by a B list celebrity I've read in the last year) but fully expect this to be the zenith of the series.

ALL NEW ATOM #11: Maybe if we'd seen Ryan carrying the torch for wassername since issue #1 this storyline would've worked, but...uh, nope. Just didn't work at all for me. Eh.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #21: Plenty of people whose opinion I trust (Paul O'Brien, Hibbs) are pretty underwhelmed but I could put this stuff on stale crackers for a whole year and still consider myself Lord of the Feast. (Yeah, I dunno--I'm channeling bad faux-Shakespeare through my fillings or something.) Pretty pictures! Clever words! Grown-up Kitty Pryde a million times sexier than that hideous "Coyote Ugly" thing Claremont was going for! If you liked early X-Men (and I mean, Claremont and Cockrum early) where half the pleasure is the trip, you'll think it Very Good. Obviously, I did.

AVENGERS INITIATIVE #2: Slott's either working the "I'm going to make you come to admire characters you hate" or the "I'm going to make you come to hate characters you've come to admire" angle and it's telling that I still can't tell which one. Sadly, it's not because he's being super-subtle or anything; I just think the whole thing is a badly staged mess. The take on the military here is both too cynical and too optimistic simultaneously to really work--you gotta buy that the higher-ups would try and cover up a death in training, for example, and unless a recruit died being tortured in a hazing incident gone wrong or something, I don't think that would happen. It's interesting that American comics have this ongoing interest in the military and I can't think of a single writer who is able to convey any interest or experience with the military whatsoever (apart from, of course, Garth Ennis).

As is the case with most comics, all of that would probably be forgiven if the art was kick-ass, but there's a very lame double-page spread of "all out war!" that's just six people climbing on top of three jets that shows how overwhelmed or disinterested the artist is. As you can tell, I found the whole thing deeply, deeply Sub-Eh.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #3: The art felt rushed here, which really puts the kibosh on the "unlimited budget" thing comics brag about from time to time (there's an enormous undead quadrille taking place and we don't get to see it once?) and the script had at least one big gimme that could've worked a little better. But really my biggest complaint is the story is wrapping up next issue and it feels like it's just revving up. Good stuff, but not quite as good as last issue.

CITY OF OTHERS #2: Last issue, I was caught by the "narrative voice" and the "dream-like nature" of the narrative so I signed up for the book, figuring I should reward Steve Niles for trying something a little different and man was that a HUGE mistake. This issue cranks up the retarded hack factor by about a billion, as it's revealed that the last of a race of vampires are fighting an army of zombies built by a mad scientist named (God help us) Chunx and only mannequin/protagonist Bludowski can turn the tides. The whole thing is similar to Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's visit of classic horror archetypes in Swamp Thing--and by "similar," I mean "a sad, pathetic farce compared to." My only hope is that Mr. Wrightson is getting enough cash from this to build a solid gold statue of himself. Awful, awful stuff.

DETECTIVE COMICS #832: I was three steps ahead of this thanks to the shout-out to film classic The Third Man, but how can you not love The Terrible Trio? I had some quibblage but it was pretty OK, overall.

GREEN LANTERN #19: I was flipping through that Wizard Commentaries book on Friday, and reading Geoff Johns', Ethan Van Sciver's and (I think) Pete Tomasi's commentary on the making of Green Lantern: Rebirth was pretty telling. It went something like:

JOHNS: It used to drive me crazy that they kept having Hal travel cross-country to find himself. The first time was fine, but then they kept having him do it over and over and it made no sense to me. Hal Jordan knows who he is: he's a bad-ass.

SCIVER: Totally. Part of why I was so excited to work with Geoff on this project is that we were bringing back Hal Jordan, bad-ass.

TOMASI: In fact, when Geoff first turned in this scene, we had a long talk about whether Hal seemed enough of a bad-ass, and Geoff went back and tweaked a line or two so that Hal was two times badder, and at least three times assier, than before. And it turns out that was just what the scene needed.

And that probably explains this whole issue where Hal Jordan, bad-ass, must save his old girlfriend while not giving into the Cosmic Vagina Trap of his new girlfriend. (Now that I think about it, if this book had just had that classic Neal Adam cover of Green Arrow dramatically hollering, "Green Lantern, NO!!!! If you put your penis in Star Sapphire's vagina, the EARTH is DOOMED!!!" it'd be awesome.)

Nice art, though. And that Sinestro Corps back-up was great. So, OK.

INCREDIBLE HULK #106: I keep forgetting that World War Hulk is its own mini, so I was surprised and bummed that instead of "Hulk Smash!" we got "I Was A Teenage Tao," part 1. Pretty decent as far as set-ups go, but can we get to the smashing, please? OK.

MARVEL ZOMBIES ARMY OF DARKNESS #3: Nice little resolution of the cliffhanger, and thanks to the amusing cameos (Hey, Nextwave!) I ended up reading it with an amused grin on my face pretty much all the way through. Considering I find reading a comic book recreation of a Bruce Campbell character as innately beside-the-point as listening to a Playmate of the Month read an audiobook, that's quite an achievement. Highly OK if you're a Marvel nerd.

MIDNIGHTER #7: A very cool idea and truly awful execution make this an interesting misfire of a book, as Brian K. Vaughan tries to tell a Midnighter story backwards in order to show...what? Even if you can buy the change in Midnighter's powers (from being able to see every move in a fight and pick the best possible outcome for himself to being able to do that, apparently, all the time), it really doesn't seem to have any point other than an initially amusing splash page. (Maybe it's a veiled critique of how formulaic Midnighter stories are?) If you read the story from back to front (forwards in time) it's not even really a story as much an extended opening scene. To make matters worse, it seems like BKV only had the time or inclination to think about how to make the first and last three pages resonate as pieces to be read either forwards or backwards and the rest seems just tossed out there with maybe half an effort made for some resonance, if that (characters at the top of a page saying, "that's disgusting!" are reacting to a comment by Midnighter when read in one direction and, uh, something disgusting in the other direction).

Nice art by Darick Robertson and maybe BKV couldn't have pulled it off if he had really put his back into it, but man, was it disappointing to seem him not even try--this may be the most dashed-off lazily ambitious piece of hackwork I've seen from a major comics talent since the last time I read a Steranko story. Awful.

PUNISHER #47: The story of the discarded mob wife who's back for revenge would make a perfectly fine crime story even without our man with the skull chest--and that's just the kind of thing this book needs to make it a Very Good read. I'm enjoying this arc a lot.

Damn, I had just a few more reviews but they're never going to get finished the way work is dogpiling on me. I'll try to wrap this up tomorrow.

We can't take our eyes off your t-shirt and ties combination: Graeme finishes up last week's books just in time.

So many comics, and really, so little time. With Countdown launching tomorrow, I feel I should try and get at least some of the biggies from last week out the way today, so bear with me if I rush through some...

AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #2: Wow, it's like this book was written to piss my little liberal self off. Not only do we get George W. Bush as Real American Hero ("I'm not going anywhere. I made a promise to the American people... that during this time a' war, they'd be safe at home. So the last thing I'm gonna so... is cut'n'run from mine."), but we also get more Hydra as super-terrorists, just like last issue, and a repeat of the talking point that pissed me off when it appeared in Iron Man: "For years we've called men like Hank super heroes, 'cause they have powers the rest of us don't. But today, serving as part of our proud military... he and his fellow Initiative members are now takin' on the role of real heroes!" This advertisement of our military also contains a character demanding that another character should be "Fighting for your country! Holding the line! No matter what the cost!", and the whole thing leaves a really weird taste in my mouth. If it wasn't for the fact that the book, politics aside, is a dull and uninvolving mess, I'd feel more conflicted about calling it Crap. As it is, though, I kind of wonder how I would've felt about it had I been more of a Fox News viewer.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: SEASON EIGHT #3: And back to the whole "You've really got to know your show to get the big last page reveal" thing from #1, which even gets some commentary on the letters page - A shame, because up until then, I'd been really enjoying the showdown between the newly-returned Willow and Amy. Sure, the last page reveal is very similar to an act-out on the show, but still - Bah. Good, though.

HELLBOY: DARKNESS CALLS #1: Just another example of Mike Mignola's debt to Michael Jackson's seminal "Thriller," this is the series where Duncan Fegredo takes over the art chores on the man with the big red right hand, and... well... it looks better for it. Don't get me wrong; I like Mignola's boldness, sense of design and use of blacks, but Fegredo manages to take all of that and fold it into something that works better as narrative - add that to Dave Stewart's colors and you have a beautiful book in service of a somewhat frustrating first chapter; Mignola's writing has a wonderful shaggy dog quality to it at best, but this feels more scattered than usual. Good, but I wish it had a stronger story for the art to support.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK #106: Or, World War Hulk, part 1. And as much as I didn't want to like this, it's actually pretty Good. Most of that falls on the shoulders of new cast member Mastermind Excello, teenager and seventh-smartest-person-alive, who is pretty personable for a walking McGuffin who goes around to let people know just what happened to take the Hulk offplanet. He's also one of the best things about WORLD WAR HULK PROLOGUE: WORLDBREAKER - the main feature is a pretty boring recap of just why the Hulk should hate the people who pushed him off the planet, but the two back-ups (a reprint of Mastermind's first appearance, and a Mini-Marvels recap of Planet Hulk) are almost worth the price of admission by themselves; if the majority of the book had been that good, then this would've been more than a high Okay.

THE SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1: It had to happen. In the middle of unmasking and Aunt May being shot and "Back In Black" and everything else that Marvel have been doing to poor Peter Parker over the last few years, it was only a matter of time before they did the unexpected and gave us a really surprisingly good Spider-Man story that actually reads as if it's the same characters that you grew up reading. Credit Matt Fraction, who manages to make the current Spider-set-up work in a way that no-one else working with the character has managed, and immediately makes you wish that he was doing this on a regular basis - He writes a story that isn't about changing the status quo or how Spider-Man beats up the latest generic bad guy, but a story about what Spider-Man's meant to be about: family and responsibility. That he also makes you not only believe in the "controversial" (to, um, someone...?) marriage to Mary-Jane but root for it seems like an equally impressive task until you realize that he does it just by making MJ seem like a person in her own right as opposed to a robot who has two tasks (Being fanboy masturbatory material and saying "Oh, Peter..." when Spider-Man is upset). The only letdown for the book is Salvador Larocca's art, which (when he's not doing an admittedly very good job of aping John Romita Sr.) is dead on the page, despite a nice coloring job by Paco Roca. Released just in time for a movie that some of y'all might've heard of, this is Very Good and easily the best Spider-Man comic that Marvel have done in a long, long time.

SHAZAM!: THE MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL #3: It's the bizarro twin of Avengers: Initiative, as Dr. Sivana appears all-but-wearing an "I represent the Bush regime" t-shirt and saying things like "What's this, little girl? The alien creatures are really giant robots?All the more reason to keep them around a while longer. Robots are just machines - - tools for powerful men. Tools of war. And war... is profitable." The unsubtle contemporary political dig feels out of place in the otherwise timeless, child-friendly story, and kind of overbalances this penultimate issue. Yes, it's still Very Good, but less than before, if that makes sense.

SUPERMAN #662: Ahhh, Kurt Busiek - You manage to follow up Arion's prophecy of doom with an issue of Superman actually, you know, thinking about shit and it's still really pretty damn Good. It's a weirdly fun breather issue, and not just because Zatanna makes an appearance and seems to be post-Seven Soldiers for once; you get a nice idea of who Superman is in how he deals with this kind of pressure, and it's not the passive do-gooder of myth. I'm still wondering where the story is going overall, and I could've done without the appearance of Chris from Action, but, Kurt yet again proves why he's the best writer for the Man of Steel not called Morrison in a lonnnnnng time.

SUPERNATURAL ORIGINS #1: I don't watch the TV show - known in this household as "Look! It's Dean from Gilmore Girls trying to look mean!" - so this first issue left me confused and cold, especially with writing that isn't particularly tuned into the comic form yet (The psychic scene would've worked a lot better on TV, where the narration wouldn't have been so superfluous, for example). Eh, but who knows what a Supernatural fan would've thought?

Surprise PICK OF THE WEEK? Sensational Spider-Man Annual - Fraction is pretty much on fire these days, I think, so expect him to completely flame out and start writing some Avengers/Alpha Flight/X-Men Ultimate crossover within the next year or so. PICK OF THE WEAK is Supernatural Origins, because, really, Jared Padalecki's pout doesn't reproduce well on the comic page. What did everyone else read this week, anyway?

You get what you pay for: Graeme on more FCBD books.

Aaaand we're back with more Free Comic Book Day Comic Books That Are Free. If you're going to be wandering into a store this Saturday looking for some priceless (in the sense of it not having a price because it's, you know, free) swag, then I have to admit - You might want to avoid all of the superhero books I talked about yesterday and think about these books, instead. Or, at least, the entry from our Canadian friends in the North:

COMICS FESTIVAL!: Easily the book to pick up, even if you avoid everything else from the day. Just the line-up of talent involved, from Bryan Lee O'Malley, Hope Larson, and Darwyn Cooke all the way to Ryan North's awesome and worthy of festivals on its own Dinosaur Comics!, is pretty impressive, but no-one involved phones it in here. Highlights for me include Kean Soo's Jellaby, just cute enough to melt your heart without making you feel manipulated, and O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim spin-off The Wonderful World of Kim Pine, which will make you hungry for more Pilgrim later this year. It's Excellent in its quality and eclectic nature, and the perfect book to give someone who doesn't know much about comics but is willing to learn.

HUNTER'S MOON/SALVADOR: From the sublime to the... well, the not sublime, let's put it like that. A lazy, lazy effort, sad to say - With the exception of the one page hype piece at the start of this book, this pretty much feels as if someone's just put the two books together by accident - the excerpts shown stop without warning, and don't offer any tension or even reason to read any further. Disappointingly Crap; the books and the publisher deserve better, I think.

TRANSFORMERS: OFFICIAL MOVIE PREQUEL #1: There's one thing I don't get about publishers releasing previously released comics almost entirely as they appeared before for FCBD - DC are by far the worst at this, with both of their books more or less just reprints of things that fans have spent money on in the last year - but I have to admit that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this reprint/repurpose of the first issue of IDW's movie tie-in. Once I got past the whole "That isn't what Megatron looks like! And he turns into a gun!" thing, this proved surprisingly Good; maybe not enough to make me want to pick up the rest of the series, but enough to make me want to see the movie.

UNSEEN PEANUTS: Surprisingly weighty, at least compared with some of the other Free Comic Book Day offerings, this mix of rare (and in some cases, never-before-reprinted) Peanuts strips - along with commentary on why they're so rare - feels like one of the better bargains of the day. Charles Schulz's genius is pretty much one of those things that everyone takes for granted these days, and for good reason, which is just one more reason why this collection of his misfires is Very Good.

VIRGIN COMICS SPECIAL: Pretty much a sampler without that much time, attention or care spent on it, this just collects a few pages from the first issues of four of Virgin's series - Ramayan 3392 AD, The Sadhu, Walk-In and Devi. None of them are much to my taste, so Eh; I found more interest in the text material repeatedly calling Nic Cage's upcoming title "Enigma" when the cover they show calls it "Voodoo Child".

COMICS 101, WIZARD: HOW TO DRAW and IMPACT UNIVERSITY #3: This year's "learn to be a comic creator" books almost work well together. Comics 101, a compilation of essays from creators of TwoMorrows' magazines like Draw, Alter Ego and Rough Stuff, is a slightly schizophrenic book, mixing "how to" basics with a brief history of the medium in America, but it's a hefty and Okay read. In comparison, Wizard's magazine is frothy and all about the spectacle, but just Eh in terms of content - it's not incredibly helpful, but has unintended humor like Joe Quesada announcing that covers should reflect the stories inside. Maybe he should tell the rest of Marvel Comics that... Impact's Okay anthology moves between surface finish and dry basics, with writing that follows the two extremes, but arguably works best as a bridge between the two earlier titles. Not that I think that they planned it that way, mind you...

As I said yesterday, I didn't even get the chance to read everything - Somehow I missed out on Dark Horse's preview of The Umbrella Academy (by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and Casanova's Gabriel Ba), the First Second preview for The Black Diamond Detective Agency (Eddie Campbell's new book) and Tokyopop's Choose Your Weapon, to name just a few. There's a complete list of books available here, but why not just go into your local store and pick up whatever catches your eye?

Me, I'm not going to follow my own advice, but that's because I'm not going to be in a comics store this weekend - Kate and I are heading out east for a whirlwind tour of friends, culture and pizza-that-is-apparently-very-good (And when I say "whirlwind," I mean "less than 48 hours"). Expect more from me on Monday, when I will be very tired indeed.

All this, and World War, too? Hibbs Hulks Out

INCREDIBLE HULK #106, WAR WAR HULK: PROLOGUE: These are of a set, so let's look at them like such. I'll cop to the fact that, in my little secret fanboy heart, this is the crossover this year that I'm most looking forward to. Why? Because it seems pretty "pure" to me: They made Hulk mad, now Hulk SMASH! Pretty hard to screw that up, and its a nice clean line.

The PROLOGUE is more or less "here's what got us here", but does a pretty good job of not feeling like a clip show. Nothing is recycled, just recapped. Its a pretty effective presentation of the basic information, and I wasn't bored while reading it (especially since I read all of the issues its discussing already). It also reprints the obscuro first appearance of Amadeus Cho from that issue of (second series) AMAZING FANTASY so no one has to sweat collector’s prices (if, indeed, they were). But the real winner of the issue is the "mini-Marvels" bit, which is a complete piss-take on the whole story. That alone is *almost* worth the entry price by itself.

In HULK #106 the last of the pre-arrival bits fall into play -- Jen is depowered (though, gah, way to trash SHE-HULK before it ships [and, huh, still not shipping by 5/9 either, it looks like, based on the East Coast shipping lists]), Amadeus Cho puts himself into play, Ol' Doc Sampson shows himself to be as big of a dick as Reed, et al. Its all reasonably well written, and I loved the art as well, so hooray.

One thing that bothered me is the Continued Dickafication of the Heroes-in-Authority -- Reed's rationale is weak, at best, and you'd think the World's Smartest Guy (who is off-planet in FF, isn't he? Maybe it's a clone-robot!) could come up with something better, Len Sampson also comes off very very badly -- you'd think a licensed mental health professional might have a greater sense of ethics, wouldn't you?

I suppose one can argue "Civil War" either way -- I don't much *buy* the pro-side arguments, but its clear that something similar initially happened in the US post 9/11 -- but in WWH, I really can't see this as anything but "the illuminati is ABSOLUTELY wrong". They kidnapped him, they exiled him, and they left him a giant-planet destroying bomb of a ship as their bonus prize. They killed his wife and unborn child. They MADE the monster what he is.

So, yeah, I'm rooting for ol' Jade Jaws.

The problem is they're pretty unlikely to let him kill Tony or Reed -- though I suspect Black Bolt or Dr. Strange might be possible -- nor can he really "win" in a "war", so it is a little hard to see how this can have a satisfying resolution, in the weeks before it really starts.

I'll probably surprise everyone by having a shockingly low standard here, and I'll give these both a GOOD.

What did YOU think?

I Wanna Be Free: Graeme looks at some FCBD books ahead of this weekend...

For those who haven't been paying attention to the calendar, this upcoming Saturday is Free Comic Book Day - that 24-hour period when publishers try to convince you to pay money for their wares in the future by employing the popular drug-pusher credo of the "first one," if you will, being "free". There're a ridiculous amount of books coming out this year; enough for me to spend today and tomorrow looking through what's going to be awaiting you for zero dollars this weekend, and even then I haven't seen everything that's going to be available. Let's do the superhero ones first, shall we?

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: This is the strangest of the books released; It's incredibly old-school, with Dan Slott using a traditional Spider-Man plot (I want to be there for Aunt May - but my life as Spider-Man gets in the way!) and even using thought balloons, but with a pretty massive unexplained character appearance - You'll know it when you see it - that begs for follow-up elsewhere. If the rumors are true, and Slott is soon to take over Amazing, then is this a flash-forward to Spider-Man, post "One More Day" (which gets trailed at the back of the book, and is such a buzzkill as to harsh my mellow from the Slott/Phil Jiminez strip; when did Quesada's art get so ugly?), and does that mean that we're heading to some kind of reset button about to be pushed...? Good, if confusing...

THE ASTONISHING WOLF-MAN #1: Everything about Robert Kirkman's new series, from the title down to the slick-but-dull writing screams minor 1970s Marvel... Shame that the artwork, doesn't follow suit - It somehow manages to be stylized and yet unstylish at the same time (Think a blockier, less refined, Cory Walker). There's nothing about this Okay first issue that makes me want to actually pay money for the second issue, but it's fine enough. The previews at the back, for Top Cow's First Born event and the new-look Spawn, aren't particularly enticing, either...

LIBERTY COMICS #0: Heroic Publishing deserves praise for standing up to Marvel's attempt to use their Champions trademark, but not so much praise for this anthology spotlighting their pretty-generic female Captain America in pretty-generic Captain America-lite WWII stories. All of the stories trade on a weirdly idealized version of what WWII must've been like, right down to the bizarre "Japanese Internment Camps aren't that bad really" feature. Eh.

MARVEL ADVENTURES: IRON MAN/HULK: Marvel's kid-offering for the day hypes up their two upcoming launches, Iron Man and Hulk. Neither strip comes up to the level of something like Jeff Parker's Adventures work, although Fred Van Lente's Iron Man comes close (Pepper Potts in particular is a lot of fun) - Sad to say, though, the highlight of this Okay book is probably the non-headlining third strip, a new Franklin Richards short.

NEXUS: As much as I love the character and this strip, this greatest-hits compilation is a missed opportunity to introduce fans who are unfamiliar with Nexus to the whole shebang, focusing instead on scenes that the creators' favorite scenes shown mostly out of context. I'm still looking forward to the return of the series, but this Okay book could've, should've, been better.

You'll notice that I didn't mention either of DC's attempts, JLA #0 and The Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #1. One of the reasons why is that both of them are reprints - the Legion book, a tie-in to the cartoon as opposed to the Waid/Kitson team, actually only came out last month - and another is, well, I didn't read the FCBD editions. But nonetheless, JLA is a fair enough sample of what the regular DC Universe books are like these days (Okay enough continuity porn), and the Legion book seems on par with the TV show, neither of which are particularly more than Okay to me.

Tomorrow: The indie books, including the one that you should go out of your way to pick up.

52 Weeks Later: Hibbs on What Was Wrought

52 WEEK 52: So, I have to admit I am a little torn. The final issue of 52 is kind of two different things, really. There's the full-length (or there about) "multiverse, multiverse, who-has-the-multiverse" story, which seems almost tangential, and largely irrelevant to the narrative through-line of 52; then there's the Epilogue-to-the-series bits where everyone (who didn't get one last week) gets their happy ending. The latter mostly makes me happy -- especially the Ralph sequence, which is pretty much exactly what I asked for weeks ago (yay, me!) -- but also goes far in underlining some of the narrative problems of the series: situation A, B and C are all resolved while skipping over some of the "how", and while more or less ignoring certain amounts of story logic. (For example, the whole "prophecy" bit -- when you're "playing fair", prophecy should, in fact, "come true", but with a twist that no one expects because they read the prophecy incorrectly. Like a Wish spell in Dungeons & Dragons, y'know? "I wish for 1 million experience points" "OK, your character ages 60 years, mark off 6 points each of Str and Con, and 4 points of Dex")

As a story, I think history will probably judge 52 to be a failure - a very noble and far-reaching failure, to be sure, but a failure none-the-less. Plenty of stuff is left unexplained, or dashed off explanations that don't really make a lot of sense; there's an enormous bloat in the 2nd act where wheels are spinning on mostly really dull stuff (every single thing that happened with Steel, for example, could probably have been contained in a single 22 page story); and, it appears to me looking at things from the outside that the intent and the scope of the story changed from week 1 to week 52 -- shouldn't have there been more meaning in the "people were changed coming back from space at the end of Infinite Crisis"? Which, instead, more or less got tossed under the rug.

However, that's kind of alright, really, given the experimental nature of 52 -- something I don't think any of us really thought was going to work at or, nor, in fact, come out like clockwork the way it did. And it very much raises the stakes on COUNTDOWN, because I strongly suspect the audience isn't going to put up with the annoying tics that 52 had on Project #2. Overall, I very much doubt that 52, the series, deserves much better than a Savage Critic "OK"... and it was actually probably closer to an "EH", but you have to admire both the audacious nature of the idea, as while of the crazy efforts of everyone involved, both on the business side (as exemplified by Didio's column this week), as well as the creative side (who.... uh. Aren't even mentioned in passing?)

As for the specific content of the main bits Week 52, I was reasonably charmed. But, again, I'm not sure how I feel. I *think* when people say things "we want that back", what they actually mean is "we want it back to what it was pre-Crisis -- JLA on e-1, JSA on e-2, Shazam family on e-S, Freedom Fighters on e-X" and so forth, where there was demarcation between the "earths", and where each one was relatively self-consistent.

What I'm less sure of is the value of "Earth-1 is 'smooshed Earth' where everything stays jammed together; but then we also have an e-10 (10=X, get it?!?!) where the JLA heroes are controlled by the nazi party and the Freedom Fighters battle them"

How do I put this? That set up is good for a story, maybe two. BUt it's not really sustainable in terms of audience interest over the next umpty decades. Why? Because the audience wants to read about the "real" version of a character. The Freedom Fighters on e-10 can't be much more than a McGuffin (or a way to introduce Ubermensch and Fraulein Vundabar) because the "real" FF lives on e-1.

[I also want to say that just because the audience or a reader wants a concept back in play, that doesn't necessarily mean it has commercial success written on it. For a decade or more I thought one of the stupidest mistakes DC made was eliminating the Green Lantern Corps -- what a brilliant tool for generating ideas and stories! But that doesn't mean I want to read a monthly GREEN LANTERN CORPS comic book, running parallel to GREEN LANTERN itself]

Obviously, at this point, it's probably not even possible to "unsmoosh" Earth, even if that what people REALLY wanted, but this does feel like a way to keep 52 plot devices, rather than actually bring back the multiverse in any meaningful way -- especially because there are only AND SPECIFICALLY 52 parallel worlds, rather than an infinite number of them.

Anyway, despite all of that nitpickery, as a single issue I really rather enjoyed the romp, and the spirit on display, and anyone jumped off during the series, or, really, cares about the DCU at all would do well to pick up this issue -- I thought it was a solidly GOOD comic, though I might be a little more rose-colored than I should be.

What did YOU think?

-B

(49 plus) 3 is the magic number: Graeme gets to the end of things.

52 WEEK 52: And so, it's over. I found myself bizarrely excited about this issue, ahead of time - Not because it's the end of the series and thank God, but because it's the end of the series and I'm all fired up and excited to see how and if they wrap it up. I've been rereading the series in chunks over the last few nights, and was surprised by how well it holds together, despite the continual and ever-present mad rush on behalf of the creators to keep all of the balls in the air at once. I'm already in the nostalgic break-up mourning period about 52; the book was never perfect, I think to myself now (Hell, sometimes it wasn't even good, when taken in individual issue servings), but that was half the fun - The creators were present throughout the whole series, in their missteps (Ralph Dibny going insane in week thirteen, which wasn't only never followed up on, but pretty much ignored as soon as he appeared next, for example) and their biases and familiar tics (Greg Rucka taking Montoya through the end of a storyline that started, what, way back in his Detective run; Grant Morrison's humanism from his Animal Man run influencing whoever decided to give Buddy another happy ending) and even at the very worst, the whole thing sang of the wonderful joy and uncertainty of creation.

That feeling comes through strongly in this final issue. Like the conclusion of other plots, it's practically a full issue following one plot thread, and like the conclusion of other plots, it's somewhat unsatisfying, with plot beats coming from nowhere and not being explored fully. But - and maybe this is because I know that I'm really going to miss this series - it's one of the more enjoyable issues that we've seen in the series for a long time. By the time we hit the conclusion of the main plot (and, yes, a lot of the smaller threads and hints from the beginning of the series go unanswered, but that's fine; it's almost more fun that not everything gets tied up nicely), the promise of a kindler, gentler DC Universe has almost been fulfilled - For all the characters that died, we have a conclusion that gives happy endings to almost all of its main players (Vic Sage aside); the epilogue to the Dibny story alone is enough to make you want Mark Waid to write a sequel almost immediately, and that's not touching on Booster's story, the miraculous-but-welcome end to Montoya's journey (Yes, she should have died but when it comes down to it, I don't care), or Steel's pretty-much-reboot. Even Black Adam lives to rip-people's-arms-off another day.

When it comes down to it, the end of the main story isn't new - It's exceptionally similar to the end of Waid's The Kingdom, from, what, ten years ago or so? - but it's fun and offers both a reset and the offer of new possibilities. Whether or not those possibilities ever get followed up on is unlikely (Hello, cynic!), but there's something wonderfully optimistic and entirely welcome about such a massive Big Two event having an ending that doesn't involve someone's tragic sacrifice or wholescale death. This issue may be Good, but the series as a whole is an uneven, unusual, and unexpected Very Good novelty.

Countdown won't be the same, of course. But maybe it can be its own version of good, who knows?

Slow and steady wins... nothing: Graeme wraps it up for 4/25.

So I would've posted this yesterday, but I forgot. That's what I get for writing these things up ahead of time. Something else I get is that Hibbs more or less wrote the same thing as my first two comments - yes, I really wrote this that far ahead for some reason - but I figured why not post it anyway?

(And now Jeff's posted his reviews saying the same thing as well. Goddammit.)

First off, JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5, the second part of the current JLA/JSA crossover. Taken on its own merits, it's perfectly Okay; the story moves along incredibly slowly - Seriously, we're two issues into this so far, and I'm not really sure that the plot has moved along that much at all - but the art is nice enough, and at least there's an attempt at expositionary dialogue to give readers unfamiliar with all of the characters a reason to care about what's going on. Except, as Hibbs pointed out, that expositionary dialogue is kind of a problem. I mean, just the idea that Superman used to belong to the pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes is kind of a continuity fuck in and of itself these days, considering that they aren't the Legion that currently has its own book or anything, but when he then says "Then the first Crisis hit and I never saw them again," there's this moment of the story stopping dead and fans thinking, Wait, what?

On the one hand, sure. It's a metatextual comment on the post-Crisis changes that essentially, slowly, fucked the Legion up, as well as on the Byrne reboot Superman, and in that sense, huzzah! But on the other hand, there had to be a Legion around for Superman to meet after the first Crisis, in order for what we generally assume to be the vague DC continuity fans understood to still be the case to work - Cosmic Boy was around to take part in the Legends crossover, and as Hibbs and others pointed out earlier this week, there was a team of stranded-in-time Legionnaires in the present during the Final Night crossover. And doesn't newly-important-again Booster Gold's origin involve some Legion trickery? It's not that continuity around the Legion wasn't already dicey, but having characters explicitly point this out in stories just underscores how mallable and uncertain continuity is for DC, post-Infinite Crisis; something that wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't for the fact that their comics consistently refer to themselves over and over again. The strangest thing is, they do it to themselves. There's no reason other than fanboyishness for the pre-Crisis Legion to be used here instead of the threeboot version of the characters, but in order to satisfy that fanboy neediness, the creators needlessly confuse everything. Remember that whole "Where are the editors?" thing?

SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #29 has a similar issue with continuity, in that - as Hibbs said last Wednesday (This really is the post of "Like Hibbs said...", isn't it?) - it kind of gives away a reveal for 52 #52 tomorrow (Only kind of, however; this week's 52 also gives the same thing away, when Morrow says "52 worlds... 52 Morrows...And it all comes down to me..." Legion is just more explicit about it, is all) and reveals that this entire plot that's been running in one form or another for the last year is the result of a 52 plot that we still haven't had explained to us properly yet. Fine, congratulations to the creators for tying the book into current DC continuity, but why did you tie a book set 1000 years in the future to current DC continuity especially when current DC continuity seems to want to deal with a 30-year-old version of your characters?

(I know the answer, and so do you: Sales. But still. It's incredibly frustrating to see this book that has the perfect excuse to be complete in and of itself suddenly become another chapter in the ongoing saga of continuity porn.)

That said, that's the least of this issue's problems. With the disappearance of the book's regular creative team two issues earlier than their announced departure (The book is by Tony Bedard and Kevin Sharpe, who have been announced as the creators taking over temporarily in the wake of Mark Waid and Barry Kitson both taking off for pastures new) and the fact that the end of the issue pretty much sees the main characters where they were at the start of the issue, this feels as if it's a last minute fill-in rather than the legitimate next chapter of the story. But that doesn't appear to be the case, because this issue we also get the motivation for the bad guys and the escape of characters who've appeared as captives for the last few issues... So it's not exactly filler, but it's not entirely essential either; it just feels like an afterthought, a tired attempt to get an issue out and make it barely worthwhile... which, considering that Waid and Kitson had managed to make the book feel like it was regaining momentum and building to a big finish, is somehow all the more offensive in its weakness. Crap, sadly, and unless next issue is somehow jawdroppingly wonderful, enough to pretty much kill interest in the storyline completely dead.

Depressing, ain't it?

Meanwhile, in the non-continuity-bashing parts of the reviewosphere:

ACTION COMICS #848: We're completely in the midst of Action's fill-in period, particularly now that the end of Geoff Johns and Richard Donner's first story-arc has now been booted over to next year's Action Comics Annual - Regular scheduling is due to resume somewhere around #855, I think? - and this issue is respectable enough, but falls into the trap of trying to do something "important" with the character... In this case, having him confront a character apparently powered by the religious faith of others. Which is an interesting idea, but there's something unconvincing about the execution that I can't quite put my finger on. Okay, but fairly traditionally fill-in-ish.

DAREDEVIL #96: The other day, Jeff and I agreed that this issue of DD was, despite being well-written and well-drawn and otherwise technically Good, a really bizarrely bland reading experience. Maybe it's because it's a book that's so reliable that it's weirdly dull...? I think that may be the worst compliment ever given to a book, but still...

FANTASTIC FOUR #545: There's a lot to enjoy in this book, as much as the portrayal of Black Panther as Marvel's Batman (or Kurt Busiek; whichever one wins more often in your eyes) can get old very quickly - although watching him take the "most strategically sound" route around the Galactus problem was funny, even if it's probably only part one of a dodge. Dwayne McDuffie keeps with the lighter tone of Peter David in his heyday, and the mix of comedy and adventure feels appropriate for the series... Also appreciated is the fact that Reed and Sue are still part of the book, even as they're not part of the team; it really reinforces the "family" aspect of the FF. There're rumors that McDuffie and artist Paul Pelletier are only the temporary creators on this book, filling in until a more high profile team takes over in September, and I'm hoping desperately that that's not the case - this is a Very Good take, and I'd like to see it continue for awhile.

WONDER WOMAN #8: This third chapter of Jodi Picoult's run on the book feels like a first chapter of something else - Amazons Attack, say - instead of any continuation of the previous two chapters. Part of that is down to Terry and Rachel Dodson returning to the art chores, but it's more down to the fact that the AA plot comes in and more or less overruns everything else. It makes what's already a weirdly out-of-balance book even worse, especially with dialogue like "If you want to hit me, which I'd understand, know that I'm not really here. Whoa - - Deep." At this point, not much of a surprise that this is another issue of the failed relaunch, but still, this is Crap, sadly.

PICK OF THE WEEK is a bit of a cheat, because it's also TRADE OF THE WEEK: The Salon, which is very, very worth your time and money. PICK OF THE WEAK is probably Wonder Woman, which just keeps on disappointing, depressingly. Coming up later this week: 52 finishes! Free Comic Book Day arrives, bringing with it a great book from Canada! And I go to New York for the weekend! Can you dig it?

Inviting Brain Damage: More Reviews from Jeff of 4/25 Books.

In the last 36 hours, I've watched Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, the Ong-Bak-esque Born To Fight, and Clerks 2. It's like I'm trying to give myself brain damage or something. In reverse order, Clerks 2 is mostly Eh (I laughed a few times, but how watchable the movie is depends on the size of your Rosario Dawson crush); Born To Fight is unrateable (oh my god, some of the stunts are truly insane, and I applaud these guys for trying to bring Gymkata into the new millennium, but it's a very grim little propaganda flick at heart) and The Holy Mountain is Excellent, with spots of its vivid imagery still floating in front of my eyes a day and a half later. While on the funnybook front:

DAREDEVIL #96: Lark's art is gorgeous, and Brubaker has done a great job twisting the standard Gladiator story on its head as Matt tries to figure out what to do considering his belief in Melvin Potter's guilt. The problem is that I really, really don't care about Melvin Potter/Gladiator. The quality of the work here is Good, but the subject is Eh, so let's go with OK. Maybe next issue will knock me on my ass.

FANTASTIC FOUR #545: Kinda torn about this because even though the character dialogue was tremendously satisfying (particularly between Ben and Johnny), there was a lot of stuff I couldn't buy. The FF put on bracelets that allow them to survive in space. Okay, fine. Then Ben goes out into the soundless void of space and yells at The Silver Surfer, who then replies. Wait, what? The Black Panther stealthily hops onto the Surfer's board and rides it in to attack. Okay, fine (and pretty cool). But then he grabs the Silver Surfer in an armlock that renders the Surfer incapable of escaping. Wait, double-what? Bri and G. had no problems with this whatsoever, so I guess I'm just the "Buh-but space is soundless and the Silver Surfer's can channel the Power Cosmic through his entire body" nerd. Well, this nerd says Eh.

HEROES FOR HIRE #9: Oh, Jack Kirby, how you've made a hypocrite out of me. If Jack saw a sequence from a movie or a TV show that he thought would work on the comics page, he wouldn't hesitate to lift it and I love that about his work. On the other hand, that Zeb Wells brings the Heroes For Hire team to the Savage Land just so he can rip off the bug section from the Jackson remake of King Kong annoys the living crap out of me. That the artist can't figure out a way to give any of the scenes a sense of space or movement only exacerbates that annoyance. Sub-Eh dross, sadly.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #5: I'm not sure there's anything I can add to Hibbs' review. This was a Good issue with decent art and some fun characterization, and the LSH shrine in the Fortress sums up nearly everything wrong with DC right now. Putting aside the gossipy side of me that wonders if the reason Mark Waid was mysteriously absent from Supergirl & LSH this week is because that scene seems to shit on 28 issues of hard work on his part (more, if you count his involvement with other Legion reboots), that scene underscores how much DC relies on selling my own childhood back to me to make its cash. Actually, considering what a good (albeit depressing) definition of superhero comics today that is, let me try and tighten that up somewhat: the scene with the LSH shrine underscores how much DC relies on having kidnapped its own history and ransoming it back to us. Hibbs argues in his review about how DC needs to make clear "what IS continuity, and what isn't" but obviously that's the last thing DC is gonna do at this point, because there's no surprise, no delight, to just saying "okay, yeah, it's all back in now unless you hear otherwise." To extend my earlier metaphor, why would you pay the ransom if you know the kidnappers are just gonna release your kid anyway?

Maybe I'm utterly wrong and 52 #52 will lay things out so we'll be able to look at this scene from a story point of view and have it make sense. But the easiest way to have it make sense is this: when a chunk of your readership is people who've been reading these things weekly for decades, the simplest way to really surprise 'em is to give them the things they think they can't have. And giving us a sudden spread of the Legion and having Superman talk about meeting them when he was just a boy is, in the face of Supergirl and the LSH and the Siegel family winning co-ownership of the Superboy copyright, something I sure as hell didn't think we'd have again. It is, let's face it, a neat fucking trick. But like all tricks, it relies on making sure the people on whom the trick is pulled knowing less than the people pulling the trick.