Why couldn't I live that "ultimate power corrupts absolutely" one, instead: Graeme on DC 5/31

Well, this week has pretty much officially kicked my ass. It's mostly work-related stuff - in fact, I think it's entirely work-related stuff, now that I come to think about it - and as such completely disinteresting to all of you, but I just want to announce that Stan Lee had it right: That great power? Really does come with great responsibility.

Let's lose ourselves in the world of DC continuity, shall we?

AMAZONS ATTACK! #2: You know what I'm bored of? Fake "Oh no, we've killed off Superman's Ma and Pa" cliffhangers. Guess what, DC? We know that they're somehow fine - We've survived The Kingdom and Our Worlds At War, both of which (as far as I remember) featured exactly the same ending to this issue at one point or another - "Kansas is aflame! Superman rushes off, griefstricken!" - so it just doesn't work anymore. It's one of a few bum notes in this overall Okay second issue. Will Pfeifer's script is pretty sound overall, and Pete Woods' art is really great, but there's something disconcerting about seeing the return of "Why is this happening? See Another Comic #7! - Ed" footnotes not once but twice. Have I been so mollycoddled by modern superhero comics that the prospect of plots flowing between books, or is it just that I'm annoyed when it happens in scenes that don't seem to have any other purpose in the book other than to drive people to those other comics?

COUNTDOWN #48: I really like Adam Beechen's writing normally - Sorry, people who want to kill him because of Batgirl - but the last page of this issue has ridiculously clunky dialogue: "...I think Lightray's dead. But how... how is that even possible?" "I... I don't know, Jimmy. What does it mean for the universe... when a god dies?" I don't know, Superman, but I do kind of feel that your incredibly melodramatic question - and, in fact, that entire ending, which reads as if it was meant to be a shock and surprise - would have had more power had the cover of this issue not read "Death of a New God" and had you standing over Lightray's corpse. Elsewhere in the issue, it's still as if the series hasn't found its feet yet, but it's (dare I say it) improving slowly. There's nothing here that matches the joy that marked 52's best stuff yet (although Jimmy Olsen's various super powers appearing and disappearing comes close), but this Okay issue did mark the first time that the series didn't feel like a terrible mistake, which has to count for something, right?

TEEN TITANS #47: All-new! All-continuity! Not only tying up their own loose ends, the Teen Titans seem to be becoming the go-to characters to get everything else tied in as well - The main thrust of the issue is following through from Countdown #51 and 48, and ends with the start of an Amazons Attack! crossover. Which, in one way, is kind of cool for the continuity nerds - Now you can work out the timeline for all these events in the DC Universe, finally - but on the other hand, it feels as if the lead characters are just guest-stars in their own book (especially as, of the three main characters in the Countdown-related plot, only one is a regular in this series); the Titans-related scenes feel tacked-on and superfluous, which is somewhat depressing. But then again, this kind of thing is what the kids want... Eh.

On a related note, how bad is it that I was still tempted to pick up the first 52 trade this week, despite having bought the singles, just because I wanted to read whatever extras were included...?

How about a review?

Post Jeff Irony #2 -- he's not here this week, my first solo 8 hour day in a while, and none (not one) of the usual Friday night regulars came by to hang out. Guess I know who the Popular Kid is now (*sniff*) However, Skip Tuttle DID come by -- I haven't seen him in 6 months at least -- but, of course, he came by to say goodbye to Jeff *double sniff*

DRAWING FROM LIFE #1: Jim Valentino's had a pretty interesting career, really -- doing pretty much the definitive superhero parody with normalman, being the One-Of-These-Things-Is-Not-Like-The-Other member of the original Image 7, and so on, but I've always been way more partial to his autobio stuff, really. He was doing it earlier than most guys, and he neither seemed to flinch OR pander.

The problem is that's he's not much of an artist. Don't get me wrong -- he's a pretty reasonable CARTOONIST, but there's more than a few pieces here that I would have liked to see a more ... dunno, "assured", maybe? line on.

Everything in this first issue reads really well, but that Valentino's art hasn't really grown at all in the last 20 years works against it on the flip test (We've not sold a single copy as of yet, though I ordered 10 because I personally like his auto-bio writing) -- he's got some better tricks with use of negative space and what not, but his underlying rendering sadly works against the content in most cases.

The weirdest thing for me is that this is billed as all new material, but it looks really old -- not just because of Valentino's basic craft, but also because it's not really "cleaned up" -- you can see the lines in many word balloons, for example, that I assume are badly erased hand lettering marks. In the 21st century, that doesn't look quaint -- it looks sloppy.

Despite that, I still largely recommend the issue -- I think its stronger stuff than, say, TRUE STORY, SWEAR TO GOD, and there's a nice denseness in the sheer number of stories on display here. I really would like this to sell, because I'd much much MUCH rather be reading this than 80% of the we've-grown-past-superheroes-but-the-market-demands-them output of the Shadowline.

Still, I say: Solid GOOD, and if you like auto-bio, and, especially, comics industry-related auto-bio, this should be in your reading stack.

What did YOU think?

-B

Would you care to let it show?: Graeme doesn't get it.

There are some books that I literally don't understand.

I mean, I read them and understand the plot. That's not what I'm getting at. What I mean is that I read them, and I can see that technically they're fine (everything goes in and comes out in the way that it's supposed to and all the parts move in the directions you'd expect them to), but still can't see any excitement or reason for others to relate to it or even like it, really, in any way. Such is the case with me and THE BOYS, which relaunches with #7 this week from Dynamite Entertainment.

It's not that there's anything wrong with the book, because there's not, not really - Garth Ennis's script follows its themes closely and the dialogue is that convincing kind of unrealistic dialogue that nonetheless reads very well. Similarly, Darick Robertson's art is a fun mix of Dave Gibbons and Richard Corben, clear to read but not clean. It's just that I don't particularly want to read about an Iron Man analog who wants to fuck everything in therapy, or about how comics are the santized version of reality for the public in a world with superheroes... They're ideas that I'm either not interested in, have read variations on before, or just don't get why they're that worth reading in the first place (I have the same reaction, interestingly enough, to a lot of Mark Millar's work; maybe I'm just immune to the charms of non-insane writers from Britain. Which would, perhaps, explain my lack of reaction to the careers of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Also interesting is the way that I don't have the same problem with superhero comics that are equally as unoriginal and uninspired - Perhaps I'm happy with familiarity and getting what I expect, and it's only when stepping outside of the norm doesn't step far enough outside that I get disappointed?). To be honest, it's kind of depressing; I'm sure that I'm missing something by not being seeing how transgressive and/or funny this book seems to be to other people, and I almost feel as if it's my fault as a reader that I find this book a perfectly respectable, but perfectly dull, Eh.

Maybe I'm just a prude.

Anything you can do: Graeme gets started on this week's books.

When I say that the best example of the current state of DC's superhero comics available this week is Marvel's NEW AVENGERS: ILLUMINATI #3, I hope you'll all understand that it's not really a compliment.

I know that Brad Meltzer and Brian Bendis are fans of each others' work - I remember reading an interview between the two where they were comparing notes on Justice League and Mighty Avengers with something approaching glee - but it's a really strange thing to read a comic that so clearly embodies the worst attributes of each of them. On the one hand, I almost want to congratulate Bendis on his incredible ability to write (or co-write; Brian Reed is responsible for some of this as well) a comic that's not so much a story as much as well-illustrated continuity porn fanfic without much of a plot just like Meltzer's current JLA run has been - It's certainly a different style for him if nothing else, as he normally works his fandom into a stronger framework that shelters it slightly. But on the other hand, Good Lord, what the hell is this book?

I have no idea how this saw print, unless it was literally just the "Well, they're all hot creators" thing - Not only is the entire plot of the issue somewhat weak (It's literally "The heroes go looking for the Beyonder. They find him. Then they leave, because he's convinced them that he's gone away... but he hasn't!"), not only is the issue based around an unnecessary retcon of a series and character over twenty years old - and, man, is that depressing to realize - but it's a retcon that doesn't really work, either: If (spoilers) the Beyonder is just a mutant Inhuman who somehow has the powers of a god, and if he remembers Black Bolt and is therefore on some level aware of his origins - as is what's suggested here - then why does he go through the whole "What is this thing you call 'life'?" thing during Secret Wars II? I mean, if he knows that he's not only not a god, but instead a living thing that - at some point - used to be a mortal himself, then why doesn't he have any grasp of that concept?

There's something almost admirable about the way that this issue, much more than either of the earlier issues, seeks to specifically address a subject that was neither a dangling plot point nor a question on any fans' lips, but instead just something that's clearly been bothering Bendis and/or Reed since they read the last time the Beyonder was given an origin and they didn't like it - It's the same (depressing, anal) drive that created things like The Official Handbook To The Marvel Universe in the first place, the urge for things not only to make sense, but to explain to everyone else just how they make sense so there, as well. But sadly, that and the art (which is good, but somehow lacking compared with earlier issues - Maybe it's just me?) are really the only two things that this issue has going for it; otherwise, it's just the continuity porn that DC's big books have been trafficking in for the last year or so with some extra novelty for coming from the other side of the tracks. Awful.

Little Short One, Pt. 1: Graeme rushes in, tells you to buy Gloom.

I was explaining PERCY GLOOM to someone the other day, and the best I could come up with was that it was a philosophical story done by David Lynch and Walt Disney (but without the Nazi thing) in a beautiful, somewhat retro pencil style but with a depressed, disassociative voice similar to Chris Ware's stuff.

The person I was talking to looked as if I was insane, and then walked away wondering what I was on about. The last comic that they'd read was Mike Zeck's Punisher in the '80s, and I think they probably regretted asking what I was reading these days.

Nonetheless, Percy Gloom is a wonderful book, a fairy tale for grown-ups who've lost their faith in humanity and want to get it back. It's calm and gentle in the best way, without sacrificing narrative thrust - What little there is, admittedly, but it's there - but present in such a manner as to making it impossible not to fall for the main character or the book. The entire thing has a dreamlike quality, both in terms of the illogical logic and the old-fashioned, formally daring artwork, and the book itself works best on that level for me; I don't want to analyze it that far for fear of destroying my enjoyment of it, but suffice to say that it is an Excellent book and a leader in the recent spate of worthwhile graphic novels released (See also The Homeless Channel, also out this week, PLAIN Janes, out last week and the upcoming and still to be released The Black Diamond Detective Agency); those looking to spend pennies should have a problem deciding what to spend them on right now...

Of our elaborate plans, the end: Graeme wonders what could've been of Waid's and Kitson's Legion.

I don't think that it's the greatest secret that I love the Legion of Super-Heroes. Besides Green Lantern, I think it's my favorite superhero high concept (As cool as "It's an army of teenaged super-heroes! In the future!" is, "He's a space cop with a magic wishing ring!" is very hard to beat, let's face it), and you pretty much have to have a heart of whimsiless stone not to find the original 1950s stories featuring the characters charming at the very least. My favorite era of the characters - because everyone who loves the Legion has their own era, I think, usually corresponding to when they first found the characters, just like everyone's favorite Doctor Who - is easily the last eight or nine years (!) of Paul Levitz's run on the books, from when Keith Giffen took over on art all the way through him coming back again, after Steve Lightle and Greg LaRoquette (with Mike DeCarlo's beautiful inks... Man...); it was a run that took the soap operatics - and some of the dialogue tics - of Claremont's best X-Men and soldered it onto Silver Age DC weirdness to come up with something uniquely fun and confusing and demanding your attention. From there, it was all downhill for me: every subsequent take on the team was interesting but ultimately not as interesting as what'd come before, whether it was Giffen's byzantine "Five Years Later" storyline or the post-Zero Hour reboot or Abnett and Lanning's revival after that. The stories all walked the fine line between nostalgia and wanting to seem updated and contemporary, and couldn't manage to do so and weave exciting stories into the mix as well.

All of which is one way of saying that the Mark Waid and Barry Kitson relaunch of the title a couple of years ago was both an exciting and depressing proposition. Depressing because, well, it's the second hard reboot of the concept in, what, ten years or so? And exciting because Mark Waid knows his stuff, and loves the concept as much as any fan; even if you're a tepid Kitson fan like me, at least the book would be readable. And it was; for the first year, it was an amazing book, one of the best superhero books that DC published. Seemingly informed by Joss Whedon both in terms of snarky dialogue and pacing (each issue containing a complete story in and of itself, while also moving a larger plot forward), Waid's revival succeeded where others had failed by jettisonning both plot nostalgia (Although he does love his easter eggs) and the need to be contemporary in a book that's meant to be set a thousand years from now. He found the easiest explanation for the quaint nature that's - I think - essential to the Legion working (that the Legion themselves are nostalgic fanboys in a way) and worked forward from there, and if you bought into that idea, the rest was all tightly-plotted and carried out with humor and tension. The first year of the book (as collected in the first two trades of the series, for those who haven't read them) is just Very Good superhero work.

And then the second year happened. And with it, 52.

Now, I have no proof that it was really 52 that derailed the book, but something clearly did, and Waid's involvement with the weekly book that took up everyone's time much more than they'd intended it to seems like a pretty guilty looking suspect. For whatever reason, though, the second year of the book - which, to cheat, really counts as #14 onwards - blew it. There was a wealth of good stuff, but it was unfocused and the tightness of plotting and pacing from earlier was missing. There were fill-ins on the writing and art side, and plots drifted in and out of the reader's attention in a way that suggested that similar drifts were happening for those responsible for the book. It was frustrating not just because I wanted the Legion to be better, but because it had just been better, just a few months earlier. When it was announced that Waid and Kitson were leaving the book with this month's issue, it was depressing but not surprising - You could almost sense that the fight's gone out of both of them, for whatever reason (A feeling helped by the fact that they missed the penultimate issue of their run, letting a big plot moment be handled by the fill-in team who're about to take the book over from them).

So.

SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #30, on its own, is actually pretty good; there are two swerves here that show that Waid is not only playful with his characters but inventively so, and also that he loves the history of them enough to tribute in unexpected ways (Did anyone really see what happened to Cos coming? Or, for that matter, did anyone think it was out of character that he accepted...?). Taken as a single issue, it's as much of a love letter to the series as you would've wanted Waid to end on; respectful of but not tied down by what has come before in the concept's, what, 50-year history. But, depressingly, it's kind of hard to take it entirely on its own - it is the final part of a multi-part storyline, and it fails in that respect - It feels like an epilogue, and that the main battle that was teased in the previous issue has all happened off-panel, which is somewhat disappointing but again, not incredibly surprising given the sway of the last year's books. Also, it rushes a couple of reveals to longrunning plots that really should've been given more space or else abandoned altogether, and in doing so kind of undercuts them entirely. The strongest feeling I had at the end of the issue was one of frustration - that Waid was leaving in the first place, that he hadn't stuck around a couple of more issues to let the story breathe a little more, and that the final issue of a run that started out so strongly was, ultimately, just Okay.

So it goes. Here's hoping that someone at DC really does give the book to Christopher Bird; if nothing else, I know that he's probably a bigger fan of Levitz's run than I am, so we'd have nostalgia to share.

Where did it all go wrong?: Graeme returns, again.

I'm desperately trying to catch up on reviews, after this weekend being much busier than I'd expected - Chopping up Jeff Lester's body takes time, after all - so excuse the rushing through the following books... Luckily, none of them are really worth paying that much time on...

BIRDS OF PREY #106: Gail Simone's heading towards the end of her run with something resembling abandon; this issue's essentially entirely all fight scene as opposed to plot development, and really enjoyable because of that - It's just banter and violence all the way. I'm not sure whether Gail's defined her characters (outside of Barbara and Huntress) enough for them to survive her when she leaves the book, but for this issue it's not something to worry about. Good mindless fun.

COUNTDOWN #49: Hibbs is right; three issues in, and it feels as if none of the plots are in motion yet - It doesn't help that the cover underlines that stalled feeling by featuring three characters, two of which haven't even appeared in the series yet. For all the talk of the writing team of the series having learned from head writer Paul Dini's TV experience, it seems to have been entirely missed that no TV show would get away with such a slow, sloppy start as this book. Crap.

FANTASTIC FOUR #546: After two issues of well-done build-up, this conclusion feels rushed and unbelievable, partially due to the McGuffin Machine that T'Challa just so happens to have lying around at home (It's just one step above "Luckily I have my Beats-All-Bad-Guys-Ometer right here!"); it's as if Dwayne McDuffie was suddenly told by his editors that he really had to wrap up everything he had planned and start working on getting the original team back together in time for the new creative team arriving in four issues' time or else. Both sad and Eh.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1: Obviously a delayed tie-in to the movie, this "Sandman: Year One" issue is surprisingly flat - The origin story is cliched in almost every way (He had a rough childhood! He's trying to prove himself to his absent father!), with no sparkle or surprise in the execution. There's also a strange back-up strip that's so simple that it makes me feel as if I'm missing a context for it... All in all, a somewhat disappointing Eh.

MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #1: All of the fun in this Okay first issue came from the small things - Tony Stark as Steve Jobs, for one thing - and not from the revised origin, which may make the whole thing make a little more sense, but still just comes over as extremely hokey. I wouldn't be surprised if this is more or less what the movie version of the character is like, though...

NEWUNIVERSAL #6: I'm not sure why I'm still reading this book - It's extremely slow, to the point where at the end of this issue (which will also be the end of the first trade), almost nothing has actually happened, in terms of actual plot - but there's still something enjoyable, if seen-before, about its "if superheroes were real" take on the characters. A low Okay, but I look forward to seeing something moving forward pretty soon.

SHE-HULK #18: "A tin-plated tyrant... who thinks he knows more... than everyone else. Remaking the world in his own image. You know who that is? That's not Iron Man, Tony! That's Doctor Doom!" It's almost worth reading the rest of this lackluster, Eh issue (with appalling art - Cliff Rathburn, your inking is really not a match for Rick Burchett's pencils) for those lines alone. Sadly, the rest of the book reads like filler while waiting for World War Hulk to arrive. Didn't this book used to be fun?

Tomorrow, if I have time: Mark Waid's last Legion issue, and why it's both great and sucky at the same time...

Hibbs continues on 5/25

Best laid plans, and all that -- forgot about CEO, forgot the POS computer was arriving, forgot that the order form better get done, forgot that... well, lots of stuff this week, darn it. About a half hour here before Tzipora gets home with my Fast Pass, and I can go in (early!) to the store (Jeff's Last Day!) (FOO!), so bang some out quickly here:

SATAN'S SODOMY BABY: I don't really get it -- this is selling for $20 on eBay already? Apparently part of it is that the east coast got it before the west (Didn't retailers make it clear to Diamond this is Bad Juju? RE: CIVIL WAR #6); part of it is there apparently aren't any reorders available (oh, you wacky Dark Horse, who wouldn't know how to set a print run if it came with an instruction manual!); part of it seems to be that Diamond has decided to not distribute it into Canada, due to content.

But.... it's basically just an issue of THE GOON. Maybe I'm a jaded West Coast Liberal (you THINK?), but the content didn't seem THAT much rougher to me than THE GOON can get.

(even more curious was Diamond's [really?] decision to prebag all of the West Coast's copies before distributing. They don't even do that with the actual Adults-Only comics that have, y'know, penetration in them)

Reasonably funny, very well drawn, just a little over the top -- it's a solid, or perhaps high, OK all around. Just don't pay $20 for it!

CRIMINAL #6: If I have a "problem" with this one, it's that there's not a sympathetic character in sight, yet, in this arc. And yet such is the skill of Brube and Phillips that, actually, I don't care -- I'm enjoying the ride very much, thanks. VERY GOOD, and let's cheat in case I don't get all the way through, very clearly the PICK OF THE WEEK.

MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #1: Honestly, I don't care much for Iron Man in any universe, because, traditionally, Tony's tech has been kind of like Dr. Strange's magic -- it can and is redefined on the fly as needed by the dictates of the plot. The suit makes him such a complete badass, that you're generally reduced to either getting him OUT of it, or making the man have really bad problems (bad heart, alcoholism, creeping fascism, whatever)

I've largely given up on the "real" Iron Man (excepting say, HYPERVELOCITY, below), but there's still a small potential of interest for me in these kinds of "kid friendly" versions.

I don't think, if I was a kid, that I'd have liked this much, but at least they give a noble stab at making Iron Man's origin timelessly work by not having it tied to the Commies, or Desert Storm (Sheesh), but to AIM. Not that I think it *does* work -- largely because of the whole Tech = Magic thing, and you'd think that AIM (if they were to live up to their concept) would have "better magic", but it's a good try, and one I couldn't rate lower than EH.

ANT-MAN #8: Now that we're past the origin stuff, and the special guest stars, this here is the first issue that I think shows what this book will be, on its own -- and its actually pretty entertaining once you get past the absolutely loathsome protagonist. Not much of a surprise, but this is the most "Image-like" (Current Image, not Historical Image) book that Marvel is publishing, and for that, at least, this is a good experiment. The problem? It's also *selling* like an Image comic for us -- to people who still really want nothing other than capes and powers, but have "grown past" just Marvel and DC stuff. You'd think (perhaps) that there actually a lot of people in this boat, but nah, not really -- those people who don't develop a taste past the capes tend to stop reading comics rather than find this type of material. This is probably the first issue of this I have genuinely liked, but I don't see how it has the slightest chance of even making it to issue #16. Still: I thought it was a low GOOD.

SHADOWPACT #13: What a strange strange issue. First off, Scott Hampton draws it (buh?), second off, it basically has none of the book's cast in it, and third, it's mostly setting up month's worth of more stories. Why is that last one weird? Because this, too, sells pretty much like an Image book, and I can't imagine they'd get a third year from this (and I'm surprised they got a second, to be honest). Now, having said all that, I really liked it -- especially with the nice Hampton (!) art, and I'd probably recommend it if it didn't just come to an abrupt stop like: "whoops, out of pages, see you next month!" abrupt, which, as a $2.99 entertainment experience, knocks it right down to EH all by itself.

Right, OK, that should be enough today, eh? Time for work, and getting Jeff drunk enough that he crashes into a tree on the ride home tonight, thereby killing both of us, and avoiding me running the store without him! (Yes, I'm going to miss him, damn it!)

What did YOU think?

-B

See that cat? Yeah, I do mean you: Graeme ignores the comics.

Because you kind of demanded it - Well, "Viewer" did, even if he's apparently part of BBC Canada and therefore may be biased! No comics! Just season (and series) finales of TV shows!

GILMORE GIRLS: I have to admit, I kind of stopped caring about halfway through the season, and kept watching mostly out of apathetic momentum. I found myself in love with this show thanks to a combination of ABC Family reruns of the entire series and being home sick one afternoon, so perhaps I was spoiled by the idea of daily episodes and wittier writing, but too much of this last season seemed to be slow and often nonsensical; you could tell that the writers really didn't know what to do with its characters (Especially Logan at the end of the series: "I love you so much, I can't be without you. Marry me." "I can't." "Okay, I'm leaving you." Wait, what?), and spent the last twenty-odd episodes with plots that stopped, started and went nowhere. Nothing felt organic or even that believable, which may be why I ended up so forgiving of a final episode so entirely unorganic and unrealistic. Instead of complaining that, wait, Rory just all of a sudden gets offered a job covering Obama's campaign for the year and has to leave in three days, and how exactly did Luke manage to sew all of those dropcloths together overnight on his own, I was just somewhat relieved that everyone was getting something resembling a happy ending, no matter how unrealistic. I wanted the characters that I'd enjoyed so much earlier to rest in a kind peace, instead of end up in uncomfortable angst-ridden faux cliffhanging permanence. As an episode in and of itself, it would probably have been unsatisfying and annoyingly full of writerly laziness, but as the end of a disappointing season, it was surprisingly Good.

But I'm glad that it's out of its recent misery, nonetheless.

LOST: If nothing else, I hope that someone in the make-up department got a raise for the subtle-but-noticable way that they managed to age Matthew Fox in the fake-out "flashback" sequences - Ignore the beard, as hard as that was, and you'd notice the flecks of grey in his hair, which has receded ever so slightly from his time on the island. I'm not so convinced about the twist at the end of this episode - It makes me think of the time jump at the end of the second season of Alias, which just ended up being abused and derailing the series in the third season as the writers realized that they really had no idea what to do with the idea. Yes, it makes for a good shocking reveal at the end of a season, but how is the show going to follow up on everything now that we know that they do get off the island?

Much more interesting was everything that was happening in the island timeframe - We had action and adventure and death-defying Russian assassin men with one eye! We had Hurley in a van knocking over the bad guys! Locke back from the dead, and more importantly, back from the crippled - again! Explosions! This season started with some really weak episodes, and it's kind of amazing to consider how much has improved in its second half; its as if the writing staff looked at Heroes and thought, wait, we don't have to have impossibly slow storytelling where we drag things out for weeks on end! We can have episodes that provide some forward momentum for a change! Somewhere around the episode where Hurley found his van, the plot kicked back in and the show became fun again, and more importantly, compelling again.

The end of the season was a series of moments that you've wanted to see all along (albeit punctuated by the flash-forwards that I'm not sure really added that much to the whole thing) - It was Very Good, and enough to make the wait until January next year seem disturbingly long. Here's hoping that it'll give the writers enough time to work out what exactly to do with Future Jack and his magic beard.

VERONICA MARS: This was the depressing one - After another uneven season (Did any show outside of the cancelled OC have a really strong season all the way through this year?), the last two episodes of VM ended up being the strongest the show has been since the first season, and also - not coincidentally - the darkest. For all its Nancy Drewness, this has always been a show about a moral ambiguous heroine who doesn't recognize where the line is, so it's weirdly fitting that the (unintended) final episode is all about how incredibly fucked up Veronica makes the lives of everyone around her - Her father gives up his principles and his ambition to protect her, Wallace ends up semi-naked and electrocuted, Logan... well, he could've had a series of his own to deal with his self-destructive issues, which Veronica only amplified. And at the same time, Veronica herself went singlemindedly along, not even recognizing those whole breaking-and-entering, theft, manipulating her friends things as being not so good for the hero of the piece. It was both Excellent and surprisingly bleak, and would have been even if the show was continuing for another year; as it is, leaving the series with Weevil returning to a life of crime, Keith about to probably lose the vote to keep his job, and Veronica a social outcast again returned everything to the way the first season began and provided an accidental and wonderful circular feeling to the whole series.

That said: Veronica Mars, The OC and Gilmore Girls all ending this year? Whatever am I going to replace these shows with next year? Unlike Hibbs, I liked the look of that Bionic Woman trailer, and Josh Schwartz and Amy Sherman-Palladino both have new projects coming up... I may not be Tim Goodman, but if any BBC Canada or other channels want to send me any screeners, I'd be happy to watch them in the name of scientific review, of course...

Meanwhile, much more importantly: It's Jeff Lester's last day at the store today, and as much as I wanted to do some kind of fake review of him with the punchline being that he's Excellent, it'd be kind of unnecessary; not content with being the moving force behind this blog (I don't think Brian would disagree with that that much), a voice of sanity and humor when needed and the kind of Kirbyhead who gets excited when the Devil Dinosaur omnibus is announced, he's also the kind of man who emails to congratulate me when I manage to work P!nk, Elliott Smith and the muppets into the same post. With no snark or sarcasm, he'll be very very much missed around these here parts.

And, no, I won't be that nice or sentimental when I see him this evening.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad... Oh, never mind: Graeme continues 5/23.

I can't tell if this week is going quickly, or if I'm just getting old and forgetting what's happening each day. Nonetheless, I'm tried and it's almost the weekend, and one of those things is definitely good. So, let's move on from there, shall we?

MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #2: In which we discover that last issue's everything you know is wrong cliffhanger is, in fact, wrong in and of itself - So everything you know is wrong again! Ha! Sucks to be you! Sadly, the "you" in this case turns out in a very real sense to be "everyone who's reading the book," and this turns out to be a second Crap issue in a row.

It's not even that everything is a lie is a lie is that bad of a dodge - It gives some weight to the extended recap that was the first issue, after all - but that it's a dodge that it takes seventeen pages to get to, most of which are filled with meandering dialogue that goes exactly nowhere (Seriously: "I think. I think I am. And so, therefore I am. I think." That's an entire page right there. Or maybe "I remember nothing. Nothing. Nothing!" "He's bad. Real bad." That's a double page spread). And once we get that twist, it's half-undone by the end of the book, where Madman seems to think that maybe it's true or maybe it's not, and Allred tells us that everything happened the way we've previously read it except where it didn't. It's not that I don't want to read existential superhero comics - I'm a Grant Morrison fan, for the love of God - but I don't want to read existential superhero comics that are so weightless and meaningless. None of the concepts are really even thought through, never mind explored fully - Mike Allred writes in his (pretty interesting, but maybe not in a good way) lettercolumn text piece at the back that he wants this comic to be "an epic mindtrip" that evokes similar questions to the ones that 2001: A Space Odyssey gave him when he was a kid, but the only similar question it brings up for me is that "When is this bit over?" part that I had when all the solarized color was being used towards the end. It's an admirable goal to try and create a comic that asks the big questions, but it's a pretty hollow one if all you're really going to do is ask those questions without any real context or intent to try and at least suggest answers.

The art is still really nice, though. So there's that.

Hibbs wobbles into 5/23

It seems like I keep starting each week's set of reviews, but never quite finishing them lately? Gonna try (since it is such a small week) to get through virtually everything by this time next week... COUNTDOWN #49: 52 was always, always, without fail the first comic I read each week. And, three weeks in, its the same with COUNTDOWN. But, I'm reasonably confident that won't be the case a month from now -- I'm really not feeling it. (You know there's something wrong when Doug Wolk's chosen successor starts his second issue review with "Well, that wasn't very good at all, was it?")

I may need to go back and look at the start of 52 again, but it seems to me that by this point in 52, the individual character arcs were all well into play:

Will Ralph find Sue? Will Booster find respect? Will Renee find herself? Will the "space heroes" get home? Will Black Adam fall even farther? Will John Henry... hm, harder that one... make up with Natasha, I guess?

Everything else in 52 gets back to those points, even with all of the flash and dazzle, and, so, 52 was effectively a human story about human motivations.

And, yes, I know its absolutely unfair of me to keep comparing this with 52, but the book physically demands such comparisons.

In COUNTDOWN, here's what I think we have so far:

Will Jimmy get a story? Will the Monitors do [something barely understood by the audience]? Will Karate Kid... well, dunno, but let's go with "prevent the Great Disaster"? Will the Rogues...again, unclear yet again so far, but probably some sort of redemption/destruction split Will Mary find herself (/powers)?

Of these five threads, only the last two seem to have much of a human core around them. #2 & 3 are... well they seem like comic stories ABOUT comic stories, y'know? And Jimmy... he's meant to be the POV character, the "everyman" of the DCU, but ironically that's what renders him the least dramatic, really -- he's Jimmy Olson, Superman's Pal, and ain't nothing gonna happen to him. "Jimmy Must Die!" buttons notwithstanding. He's the safest character in this series, let alone the entire DC universe.

Maybe it will get better, who knows, but at this moment in time, I'm really only vaguely interested, and I don't see any immediate evidence that this is going to change. So: EH.

This issue also starts a backup of "History of the Multiverse", just like 52's "History of the DC Universe" (which really wasn't), and really everything you need to know is the first line: "The Timestream. A place unaffected by the flow of time..." Buh, wha?! AWFUL.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #26: I'm going to pretty much echo Graeme, all the way along -- this is effective, compelling work, and I liked it very much, especially its structure and use of 0ff-panel (esp. the Falcon's speech thing), but one thing bugged me: in the bar where Bucky confronts the redneck guy, the redneck guy calls him a "jackhole". Yet, both Falcon and Luke Cage use "$#!^". That really really bugged me. Other than that? VERY GOOD.

IRON MAN HYPERVELOCITY #5: One of those "and that's why covers are important, kids!" moments -- I had skipped reading #2-4 of this mini, but the cover here made me said "Huh, give it a read" Glad I did -- pretty ripping cyber-sci-fi action that made me think than nothing less than a Warren Ellis comic. I was fairly lost on the stakes, etc, but I was still wonderfully engaged with the story as it transpired, which is exactly what a comic should do: VERY GOOD.

OK, that's enough for right now. More tomorrow, I hope...

What did YOU think?

-B

Oh, if he is dead...: Graeme looks past the veil at the first 5/23 book.

It's completely irrational, I know, but I can't tell you how much that I almost wanted to hate CAPTAIN AMERICA #26. If nothing else, I wanted to at least start this review with some kind of joke about it having been so long since the last issue came out, I wish I could remember what had happened in it. None of this is in any way fair, because none of it actually has anything to do with the book itself; it's all everything else, all the surrounding noise, that had turned me against the possibilities that Ed Brubaker, Mike Perkins and Steve Epting had something good to offer.

By this point, you see, I've started to settle into a slight boredom with the death of Captain America. It's not that I'm not enjoying the Marvel books more these days than I was pre-Civil War, because I am (although I do kind of see the death of Cap as the real "break" between then and now, for some reason, not Civil War itself; maybe because the death of Captain America was an actual event for characters to respond to, as opposed to the end of Civil War the series, which was essentially "Hey! Our seven issues are up!"?), but more that the death feels as if it's been run into the ground by this point thanks to The Confession oneshot and the Fallen Son miniseries and all of the crazy media hoopla surrounding the story itself. I'm a child of the internet age, daddio, and if it isn't a news story that's broken in the last five minutes I'm gone, you dig? That said, I'm a fan of Brubaker's writing - His CRIMINAL #6 this week is just plain Excellent, tight and tense, pulling you into it without trying and barely giving me enough time to wonder whether it's he or Sean Philips who has the smoking women fetish - and felt sorry for him even as I was getting bored of reading characters talk about what Cap meant to them; Bendis and Loeb seemed to be writing scenes that felt as if they should've been Ed's, and I wondered what the actual Captain America book would read like, when it returned. Would its thunder have been stolen, or would it go somewhere else entirely?

The answers, respectively, are No and Kind of. Fittingly enough, the second part of "The Death of The Dream" shows you characters reacting to - to channel Jeph for a second - The death of Captain America, but Brubaker manages to show something beyond the handwringing sadness that we've seen so far. His characters show more genuine emotion and humanity because of the complexity of their responses, and by focusing on that, he manages to move the story (and the series) past Steve Rogers dying. It's an interesting and subtle difference from things like Fallen Son, I think; that series feels as if it's there to remind you, over and over again, that Marvel has done something daring by killing off their character, and as much of a guilty pleasure it may be, it never transcends the sense of "We are so awesome". This issue does so quickly and quietly, not focusing on the death itself but everything that comes after, making the death a story as opposed to an "event", if you can see the difference. More than of his other mainstream Marvel work, it also feels like one of Brubaker's "mature" books, like Criminal or Sleeper - More in a grey area morally and (again, fittingly) more hopeless. Even though I have no doubt that Captain America will live again - I don't even doubt that Brubaker himself has already put plans in motion to bring him back himself, from the scene with the corpse this issue - there's still no easy solution to any of the concerns of the characters in this issue, and it's that complexity that makes this a Very Good return for the book that manages to make me want to find out what happens next.

Dammit.

Spoilers! Graeme talks about last night's Heroes, plus some comics.

Well, at least they didn't kill Ando (What, you thought I was joking with that spoilers thing?).

That was actually one of the few things that I outright really liked about last night's Heroes finale - After last week's semi-cliffhanger of Ando setting out on his own to take care of Sylar once and for all, coming on the heels of all the talk of sacrifice and everything else, I was pretty convinced that Ando was a goner, setting Hiro on the road to being a true hero who has known loss, etc. etc. Almost everything else, however, seemed just slightly off, as if the writers knew where they wanted to go but just couldn't work out how to get there. It seemed rushed, as well; I wanted to see Nikki do more than just hit Sylar once and more of a fight between Peter and Sylar than just punching each other, but I remember looking at the TiVometer at the act break where Sylar appeared and thinking, "Wait, they have fifteen-odd minutes to finish this off?"

There was a moment, when Peter was having his travelling-in-time/flashback/epiphany moment, where I was terrified that the grand finale would be that Peter would heal the world with the Rainbow Power of Love, and it's something that I was even more convinced would happen when his radioactive glowing hands made him double over in slow motion - I could almost hear Elton John cracking his fingers in preparation of a special medeley of "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" and "Candle In The Wind" - so the fact that they didn't do that was nearly my favorite part of the whole show, even if the faux deaths of Peter and Nathan would carry more weight if they hadn't spent a couple of scenes earlier in the episode pointing out that Peter could theoretically regenerate from exploding anyway (And let's face it, Nathan probably just flew him up into the sky and dropped him before getting out of the way as he exploded). "No bodies = No death," as just one of last night's comic cliches goes.

(Alternatively, the other big cliche from the night - the villain who refuses to die - just pissed me off. Sylar's not that interesting, people who write Heroes.)

But, no, the best part of last night's finale for me was the ending. It was completely Quantum Leap, to the point where I really wanted the episode to close with Hiro running from the men on horseback, saying "Oh boy," but there was nonetheless something oddly optimistic and open about it, as opposed to the progressively-more-claustrophobic storytelling of the last few episodes. It actually felt like a new beginning, as well as a continuation of the existing mythos. And was that George Takei behind that mask...? Overall, it was a high Okay, and arguably low Good end for a show that I had no hopes for when I first saw it.

Shall we get to the comics I didn't get to review this week for one reason or another, before everything starts again tomorrow? Let's.

PAINKILLER JANE #1: I tried, I really did, to give this one a lengthy review of its own, but it kept defeating me whenever I tried to talk about it. I thought it was surprisingly Okay, a messy and more interesting take on the same character and, for that matter, style of storytelling as Jimmie Robinson's Bomb Queen, and I wanted to make some connection between the nerd fantasy figure of those two characters (Impossibly hot, socially awkward, bisexual women who hide their awkwardness under a selfconscious asskickin' and name-takin' persona and the cheesecake way in which they're illustrated - A fantasy for nerds not only for the "No-one understands me" thing, but also because they're the physically idealized woman and shown on panel as sexually active and therefore, "available") and Tank Girl, who I'm bizarrely convinced is one of the archetypes of this particular character cliche... but I could never quite get my thoughts together in any kind of coherent form. The comic itself is interesting enough, moreso when it seems to go slightly off the rails, as in the page of one panel character studies that ends up kickstarting the plot. If I can ever make sense of what I was trying to say about the fantasy female figure thing, I may come back to this one.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS SPECIAL: Fun, and with an amazing line-up of artists that fit with Jeff Parker's writing better than regular artist Roger Cruz. Get Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred on this book permanently, and you'd have something that both the kids and The Kids would have on their shopping list each and every month; their studied retro touch pushes the book out of the "upgraded Marvel Adventures" feel and into the same kind of updated pop joy of something like Allred's own Madman or Darwyn Cooke's Spirit. It's Good, and an odd reminder that the original X-Men concept really did work, in a way.

This week! Onomatopea writing may mean shorter reviews, Jeff's last day on Friday, and a three-day-weekend will hopefully give me the chance to finish Percy Gloom, Fantagraphics' Chris Ware-meets-Disney graphic novel that's so far been incredibly enjoyable...

I look up and smile, a picture of dissatisfaction: Graeme returns from the wilderness.

It's time to start the music! It's time to light the lights! It's time to get things started again after a weekend where Kate and I went camping with "hilarious" results (Read, wow, I'm not the biggest fan of that whole "sleeping bag in a tent" schtick). So, as sultry songstress P!nk once said, let's get this party started.

BATMAN #665: It's the real All-Star Batman, as Grant Morrison gives us a Batman that doesn't give up in his fight against injustice, a Robin that does stupid things like riding his motorbike into supervillains, along with romance! hookers with hearts of gold! and the promise of crazy science-fiction adventures yet to come! It's pretty much an antidote to Frank Miller's Divorce Therapy Batman Annual, and Goddamn, but it's a lot of fun. I'm sure that there are some grumpy frowning fans out there cursing the hint that all of the 1950s Sci-Fi weirdness is now not only in continuity, but also the basis of Morrison's entire run, but... Feh. This is really rather Good stuff.

EX MACHINA #28: Here's the thing - As much as I like to read this each and every issue, it's kind of depressing to realize that the book hasn't really changed or grown in the last twenty-seven issues. Which isn't to say that this particular issue isn't Good or anything (and it is), but it feels like, as a series, it's stalled and that's pretty much not a good sign. It should feel as if it's going somewhere, shouldn't it...?

FALLEN SON: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #3: The more I think about it, the more I kind of like this series. I mean, sure - It's full of stillborn dialogue (Yes, yet another character manages to work the title of the series into a conversation; this time it's Clint Barton: "I want to talk about Steve. The death of Captain America. And what the hell you're doing about it."), a plot that - by necessity - goes nowhere, and it completely screws with New Avengers continuity. But look past all of that, and you have a curiously old-school Marvel book (Say what you like about Loeb's work, but he does seem to understand what makes Marvel characters tick. Sure, he might not always be able to get it over to the reader, but still...) with some great artwork; John Romita Jr.'s work in this issue is particularly nice. A slightly guilty Okay, in that case.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #9: Brad Meltzer, please stop overwriting every single scene. Honestly, someone needs to tell him that not every scene in every book has to have the same kind of narration where someone not only explains what's going on but also the psychological reasons behind it. As much as this book has become solid I-grew-up-in-the-'70s continuity porn, it's the overdose of verbage that's killing it. Solidly Eh.

THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #3: Yeah, just a week or so after I was saying something about the way that Bendis's failures are at least interesting, he serves up this entirely Eh issue that doesn't offer anything other than Frank Cho's masturbatory horny Tigra scene. If it wasn't for that whole "lead time" thing, I would take that personally...

And, yes, I'm the one person who missed Brubaker when he was in town this weekend. Blame the camping and those results that are apparently "hilarious". Yet another reason to dislike those sleeping bags...

Not Gone Yet: A Few Reviews from Jeff of 05/16 Books...

As Hibbs pointed out at the store yesterday, despite giving my notice, I'm not outta here yet. Speaking of yesterday, my thanks to special guest star Ed "The Happy Clown" Brubaker for stopping by. As Hibbs mentioned, it's great seeing The Brube in a good place--Christ knows he deserves it (and worked his ass off for it)--and taking the time to drop by on my next-to-last Friday and shoot the shit with us was really above and beyond. Thanks, Ed.

Thanks also to Mojo of the mighty Poor Mojo website for stopping by with Red Stripes. Some of you may have noticed that I recently added the Poor Mojo Newswire to the sidebar over there. I was reluctant to add a non-comics site (or rather a non-strictly-comics site) because that way leads to madness and ruin, but the Newswire has grown pretty indispensible to me over the last few months. They cull their news from a bunch of different sources, so while you'll get a story that hit Boing Boing, or something that Ellis noticed, or a link to a Wired story, you get it without a lot of the self-congratulation and self-promotion, and they also have a loving dash of lefty politics, local stories and excellent webcomics to boot. And they link here every now and again, which is always cool. But, yeah: Poor Mojo Newswire plus Google Reader=nine kinds of awesome.

I'll spare you further shout-outs (hi, Charlie!) but needless to say, thanks to everyone who dropped by and wished me well. Every once in a while I realize I'm not gonna be behind the counter every Friday seeing great people with regularity and I wonder what the hell I'm thinking.

Speaking of "What the hell were they thinking":

ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5: The first page made me laugh, I admit it, but the rest of it just seemed wildly off and I think it's the cognitive dissonance caused by Miller's words and actions being acted out by Jim Lee's illustrations. As I think I mentioned elsewhere on this site, at some point Miller made the transition from being a comic book artist to being a cartoonist, and there's stuff that I think would work for me--that whole JLA scene, for example--if it was drawn by Miller: it would read as expressive rather than insipid. It's a critical problem of tone for me, and ultimately I think this book won't work out for me in the long run for the same reason I wouldn't really care to read a Steve Ditko "Mr. A" story illustrated by John Buscema, or a Jules Feiffer script illustrated by Curt Swan, or a Charles Schulz strip illustrated by anybody, really, but Charles Schulz. I mean, sure, if you offered to show me those things I'd leap at the chance to read 'em, but I bet I'd be left pretty cold and non-plussed in the end, just like here. Eh, really, but once you factor in the delays and the cost and the politics, feel free to ratchet that down accordingly.

ARMY @ LOVE #3: This sheer denseness of this issue's plotting, combined with the military setting and broad farcical satire reminded me of Joseph Heller's Catch 22--although if you can imagine Joe Simon adapting it for Heavy Metal or something. It needs to expand its cast (which it's kinda/sorting doing already) and maybe not disappear down the hidey-hole of its own world-making but, other than that, it's a god-damned weird little book and I'm enjoying it a lot. Good stuff.

BATMAN #665: Morrison is quite audaciously (to use the high-falutin' literary language taught me by Ghostbusters) "crossing the streams" with his Batman--trying to mix Bane and pre-Silver Age Batman stories and Miller and Adams and Sprang and fuckin' everything--but I admire the ambition more than the result. I mean, this was the second best issue for me on G-Mo's run, and yet even still it seemed oddly unresonant--like a series of sketches rather than the completed work.

(Arghh. I just had an idea that I'm proving remarkably inept at conveying so lemme sketch it out to you behind the scenes and lemme know what you think: Morrison does a much better job writing Superman than Batman because Morrison is, like Superman, at heart a loving and dutiful son [as any article where Morrison talks about his Dad will attest] whereas Batman is not. In order for Morrison to "get" Batman, he has to reinvent Batman as the consummate Pop poseur--like Morrison himself--where both Batman and Bruce Wayne are, to some extent, artificially constructed personas created from equal parts utility and self-amusement. Therefore, the Batman Morrison writes in JLA is what I would think of as a more "real" Batman because that Batman is, in effect, "acting" in front of the JLA. Left to his own devices (or book title, I guess), Morrison's Batman isn't really that character--or always that character, at least--any more than Grant is really (or always) Mr. "Look At Me! I'm dressed up in drag and I just ate a pound of hashish!"

And yet to me, Batman is not the consummate Pop poseur, so the whole thing never quite works for me. I dunno; does that make sense?)

In any event, more fun to think about than to read. OK.

CABLE DEADPOOL #40: It sure seems like the subtext here is Fabian Nicieza beng annoyed by his plans for Cable being scuttled by editorial's desire to have Cable go back to being the brooding mutant all-powerful militaristic team leader over in X-Men. Certainly, all of Cable's narrative caption iterate a very specific kind of frustration for the situation he's trapped in (and that situation does happen to be a crossover with X-Men). On the other hand, maybe he's just writing it that way to fool overzealous readers like myself. In which case: well played, Mr. Nicieza, well played. Either OK or Eh, I can't decide.

COUNTDOWN 50: Hibbs and I were talking about this issue--which I think I liked even less than the first issue, amazingly--and I finally nailed the analogy, although I apologize for how old-school it is: Countdown is like Secret Wars II to 52's Secret War. In the same way, the success of Secret Wars changed Jim Shooter into hubristically believing he had the Midas touch and deciding to force a second miniseries on the entire Marvel Universe, Dan Didio seems to have fallen for the belief that it's his ideas and his knowledge of what makes a successful comic that made Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis and 52 a success.

Hibbs, who immediately got what I was saying before I even finished my sentence and went me one better: "Yeah, and 52 is just like Secret Wars because even though it wasn't very good, it was the first of its kind and well loved, and Secret Wars II was more of the same, only larger and worse, and everyone went on to pretend it never existed!"

Now, I'm not sure I'd go that far (yet) but I wasn't heartened by what I saw this week: a weirdly out-of-left-field JLA/JSA/LSH scene; too much set-up with the Rogues and a deeply unbelievable cliff-hanger (among other stuff). It's pretty dreary stuff, flat, and, in some places, deeply unbelievable. (My theory is that this is actually taking place on Earth "Everyone Knows Everything About Everyone Else.")

Or, as I call it: Earth-Eh.

EXILES #94: Wow, that was kinda grueling. Glad I'm not around for next issue's visit to the Planet of the Mary Sue Killers. Sub-Eh.

FLASH THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #12: Art's strong, script is strong, coloring is, I think, great (really vibrant and lends some of the art a real power to it): why couldn't we have gotten this from the first issue? I wasn't exactly down with some of the plot machinations (seriously, is there a mandate that at least 30% of DC's production be time-travel related?) but highly OK. Worth looking out for.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #9: I thought the art lacked oomph this issue. I mean, how can you have Timber Wolf having a dinosaur race with gorillas and have it look that uninteresting? Brad Meltzer's stuff needs all the help it can get (although I admit it, I could read about Speedy flirting with Hawkgirl for days, probably). Wayyyy tooooo slowwwwwwwwwww, and yet still OK, I thought.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #3: The instant I read the Tigra sequence I immediately imagined the late night call Bendis must've gotten beforehand: "Yeah, hey, Brian? Frank. Lissen man, I just read the script for issue #2 and this shit's great, really, but I'm not sure I'm gonna make it through the entire arc just spanking it to Lady Ultron. Could you maybe throw in Tigra or somebody to keep my 'interest' up, if you know what I'm talking about? Thanks, bro. Okay, talk to you later, bye." Good overall, though.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #109: A really smart, engaging read with a darkly ironic reason for Peter to keep being Spider-Man folded in. I liked this a lot. Very Good.

ULTIMATES 2 #13: 8 page gatefold or not, that was one astonishingly slack issue. (Number of pages in which there were 4 words or less per page? Seventeen. And the scenes with more dialogue weren't particularly good, either. And the panels where Captain America is standing around expressionless like a guy with Asperger's wearing a flag, or that full-page half-shockwave? What about the Cap/Jan relationship? Is Tony still dying? What about apologizing to Thor? And what's with that ending? If I was being generous to Millar, I'd say he was making some kind of larger point about the passing of America's golden age or something as World War II moves it into the day of the Military-Industrial Complex, but I'm not being generous to Millar: it reads like shit he put at the end of his outline five years ago and he can't remember why he put it there but he doesn't have time to come up with anything else.

It'll probably read all right in trades, I guess, but compared to those first six issues? And considering Stan and Jack did, what, the first 64 issues of the Fantastic Four in the same length of time? Underwhelmingly Eh.

Brube in da house, and more of Hibbs' blabbing

It was a painfully slow day at the ol' CE today -- there were points I expected tumbleweeds to start rolling through. Thankfully, things were deeply enlivened when Evil Ed Brubaker did the surprise pop-in around 3 PM, which nicely helped us kill 3 hours, hooray!

Ed, once a long time ago, lived in San Francisco, and was a CE customer. Back in the days before he became a Corporate Sell-Out, Working For The Man, Ed used to come around and be a Little Black Rain Cloud, always moaning about how much the comics business sucked, and how he got no respect, and yadda yadda. Don't get me wrong, we loved it, because, yeah the comics business can and does suck, and Ed wasn't getting the respect he deserved, and yadda yadda. It's just that if I could cartoon at all, and you held a gun to my head and said "draw Ed Brubaker", I might draw a picture of Eeyore in a Porkpie Hat.

So I was a little surprised (happily so!!) to see Little Miss Sunshine Brubaker, all happy and smiling and filled with joy to all things comic-al. I guess having the nest selling single issue of the last year can do that to a feller, right?

Honestly, it couldn't have happened to a better guy, and we couldn't have possibly be happier for all of his success, and I like the fact that it's made him a Smiling Guy, because while I liked 'ol Dour Ed, I like the Happy Brube better, I think.

So, anyway, yay that!

I've decided that, no matter what he says now, I'm not going to remove Jeff from the "contributors" list. He doesn't actually ever have to post, but he'll always have the ability to, in case he changes his mind.

I'll make no secret of the fact that I think he's (easily!) the best of the three writers here (I'm the worst, pretty clearly), because he is actually edumicated about writin' and stuff. I just know if I like something or not... Jeff knows WHY.

Anyway, I hope he decides that posting a review of something occasionally doesn't violate this new focus. Even if it is only quarterly or something, I don't think he should let that particular set of muscles grow cold (unless he starts doing reviews for pay, in which case, yah forget about us!)

As for me, Jeff told me... uh three weeks ago now? You'll notice that's pretty much when MY volume of posts starting dropping, too. I mean, the Savage Critic as a blog, and as more than just my voice? That's all Jeff's fault, so having Jeff here was one of the things that kept me posting as often as I have -- trying to top him, and all.

(Look, there are worse motivations one can have)

So, I don't know much, but I do know that I won't be doing daily posting "any more" -- I'll shoot for thrice a week, though. Graeme says he enjoys posting daily, so, alright, he can be insane and keep that up (My problem is my boss is CONSTANTLY looking at my work...)

As for the future of the blog, really what I'd like to do is find 2-3 more people who share a similar style or sensibility and who know when to snark, and when not to, and get it so the Critic IS "multiple content daily", but NOT dependent on one person to make it so. I'd also really like it if we could figure out a way to monetize the Critic without selling out TOO badly (or triggering your epilepsy), but everything we've looked at so far seemed like it was too little money involved for the general intrusiveness of ads.

So, if you have any ideas, I'm always glad to hear them.

There's also a new TILTING AT WINDMILLS up on Newsarama. Follow that link to read me talk about late comics and weekly comics both. I think it turned out pretty OK for once!

Muh, one quick review before I go off and decide to have some "time off":

ULTIMATES 2 #13: Maybe, just maybe it is because there was most of a year between issues that this didn't connect to me at all, but I kinda doubt it.

The big problem is, of course, the protagonists are struggling against a faceless horde, and are rescued by another faceless horde, so there's nothing even remotely resembling human stakes through most of the proceedings (this is a common mistake of Millar's, of course)

Big widescreen action is fine enough, but it needs to have something human to anchor it against -- and I don't really care about any of these iterations of these characters enough to do so naturally. There could have been some interesting through line in here via "Sorry for thinking you were a mental patient, Thor", but that's never addressed here at all.

About the only thing I DID like was the Black Widow scene at the end.

And what about the art? I hope it's not me, because I found parts of it to be downright sketchy -- probably the biggest offender is that full page half-shot (? I thought a page was missing) of the explosion. Jinkies!

Most perplexing of all is the final scene. Why is this here? Did I forget some opening sequence from a year and a half back this is meant to link to? Even if there is, I can't see what possible resonance that scene could have to the events of this issue, or those leading up to it.

All in all, not worth the wait, and while it may tighten up in paperback, for this, as a single entertainment experience, I have to go with AWFUL.

What did YOU think?

-B

Alan Coil will be happy: Graeme likes something from 5/16.

Have I told you that I hated the movie Garden State? I really didn't want to; I like Zack Braff - well, I like Scrubs, at least - and I'm an indie kid who's all about the emotional sentimentality, so I felt as if I was the target market for it; I even like Simon and Garfunkel's soundtrack for The Graduate! But when I saw it, it was an awkward and uncomfortable movie that was emo in all the worst ways, the cinematic equivalent of putting on your sister's eyeliner and sitting in a corner telling yourself that no-one understands your pain, man. Even "The Only Living Boy In New York" can only help so much. The worst part of it for me, though, was that I couldn't buy into the central concept. My own mother had died not that long before I saw the movie, and so maybe everything was far too raw for me at that point, but I spent the entire movie annoyed at the way that the main character's mother's death was both hijacked as life-changing cathartic McGuffin and sidelined as not-as-important-as-Natalie-Portman-playing-kooky at the same time. I wanted to go into the movie and tell Braff that it's not like that, and then ask him to go back to being funny again.

Anyway.

LOCAL #9 is a death of a mother story that resonated with me to a ridiculous degree. It's not as if my relationship with my mother was anything like Megan's, nor even that I reacted in the same way to my mother's death that Megan does to her's. But nonetheless, there's an emotional honesty to the story here that's impossible to miss. Maybe it's in how quiet the issue is - even for this series, which is hardly slambang fireworks each issue - and the way that Ryan Kelly's artwork mirrors that silence with the space he gives to Megan throughout the issue (the page where she's travelling home, alone, crying on the train, is beautiful), or maybe it's in the way that the issue breaks from what's gone before and becomes much more reflective and full of memory; Megan becomes, in a way, less self-involved and stops hiding from her past and herself because she's forced by events to remember, for once in her life.

It's a skillful issue, the best of a series that has consistently been worthwhile. It works in two separate ways, the way that one-off issues always should but rarely do, both as a short story complete in and of itself, but also illuminating the series and the character as a whole. We get to understand Megan more this issue, not only because we find out about her childhood but because of how she reacts to current events (Which also shows how much she's changed; the Megan who kept changing her name as a way of staying distant and safe from the world in #5 would have taken the news very differently - Again, illuminating the series, like I said). Perhaps best of all, it's wonderfully messy; it doesn't seek to reveal all in its 20-odd pages, nor even to self-consciously set-up questions for future issues or the reader to answer. It just lets you look at people trying to do the best they can, even if they don't know what that is. There's no resolution or attempt at explanation or judgement, and it's all the better for it.

PICK OF THE WEEK - yes, I know, I've not talked about what else is out this week yet, but trust me here - and Very Good. Go and buy.

Better Late Than Whatever: Graeme blows the schedule.

Dear MUNI - It really shouldn't take that long to get from the Sunset to downtown first thing in the morning. Seriously, please sort your shit out so that I don't have to wait 20 minutes in the tunnel between stops again. Thank you.

Appropriately, on the day I'm spectacularly late for work, reviews of a couple of spectacularly late books.

ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5:Hibbs is right - At this point, Frank Miller is clearly just taking the piss and trying to see how far he can push things. You know that as soon as you see the first page, which has Wonder Woman in a cleavage-displaying trenchcoat (and with an impossibly-thin waist - Jim Lee, I know you know human proportions better than that) saying her first line in the series: "Out of my way, sperm bank."

Yeah, exactly.

Of all the ridiculousness in this issue - which includes Miller literally lapsing into self-parody, giving Batman a caption that reads "I love being the goddamn BATMAN" - it's the treatment of Wonder Woman that really stands out. It's not so much the cliched, fetishized, man-hating narration ("Men always lie. About everything. Men always make a mess. Out of everything.") as it is the fact that her man-hating ways fall apart when Superman kisses her, which happens after she tells him "You bastard! You bastard. I hate your guts. I hate your guts. You make me sick. You make me sick."

Thanks for sharing your crazy fucked-up take on gender politics with us there, Frank.

All of that said, the issue - despite being eleven months late (Or is it ten months? I can't remember, was this meant to be bi-monthly, way back when?) - is entirely Eh. It's not even funny-bad, it's just boring. Miller's writing? Kind of messed up, but nothing that we haven't really seen from him before. Lee's art? Not as good as it used to be. The whole package? Not only not worth waiting a year for, but not even waiting until you get to the store for; this will be defended as a funny subversive take on the iconic characters by many, but I kind of wonder what's meant to be actually funny about it.

That said, ULTIMATES 2 #13 isn't much better. Sure, it's exactly the kind of thing that has worked for its fans for the past 25 issues across the last, what, five years or so, but that means that it has the same flaws, as well. Ultimates really works best as the self-conscious Image book - it's really all about the art, and better if you don't concentrate too much on the story. That's definitely the way to approach this final issue, which begins with Loki telling Captain America, "Do you honestly believe [Thor] could kill me with a hammer?" after Thor has, indeed, just slammed his hammer into Loki's head and failed to kill him. So it comes as no surprise when Thor ends up killing Loki with his hammer later in the book. Foreshadowing, you see? Just like a real writer! Okay, cheap shot, but the only thing that's really surprising about the writing of this finale is the lack of spectacle - we're shown extended sequences of an Asgardian army appearing to fight giant wolves, trolls and monsters (the bad guys get three pages worth of their appearing in DC, and the Asgardians two pages), but don't really get to see that battle; instead, we get a foldout showing the main characters in tightly rendered action poses with the epic fight as background. It's a really odd and unsatisfying choice, but what can you do? Everything else goes exactly as you expected (Complete with Millar's trademark dialogue. You know that he'd script any scene in exactly the same way at this point; even someone buying a loaf of bread would get five pages, including two pages where the customer hands over the money to the person behind the counter and you get a close-up of the customer smirking and saying "Keep the change sweetheart." Then there would be a couple of panels of him leaving the store, before you see the person behind the counter turn to her friend and, in a full page splash, say "Jeez. What an asshole."), and as such leaves you unsatisfied by its perfunctory nature. Eh, again, but those who loved it before will probably love it again.

Tomorrow - The best book of the week.

All-WHAT?! -- Hibbs continues 5/16

ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5: Paul Levitz apparently thinks that DC's publication of THE BOYS could do some theoretical harm to their core superhero business, or taint the icons, or something. This makes me wonder what Paul made of THIS.

Since it is the ACTUAL icons.

The strangest thing is that, had Frank Miller been drawing this, I'd probably have found it amusing and satirical and maybe even a little funny. But with Jim Lee? Lee is THE mainstream superhero comic book artist, so it adds a layer of weight and Importance to it all that just absolutely demands it be taken Seriously, and, thus, renders any satire as stone-faced earnestness.

But, really, REALLY, Levitz cancelled THE BOYS and continues to publish this? Really?

AWFUL.

What did you think?

-B

And maybe we'll come back to Earth, who can tell?: Graeme follows in Bri's footsteps, again.

So I was all about to post a review of All-Star Batman, but then I read Bri's comments about COUNTDOWN #50 (the post below this one, SavCritic fans!), and I had to post about that instead*. It's odd - For the second week running, I'm Brian's bizarro twin; I thought that this issue was less offensive than the last, but I had pretty much the same reactions to it that Brian describes: How does Jimmy know who Jason Todd is? If everyone knows that Jason kills, why does Superman not try and do something about that instead of find Jason and then float around while Jimmy goes to interview him? For that matter, since when does Superman have so much time to kill that he helps Jimmy find his interview subjects and assist him in breaking and entering in order to do the interview? (Since when does Superman assist anyone with breaking and entering? Yadda yadda yadda...)

The problem with this series - Well, one of the problems, really - is that, two issues in, it's telling us nothing that we don't already know. The Joker's Daughter dies in issue 1, after saying that she's from another Earth, but we know that there are 51 other Earths already. In the second issue, the Joker tells us that he doesn't have a daughter, but why should that be a surprise? We were told just last issue that she was from another Earth... It's one thing to reveal these facts slowly to the characters, but the creators have to throw a bone to the readers to keep them happy as well, and there's nothing revelatory or even interesting in a good way about this second issue at all (Maybe if this series had come out prior to the end of 52, and we didn't know about the multimegaverse already, there would be some attempt at tension or mystery...?); it doesn't even have the fanboy outrage I got from the mess of the first issue that didn't introduce any of the characters properly.

Another of the problems, with this issue in particular, is the feeling that it's done by the non-star team. I have nothing against Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti or Jim Calafore - oh, alright, maybe Justin and I have a familial blood feud that has spanned generations, I admit it** - but their work on this issue seems competent at best; there's no excitement in the dialogue or the artwork, and overall it feels like a rushed fill-in already. Maybe this is intentional, in some way, down to the desire to keep a relatively homogenized "style" for the book despite the different creative teams each week (much in the same way that 52's art rarely shone), but it makes for very dull reading. Interestingly, Keith Giffen's name is missing from the credits for the second week running - Wasn't he meant to be doing layouts on this book?

Overall, it's a pretty depressing second week for the series; I'd hoped for a surprising second issue that made me more optimistic about the whole enterprise, or at least more interested. What I got instead was just pretty Eh.

(* - Also, I kind of like the weird metajoke about the All-Star Batman review being later than intended. I'm sorry.)

(** - This is not true. My family is small and has no feuds with anyone else, unless they've been keeping them secret from me.)