Shootings of Every Style: Jog and two faces of 2/13

The Punisher: Force of Nature:

This is a 48-page MAX one-shot (34 without ads), although it's interesting to note that Marvel seems to be drawing a visual distinction between the Ennis-written MAX continuity and separate Explicit Content projects like this (or last year's Annual); the Frank Castle we see here is a bit younger, and decked out in a more costume-like black outfit, although he still seems to be running around in his own discreet modern world. It makes sense not to unnecessarily tie the character down to Ennis' world specifics, if Marvel does intend to continue the series with another writer, although it also brings to my mind the character's implied prayer at the end of the Ennis-written The Punisher: The End, that the next time he's revived he'll be able to avert his own origin; truly, Hell is an ongoing franchise.

The writer here is Duane Swierczynski (soon to head the revived Cable), and his story is exactly the type of stock plot that could have filled a gap in any prior run of the series: Frank is stalking a bunch of villains, but needs to collect some information too, so he observes/antagonizes them with unparalleled cunning until they crack up on each other. I guess the twist is that the seaborne Frank winds up facing down a literal whale in the last four pages while cleaning up his mess, although building the title character up as totally fucking unstoppable for the rest of the issue doesn't allow the finale to register as much more than an odd joke.

Even then, it sort of fits; Swierczynski augments the usual narration with a cheesy, VHS action hero sense of humor, spiked with extra thuggish sadism, and artist Michel Lacombe (with the late Stéphane Peru on colors) gives the character a rattish snarl that suggests even Frank isn't taking his mission very seriously. Granted, that doesn't make such uninspired material any less EH, and I could see a renewed Punisher of this sort getting tired awfully quickly, but we'll have to wait and see. The strength of Ennis' run, after all, was more in accumulation than great single issues.

Punisher War Journal #16:

Meanwhile, back in the Marvel U proper, writer Matt Fraction offers up a sequel of sorts to my favorite story of his 'Frank as supervillian hunter' run, the barroom massacre saga of issue #4, in which gaudily costumed crooks shot the breeze and reveled in absurdity until the cruel, detached 'hero' of the piece burned them all down. It was both a prickly take on contemporary superhero tone, and a clever homage to Mark Gruenwald's famous Bar With No Name story from Captain America; perhaps not coincidentally, Fraction's Punisher would later take up the Cap mantle itself. And while some of Fraction's stories have lapsed into tedium (the Cap one, for instance), his take on the character retains a unique bitterness in its best moments.

This issue sees bar survivor The Gibbon -- no longer terribly gibbonesque due to third-degree burns -- plotting his revenge on Frank, against the wishes of his now-blind now-wife, Princess Python. Again, Fraction spends time building up the camaraderie among cheesy supervillain concepts; the difference here is that the mild villain feels melancholic over not being as hard as the authoritarian bastard of the comic's title, who gets things done like the ultimate stern father ("And behave.") of a childish world. It's not an easy mix, but neither is the worldview Fraction has built.

He's also developed the best-yet superhero forum for Howard Chaykin's divisive latter-day visual style, airy and grizzled and texture-mad, with colors (as always) by Edward Delgado. It's great for presenting conversations between odd-looking people and tense wanderings through city streets - exactly what the script requires. The more off-kilter attributes of the approach seem perfect for filling out the specifics of Fraction's viewpoint, clenched expressions and garish hues and all. The team's going to be sticking around for a bunch of issues, and I'll want to see how they operate as more typical Punisher-centric action inevitably takes over. GOOD for now.

This plastique valentine: Douglas on 2/14

Well, okay, then--the consensus seems to be that reviews of older stuff are perfectly OK here. So... here's some quick notes on this week's books! (Actual graphic novel reviews will be coming soon...) NEW AVENGERS #38 re-teams Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, so it's effectively a new issue of Alias, which is just fine with me. This is an all-conversation issue about Jessica Jones and Luke Cage falling out when they land on opposite sides of the registration divide, and... yeah, I admit it: Civil War was a much better idea than I'd have guessed for opening up story possibilities in ongoing series. This is the kind of conversation-based, stage-play-ish story Bendis hasn't done in a while, but the other reasons it works better than most of Bendis's recent Avengers books mostly come down to how good Gaydos is at facial expressions and character-acting: Luke, more exhausted than angry, pointing his fingers and crossing his arms a little less intently than usual; Danny lifting his hands up around his head when he talks about the Leader; Spider-Man hanging upside-down from the ceiling like it's the most comfortable place for him. (And the next issue is "The Truth About Echo," which I'm hoping will explain how a deaf lip-reader can hear somebody with a full-face mask who's facing away from her. Skrullity-skrullity-skrull.) Very Good, although does it bother anybody else that even Luke and Jessica almost never refer to their child as Danielle, but "the baby" or "our baby"?

The first few pages of BOOSTER GOLD #0 are cleverly executed--a callback to a 14-year-old miniseries could fall flat, but actually pretending it's an official tie-in to Zero Hour is pretty funny. (Extra points for the silver fifth color on the cover.) But that's mostly undermined by the extended "flashback" to the 25th century. I know it's hard to imagine what the future's going to look like--40-year-old Legion stories look like 35-year-old photographs of Tokyo--but the idea that Gotham University would be playing a football game against Ohio State in 2462 is like imagining 20th-century versions of 15th-century academies playing highly publicized games of closh. You'd think that Johns and Katz and Jurgens would try to get around that, but instead we get pages on end of locker rooms, sportscasters, Booster's sister in high-heeled boots... it doesn't look like the 25th century, it looks like the '80s with some extra fashion disasters. Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR #554 seems to be more about demonstrating how impressive and audacious Mark Millar's approach to the series is than actually doing anything impressive or audacious--the magazine-style front cover, for instance, was clever on Trouble, but it doesn't work here. This reads a little like the proposed-but-unmade Fantastic Four movie idea that was floating around a few years ago, which was supposed to be about them as the objects of a cult of celebrity, except that they're all acting like parodies of celebrities, as if Millar's trying to to show how impressively X-Treme everyone is. (As for the music industry making Johnny a millionaire, has Millar been paying attention to newspapers in the last few years?) The "Old West" sequence at the beginning is blatantly tacked onto a story that doesn't seem to have anything to do with it but doesn't have any other action scenes. For that matter, if the Richards family had access to a functioning time machine, the miserable first day of Disneyland might not be the most fun destination. Hitch is using a lot of photo-reference here, it looks like, especially for faces, but that means a lot of the characters don't look quite consistent from panel to panel. (And is the Marvel Boy in the Fantasti-Car meant as some sort of tweak at the Morrison/Jones version?) The best bit of the issue is Hitch's double-page spread of Nu-World at the end--and even that doesn't tell us anything about it, just that it looks like a cross between Pac-Man and the Death Star. (That "nu"-as-in-nu-metal, as opposed to "new," is a good symbol of what's not quite right about this issue: it needs to announce that it's cool, which means it's sort of not.) It's Okay, but I suspect half the fun of this run is going to be finding things to get irritated about, so I'm on the fence about continuing to read it.

21st Century Innovations in Magazine Racket-Busting: Jog is there and here for 2/13

Fantastic Comics #24 (The Next Issue Project #1):

This is the debut of a new, Golden Age-proportioned anthology series from Image. There's no credited editor, but it appears to be spearheaded by Publisher Erik Larsen and PR & Marketing Coordinator Joe Keatinge. It's 64 color pages for $5.99; note the fake markup sticker.

And while the proper, legal title of this issue is Fantastic Comics #24, allowing it to dub itself "the latest comic book Image has ever published," seeing as how issue #23 hit the stands in 1941, you'll probably know it better under its banner title of The Next Issue Project. Simply put, each issue of the project will provide a 'next issue' for some long-dead Golden Age series, with a shifting crew of writers and artists providing new stories for the now-public domain characters that used to be found in each title.

It's a fun idea, and a flexible one; none of the contributors are bound to using any specific style, or setting their work in any particular era, although the book's design does its best to evoke an old-timey feel, with authentic period ads, faux paper yellowing and digital printing 'errors,' plus the same page header numbering style seen in Paul Karasik's recent Fletcher Hanks collection I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets. Indeed, Larsen has noted that Keatinge's interest in Hanks' work formed part of the impetus behind getting the project started; ironically, Hanks' own Fantastic creation, Stardust the Super Wizard, all but unknown to most of the comics world just a few years ago, is now undoubtedly the Batman of this book, thanks to the great success of Karasik's collection.

Unfortunately, the Stardust story in here, from my perspective as a fellow Fletcher Hanks reader, is no good.

Written by Keatinge himself with art by Mike & Laura Allred, it's essentially a 'Comics Have Abandoned Their Charming Past, and the Present is Therefore Fucked' kind of parable, albeit toned down into more of a 'Comics Have Abandoned Their Wild Past, and the Present is Therefore Dull.' It's no surprise that the tale is more about what Stardust 'represents' than anything; it's pretty obvious to me that the appeal of Hanks' comics come from his singular approach rather than his concepts, and I suspect it'd be futile to simply run with the character, or attempt to replicate the artist's unique style.

But certainly there's plenty of room to explore the underpinnings of Hanks' works. Actually, the Karasik collection does a bit of this on its own, allowing Hanks' repetitive, blunt force accounts of violent acts met with kaleidoscopic retributive cruelty to stand without comment, so as to attain the force of ritual, then revealing the human pain behind all the ugly/beautiful fun. Karasik's arrangement forces the reader into the position of the eager collector, discovering these strange, early abridgements of the superhero concept for the first time, without the fuss of searching around or paying big bucks. Then, it splashes cold water in the reader's face by revealing just enough background to force a reconsideration of what's just been enjoyed.

That's the book's depth as a text; it takes what's unique about those comics -- crazy reactions, forceful declarations, gnarled forms, bullet-impact action -- and suggests why they came to be. This new story, in contrast, jettisons everything unique about Hanks' work in favor of broad, dull statements about the vitality of old things and the wild 'n crazy ways of the goofy old awesome past; it's not sneering or ironic, but it's hardly interesting or particular.

Keatinge writes in a mixed period-modern style, augmenting dialogue often paraphrased or quoted from the Hanks originals (in one case, a punctuation error is dutifully replicated) with a narrating woman's more traditional, caption-based musings. She knew and loved the gentle (but firm!) Stardust back in the day, but he abandoned the Earth when there was no more crime worth his time. Not a bad concept.

Yet Keatinge plays things out with the most obvious approach one can imagine. Time passes, and humans build anonymous, robotic superheroes to watch over things. They all get fat and lazy and old. Note above that Laura Allred differentiates between past (rulez) and present (droolz) with her coloring approach, while Mike Allred folds Hanks' brawny character art into sleeker, statuesque designs. Fitting, since Stardust -- the one who could not be tamed, readers! -- is coming back to show us all how the superheroing is done, and just maybe freeing the fun ways of yore and bringing (dot) color back to our gloomy world and literally making old people young again, which I guess is the logical conclusion of such super-charged nostalgia. I suspect it's meant to act as a type of manifesto for the project as a whole.

The problem with this SparkNotes Kingdom Come isn't that it fails to take the 'dark' route with Stardust -- after all, part of the beauty of the public domain is that you can subvert aspects of the established work to create new statements -- but that it makes absolutely no use of the original's specifics beyond a generic appreciation of wacky old comics fun. In fact, for all its citation, it doesn't even do an effective job of conveying the wacky old comics fun aspect of Fletcher Hanks, so wistful is the narration and subdued the pace. It seems like a waste of a good appropriation; this could have been any Golden Age character.

Obviously, I'm coming to this as a prior Stardust reader. Your reaction may vary depending on what you take from Hanks' work; needless to say, if your reading of Hanks' work tends toward, say, 'embodies the superhero concept as fascist impulse,' oh boy is this story gonna get sticky for you. And even if you're 100% onboard with the story's point of view, or if you've never heard of Stardust before, I suspect this'll prove a most predictable harangue about how neat the past can be - there's just nothing all that compelling on display.

This does raise an issue for the rest of the book's stories, since most of them deal with characters that are probably lacking even Stardust's limited familiarity; the immediate danger is that tribute will be paid to a lot of forgettable stories via new stories that are quickly forgotten, and most of these new works are, for sure, fast and very slight.

For me, the pieces rose and fell on the energy each artist or team brought to the table. Larsen's own 13-page Samson boasts the artist's typically fine command of fighting-mad dynamics, married to a wonderfully detailed take on Golden Age coloring, even as the goofy 'kid sidekick taken by social services' story dissolves on contact. Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca (of Street Angel) provide six pages of amusing macho antics with Captain Kidd. Tom Scioli (artist of Gødland) has six pages too, taken from a Space Smith serial already in progress; a bit labored with its humor, but sometimes striking. There's a funny, boyish wimmen-hater thread running through several of the stories; girls are trouble and sex is gross (well, not for Captain Kidd)!

But be warned, that's as good as it gets, save for two exceptions.

First, there's the six-page Flip Falcon in the Fourth Dimension, written by Joe Casey (writer of Gødland, the new Youngblood, and various other books), with line art by Bill Sienkiewicz and colors by Larsen. It's by far the most extreme of the book's period suggestions, and the only one that registers as something viscerally affecting on its own merits.

Every element comes together, although Sienkiewicz's contribution is what you'll notice first. It's like a fevered, scribbly variant of his New Mutants style, both perfectly clear and wildly idiosyncratic, yet fitting for the time; it appears to inspire Larsen to garish, seeping heights. Casey's script is both a full-scale revamp and a cheesy gag, packing down vortex angels and doomed romance and religion and evolution and moral conflict, all into its tiny allotted space. It's a loud comic, and it makes an impression. Hell, it sells an impression - you'll want to find some old comics just like it, even as you know it's only like itself.

Then, secondly, way at the end of the book, last but in no way least, is Ashley Wood's (you guessed it) six-page piece, executed in his contemporary signature style. Call it a postscript. Or a horselaugh. It's my favorite thing in the book.

What initially seems like a deliberately obtuse update of Sub Saunders -- consisting mostly of black, sound effects-laden panels, murky bodily close-ups and word balloons presented in untranslated German -- ultimately reveals itself to be a giggling little fable of its own, with Saunders fighting off the oblivion of owned obsolescence with a little help from an all-new character that might perhaps bring to mind the hero of a prior Wood-illustrated comic (that Joe Casey wrote) (for some corporation, years ago), but is truly an entirely different thing, yes yes.

An in-joke, to be sure, but just the sort of puckish, brainy thing the book needed to help make things seem merely EH, although the risk of disintegration remains.

Everybody Gets The Cold Sometimes: Graeme returns to do 2/6

This one is for Ian Brill, who complained to me last night that we here at Savage Critics weren't being timely enough any more. It's true; I didn't mean to disappear for a week, but I got both a cold and swamped down with everything else and left you all to wonder just how good the latest issue of "Brand New Day" was, and I apologize for that. On the plus side, it was a slow week...

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #549: Marc Guggenheim takes over the writing reins on the reboot Spidey and manages to make it even more of a trip in the Way Back Machine. Never mind the return of thought balloon exposition (which, possibly because of my age, worked better for me that caption narration last issue), look at the captions written in fluent 1970s Marvel: "So set your tongue on waggin'"? Really? Nonetheless, it's fun enough, with Sal Larocca's artwork less annoyingly photoreferenced than it was in, say, newuniversal. A high Okay, in other words.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #11: If only for the fake-out with the itchy neck, Good. Luckily, the rest of the book lives up to that scene, with Whedon and Jeanty managing to do a fine done-in-one that also introduces the new big bad of the season. Buffy as a character is much less annoying without the presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar, as it turns out.

CLANDESTINE #1: More old school from Alan Davis, this book fights it out for the title of "Most Chris Claremont Influenced title" with UNCANNY X-MEN #495. Whereas Davis does his best to create intrigue and tension with his cast of mostly cyphers, there's little here for anyone outside of his impressive art; the story is muddled by trying to cram in too much backstory and not enough plot, with dialogue that is Claremont-esque in the wrong way (too stylized, but without his rhythms). Depending on your feelings about Davis as an artist, you may or may not find it as Eh as I did. Uncanny X-Men, on the other hand, sees Ed Brubaker reaching out to a few Claremont/Byrne era ideas (The image inducer for Nightcrawler? The Savage Land?) but using them in such a way to remind you why the series used to be so awesome. Yeah, the speedy reveal that - hey! The X-Men haven't really broken up at all! They're just on vacation! - made me feel, again, like Messiah Complex's lasting effects were all on the marketing side of the franchise instead of story, but this was still a plain old-fashioned, fun, Good read.

METAL MEN #6: In the running for "densest read on the superhero racks" right now, this book feels completely impenetrable when not read alongside earlier issues for the most part... but when it is read with them, it's wonderful, a rare case of something exceeding the Morrison concepts it was built on. When it's a trade, people will love it; as a serial, it's confusing as all hell. Okay for now, then.

TEEN TITANS: YEAR ONE #2: Back when we did Pick of The Week here, this would easily claim the crown. It's not just Amy Wolfram's scripting, giving each of the characters their own personality in a couple of lines (I love the cowardly Aqualad, for some reason) and letting them react to each other and the situation organically, but Karl Kerschl's truly outstanding artwork, cartoony and kinetic, fits the writing and the characters to a T. Really feeling like an all ages book instead of something written for kids and/or fanboys, this is Very Good and something that more superhero comics should try and take a leaf out've.

Next week: Is it wrong of me to be really, really excited by the prospect of Booster Gold crossing over with Zero Hour? Or the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby "Lost" Fantastic Four? And if it is, do I want to be right?

Post-Superhero Fear Parade: Jog checks in on a 2/6 ongoing

Infinity Inc. #6: I can't say this has been the smoothest-launching series of recent DC history, having debuted to divided reviews, and unfolded through several visual hiccups. The initial penciller/inker was Max Fiumara, of the above cover, who hasn't had the best of luck with DC - he was also involved in the publisher's ill-fated attempt at a new T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series about half a decade back.

Fiumara is an appealing artist, but he's typically at his best in b&w. As such, his original art for this project exhibited some dramatic flair, with a sharp balance between shadow and white. However, Fiumara's lines did not mix especially well with colorist Dom Regan's flare-speckled palette, often washing the visual whole into drabness (comparisons here). Issue #3 then suddenly saw the addition of a second penciller, Travel Foreman, and an inker, Matthew Southworth, the result being a mess. Fiumara then provided pencils only for most of issues #4-5, with Southworth's inks. At the same time, certain plot threads for issues #3-5 were pulled off from the main work and presented as backup stories, with Southworth on pencils, and Stefano Gaudiano on inks. Perhaps some of the jumpy visual pacing of those issues was due to that cordoning, although it could have been a function of Peter Milligan's script.

Funny, though; Milligan's writing on this title, a 52 spinoff filled with mainly new or hazily-defined characters, has proved to be the most 'Peter Milligan' work he's done in a long while, possessed of a thematic outlook that places it at the logical end of a series of prior comics. I've gone into this a little bit before, but more detail will help.

In the beginning, there was Paradax, a superhero project from Milligan and Brendan McCarthy, which ran as a serial in the seminal 1984-85 Eclipse series Strange Days, then moved to a two-issue Vortex series of its own in 1987 (although issue #2 only collected and recolored the Eclipse stuff). It was a light, but subversive thing, presenting the young superhero as a debauched media star who operates for personal gain. That may not seem very subversive -- hell, it was an element of Spider-Man's origin -- except that's it. Paradax learns nothing of moral value, declines to grow as a character, and encounters no lessons about being a 'true' hero. He's vain, promotional, capitalistic, but still navigates McCarthy's surreal landscapes; the story's provocation is that there's nothing wrong with that, a notion that still cuts against the superhero idea today.

Beginning in 2001, Milligan revisited many of the same ideas with Mike Allred in X-Statix (formerly the revised X-Force), which explicitly defined the Marvel mutant superhero team as adored-loathed public idols, as opposed to hated/feared/etc. Despite this poking, it was a more conservative series than Paradax, for any number of possible reasons -- it was much longer, Milligan was older, it was published by Marvel -- seeing its heroes agonize over their state of affairs, struggle against the mechanisms of fame, and ultimately pay the price for their sins, to the extent that anyone 'pays' any 'price' in Marvel superhero comics, where anything is liable to be reversed.

Now comes Infinity Inc., which deals with what I'll call 'post-superheroes.' For all its faults, I don't think the series has gotten quite the credit it deserves as a clever, natural follow-up to the Infinity Inc. segments of 52, which saw Lex Luthor attempt to flood the DCU's 'market' with disposable, overhyped, literally short-lived superhero creations in an effort to undermine the superhero concept in the public eye. The story's execution was disappointing, but its oddball self-criticism of superhero publishing did have some underlying bite.

Milligan's work follows several of those disposable concepts, including Natasha Irons, niece of the superhero Steel, who have lost their powers and are trying to adjust to life away from the spotlight. All of them seek out different forms of therapy, none of which quite address their problems. But then, gradually, they begin to manifest 'secondary mutations' of a sort, an unexpected aftershock of the procedure that gave them their 52 powers. New abilities spring up, this time not merely reflecting their anxieties, but existing wholly because of them. For example, a young man with a fixation on ladies' clothing, who used to have huge claws (all the better for castration anxiety!), develops the ability to transform into a strong, confident young woman. And... er, that's all. They're not always the most useful superpowers.

Longtime Milligan readers will also pick up shades of his 1993 Vertigo superhero project Enigma (with Duncan Fegredo), but it's really all about how these kids are so burned by having been popular superheroes, their very bodies revolt so as to return to that place. They wear no costumes as of yet (even Steel, for the most part, despite DC's best efforts at misleading covers); after all, having a costume to embody aspects of their interior states might imply that they're at lease pretending to have some control over their desires, which they really don't. Their adventures deal exclusively with preventing similar post-superheroes from hurting themselves or others, like a guy whose self-pity sucks the energy right out of others ("Dale isn't a goth vampire creature! He's an existentialist."), eventually causing him to become addicted to suckling on people like him.

I think this is a fine concept, with a lot of potential, although I couldn't blame readers for getting spooked away from the opening storyline; aside from the above-mentioned visual problems, it was a long-winded thing, taking five issues to present the full concept while repeating certain thematic details over and over.

But this issue starts a new storyline, which will only last two issues. The next will last three. The artist for this one is Matt Camp, whose thick outlines and solid blacks seem to have prompted a different approach from colorist Regan, now working in a brighter, somewhat flatter style; the total look is somewhat similar to Jamie McKelvie's and Guy Major's work on Suburban Glamour, to name a recent example.

It's not perfect -- Camp's heavily posed style becomes stiff in the action panels, and his character expressions rarely convey hotter emotion than 'perturbed,' even when someone's jumping out a window -- but it cleanly conveys the non-muscular, understated oddness of the book's concept. The story sees the team struggling with the evil influence of television and video games, or at least a young man who's using them as conduits in a quest to relieve everyone of their desires by forcing them to act 'em out. Beauty queens, nasty parents and questionable medicine all figure in, while Superman and Batman stand around for a page discussing the plot. I expect to see Ultimates 3 sales immediately.

I realize I'm going on a lot about background and stuff here, but that's because I haven't read much about the potential this series has. It's gotten OKAY as of now, but what interests me is that there's a lot of room to expand, now that the series seems to be working through its narrative problems. Give it a look, if you've been reluctant so far.

Useless Information: Graeme finishes off January's haul.

My, this was a busy week in terms of releases, wasn’t it? And that’s not even including the Essentials books that I read this past week (Essential Defenders – The title may be untrue, but I kind of wish that kind of comic was still being done at the big two today), or the history of the WB and UPN that I just finished last night (“Homeboys in Outer Space”? Really, America?). I've also been "grooving" to the leaked new Gnarls Barkley song, which rocks my world several ways to Sunday, and happily finally getting into The Wire on DVD, just to make my media consumption as vast as possible. But I’m not here to talk about other forms of media. This here is comic city.

ACTION COMICS #861: While I’m not the biggest fan of the slightly goofy “Hey! You guys!” Brainiac 5 we get here, I’m still enjoying this entirely nostalgic trip down Legion Lane more than I should. That said, this feels like treading plot water more than the last few issues for some reason, so I’m hoping that next issue sees faster movement and maybe some things exploding or something. Good, though.

BATMAN #673: I’m genuinely depressed by how bored I’m getting with Morrison’s Batman these days. All the ingredients for something good are in this issue – A near death hallucination where Bruce Wayne deals with his guilt issues and also reveals what happened to him during 52? That should be much more interesting than the flatly-illustrated reference-filled Eh-fest that this was.

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #5 (OF 8): Wait, so it’s the Source that’s been killing all the New Gods? And behind, apparently, every single DC crossover ever? Because it wants to recreate the entire universe because it’s flawed and, by the way, can talk and explains everything to Metron? (Oh, and by the way: spoiler warning)? I’m not sure I buy it, but at the same time, it definitely gives some kind of scope (and, if the Source succeeds, finality) to Final Crisis if it’s true… Oddly Good despite the nature of the reveal.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #8: Still feeling very much like the unsuccessful attempt to do for the Avengers what Grant Morrison’s JLA did years ago, this big scale adventure reads muddled in execution and uncertain in planning – the symbiote takeover of New York is so rushed that any potential sense of it being a big deal is lost; it just seems more like a nuisance than anything else, and who wants to read about that if it’s not fun? Eh.

NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #2: That said, even a nuisance is better than the feeling of complete unnecessary cashgrab that this book has. After defeating the Hood’s team in the main book, they escape and… get defeated again. Meanwhile, Dr. Strange turns out to be faking his magic and has to quit the team because… well, I’m not quite sure, but it’s probably meant to be shocking (Maybe he’s really a Skrull and this is foreshadowing). Why none of this could be done in the regular monthly – especially considering how meandering this storyarc was in there, and in need of the little meat that this annual provides – I have no idea, but this was rather Crap. Nice cover, though.

SPIDER MAN SWING SHIFT DIRECTORS CUT ONE SHOT: Almost worth it for the Tom Brevoort-written “manifesto” alone. In fact, those five pages are much more interesting than the main event, which is still a nice enough old-school Spidey story that you shouldn’t have to pay $4.99 for. The manifesto, though, illustrates the thinking behind the necessity for the revamp, and if you ignore your feelings on the whole “breaking Peter and Mary Jane up via the devil” thing, it’s hard to disagree with what is said in there… Okay if you’re a behind-the-scenes wonk like me, really.

SPIDER-MAN WITH GREAT POWER #1 (OF 5): This, on the other hand, is a nicely-illustrated but ultimately unfulfilling or affecting story about a timeframe that most people won’t care that much about. For Spider-obsessives, it’s probably absolutely awesome, but for me…? Eh.

SUBURBAN GLAMOUR #3: There seems enough story left over – especially because there’s not that much actual plot this time around – to make me wonder whether next issue’s end of this series will just set up future sequels (which I would welcome, actually)… Even when he’s not really moving events ahead, Jamie McKelvie’s writing shows nice, quiet, character work that’s matched by artwork that just looks so good in color. I have no idea if this is a “hit” or not, but nonetheless, it’s one of the best new books to have come along in a long time. Very Good.

But what, as the saying goes, did you think?

I can hear the grass grow: Graeme gets Green

Okay, am I really the only person who was wondering just where the whole "Alpha Lanterns" thing in GREEN LANTERN #27 was going before it got to the end, and I got completely creeped out by seeing the characters, post-surgery with their faces flipped open to reveal weird robotic anti-Lanterns underneath? I mean, dude. THEIR FACES WERE FLIPPED OPEN. In a Green Lantern comic. What's the world coming to?

Before that point, the storyline seemed to be a strangely-paced version of the usual "our heroes try to catch their breath and reflect" stand-by storyline; there didn't seem to be much happening, and without knowing what the Alpha Lanterns were, the crumbly visuals from last issue didn't really offer much in the directions of interest. Even as we were getting into the what, midway through this issue, it was still pretty ho-hum. Only at the end of the issue, seeing the Green Lanterns having been turned into some weird monstrous cyborg things and realizing just how out there the Guardians are getting, and also far their "We're not afraid, we're just letting fear influence every action we take" stance is going to go, does the story get interesting... It's a shame, because while I can see that Geoff Johns has a plan, the loss of momentum from the Sinestro Corps War storyline to here is both immediately noticeable and worrying.Okay, and that's entirely down to the creepiness of the final page.

I just can't seem to plug myself in: Graeme goes for the ones you've probably read already from 1/30

Speeding through the big time books of the week, partially because I'm pressed for time, and partially because I've already written about two of them over at io9 this week. Yes, that was a plug.

Y: THE LAST MAN #60: While it didn't bring me to tears like it did Diana, I have to admit to being happily surprised by this last issue. Not that I expected it to be bad in any kind of way, but I did expect some kind of last minute reversal or reveal that would cast everything that had come before in a new light, and that idea scared me; not only did I like everything that had come before, but the whole "last minute gotcha" thing would've felt cheap in this series. It wasn't something built on that sort of idea-led/plot-led structure; like all of Brian K. Vaughan's work, it's been the character work and small details that had made the series as good as it was. So, that the final issue turned out to be a series of small, quiet, vignettes with a framing sequence that resolves the entire series in an entirely unresolved, optimistic, manner, came as an unexpected treat. That those vignettes, along with the framing sequence, manage to somehow bring the series to a close that feels right and doesn't shortchange the entire story, makes this last issue a Very Good end to an Excellent series.

STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #25: Maybe I'm the only person outside of Dark Horse who feels that a year-long storyline running through all of the Star Wars books is a big deal, but as someone who'd never before read a DH Star Wars comic, I have to admit: I was sucked in pretty quickly by this opening issue. As I said over at io9, it's not just that the issue hits a lot of Star Wars tropes, but that it also feels pretty much like "Jedis do Indiana Jones" at times. John Jackson Miller's writing manages to make this relatively unfamiliar setting (I know Jedis and lightsabers, but everything and everywhere else... Not so much) easy enough and recognizable enough to understand for first-timers, and the art is weirdly similar to a cartoonier Yannick Paquette, which is pretty enough for these eyes. I'm not sure where the overall plot is heading - or even if the quest is going to turn out to be anything more than a McGuffin that threads throughout each series - but right now, it's fun enough that I'm not sure that I care. A high Good.

PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #0: Jesus, can someone invent a time-machine so that Alex Ross can go back in time to when he's actually happy with the superheroes of his youth? Despite this looking like the start of yet another "heroes from the past come back to show these whippersnappers how it's done" story (Hey, it's Kingdom Come! But with public domain characters!), I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that... uh... it's actually surprisingly not that bad. Highly Okay, in fact, and that's with my complete distaste for this type of plot. As much as anything, I liked the McGuffin of Pandora's Box and also the idea that our point of view character is a superhero who was the only one who could save the world, except he was completely wrong and instead screwed everything up. That isn't to say that it isn't going to turn into turgid referential and reverential nostalgia down the road, but for now...? Worth reading.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #34: Dammit, just when I thought I was getting bored of the Cap-less Cap, Brubaker goes and lets the bad guys make their move and Bucky turn out to be a more interesting character now that he's trying to live up to Steve Rogers' memory in a more literal way than before. Mixing pop and politics in a way that'd make Billy Bragg happy, the idea of a corporate undermining of America amuses in a somewhat perverse way, and also gives the new Captain America an enemy that he can't just shoot (or perform fun new shield tricks) to stop... Reading this makes me wish that the whole Skrull Invasion plotline could've been held off for enough time for Brubaker to really play out his grand plan on a larger scale, but I'll take what I can get if what I can get continues to be as Very Good as this. That said, if anyone at Marvel wants to try and talk Brube into taking over the regular Iron Man book, that'd be great.

Tomorrow: What was the creepiest moment in this week's comics? The answer may shock you, as they say.

These Are The Years That We Have Spent: Diana misses Yorick already, 1/31

Very few moments in comics have had the distinction of making me cry. There was SANDMAN #72, when Nada throws flowers into the river as Dream's funeral boat passes by; Valerie's letter from V FROM VENDETTA; Noah finding the scooter in DEADENDERS #16. And now we have the conclusion of Y: THE LAST MAN - even as I write this, I've got tears in my eyes.

Well... maybe not quite that tearful.

Better.

Anyway, Y. I'd actually been holding out on reading the last arc until yesterday, when I had all six final issues in my hands. I'm glad I did - while Brian Vaughan packed as much dramatic weight as possible into each individual issue, the sheer impact of the last storyline as a whole made it worth the long (long, long, long) wait.

There's really no way I can do justice to Y: THE LAST MAN and what it meant to me as a reader - for five years, it entertained me, shocked me, made me think, made me laugh, and yes, made me cry. It was consistently well-written and well-drawn, it was complex, and right up to the very end, it never opted for the easier storytelling choice: Vaughan always chose the less-traveled, and therefore less-predictable route, and in the end even the reader's perception of the series itself, of what Y: THE LAST MAN is supposedly about, is challenged.

Taking a broader view for a moment, I like to think Y will be remembered as the post-SANDMAN Vertigo flagship - symbolizing, if you will, a shift in trends from literature-based fantasy to a kind of gritty realism that nevertheless speaks truly and pointedly to the human condition. Not to knock PREACHER, or the still-running FABLES (which continues Gaiman's tradition of mixing myth and reality), but Y was different - more real in terms of the world presented and the way people behaved. I love that the hero of the series was just an ordinary guy; I love that there will never be one true answer to the question of the Gendercide; I love that the book took us all over the planet and really explored the possibilities of a world without men, with all the negative and positive and ambiguous implications therein. I love that the finale made me feel like I'd witnessed the end of a saga - that bittersweet sensation of a wonderful journey coming to its inevitable end.

Thank you, Brian and Pia and everyone who worked on this book. Thank you for recognizing that all tales need endings - and for giving us a conclusion that met the very high standards you set for yourselves. Thank you for five years of EXCELLENT stories.

Let's all relax with the smooth flavor of drugs: Jog and a 1/30

Narcopolis #1 (of 4):

Courtesy of Avatar comes creator/writer Jamie Delano's return to comics after half a decade's absence, and it's a detailed, distanced, fitfully amusing one, its limited success solely the result of enthusiastic flourish.

Delano really decorates the hell out of this one's language, positing the friendly ol' future megacity concept as a glowing drug paradise, where the people speak in a sloganized drawl like fleshy adbots - they wish one another SafeDay, spend their SpareCred on SpenDay at LazyLifeLotto, love the corporate-state bosom of MamaDream, oppose the unseen forces of BadEvil and suppress the ContraNarcopolitan urge. Workplace slobs are referred to as "employee heroes," and typical citizen names include Azure Love and Angel Gabble, while other doubleplusgood turns of phrase abound.

But this isn't quite an Orwellian limit on vocabulary/imagination at work; the language of Narcopolis is titular, alliterative and declarative, a poetry of brands and catchphrases poised to transform philosophy into soft drinks, just as emotions can be distilled into handy JooSacs. It's a world of grinning literalism. Opiates: the opiate of the masses.

But believe me when I tell you that occasionally funny scene-setting and decoration is all this first issue has going for it on the literary front; it's as if hanging around so much in Narcopolis' blunt society proved to be a bad influence on Delano, somehow prompting him to concoct the most obvious set of themes and tropes imaginable for the core of this debut issue.

Our hero is a fellow named Gray Neighbor, who's different from the other folks. While working his shift at the bomb factory (yes), he has visions of peaceable Others exploding... all while the narration of the city speaks of Strength and Justice! Why, that's not very just at all. Neighbor also isn't much up for the joocing and funning, preferring to do perverted things like reading books and taking walks, and wondering why the enemy hates his nation. He keeps a pet bird that's big enough to fly, dear readers, but it finds its cage a little too cozy. Might our Neighbor strike at the heart of MamaDream, even as a strange terror attack drives a horde of people cheek-ripping mad?

It's disheartening that bubbling newerspeak of Delano's dialogue gives way to such simple boredom; the story could at least be banal in a way that befits the dystopian mashup of its accoutriments, but it rather suggests a lack of spark underneath the concept at the 1/4 mark. And it doesn't help that Delano's lines aren't quite deft enough to suggest the squirming humanity of his characters, leaving them stranded in style; I'm not saying that distanced emotions can't work in a story like this, oh no, but here they don't have much to work off of beyond obvious messages about the numbing obviousness of bourgeois complacency.

The art (and lettering?) is by newcomer Jeremy Rock, who acquits himself fairly well with a straightforward semi-realistic cartoon style not entirely unlike that of Avatar regular Jacen Burrows, speaking of brands. Granted, I often suspect that much of Avatar's visual identity actually comes from their use of only three or so colorists for all of their books - longtime veteran Greg Waller (recently returned from a period away, I think) does the honors here. EH for right now, hanging on, improbably, by the tip of Delano's tongue. And you'll want to shave a point off if lines like "MagicWord comes, we'll screech BigMouth, scream clean through the DeathStatic IdiotNoise" have you scratching at your eyes - the whole trip's like that, and that's the whole trip.

I need Damage Control to clear out my in-tray: Graeme finishes off last week.

Making it to the finish line just in time...!

ASTONISHING X-MEN #24: This series has become some strange theoretical exercise – when something this slow takes this long to get done, at what point does everyone stop caring at all? In both lateness and terms of decompressed story, this really does seem like a throwback to the Marvel of a few years ago, and the execution of the whole thing makes it seem as if the creators’ enthusiasm didn’t make it through to 2008. Dull and Eh.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #14: See, I like Evil Dick Superboy (Yeah, yeah, Superman Prime, whatever) pretty much as a character when Geoff Johns is writing him as Fanboy Extreme, but even the sudden, re-write-smelling, addition of him to this series fails to inject that much interest into what’s going on here, because he’s being played as generic omnipotent bad guy, adrift in a sea of generic bad guys fighting with each other. I can’t quite tell how any of this is going to end up tying in with the Final Crisis series, but that doesn’t make me want to read any more of this series; it just makes me want it to be over, already. Crap.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #11: Hey, it’s the oft-delayed last part of Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale’s secret origin of kryptonite storyline! And it’s... not really worth the wait! It’s not really the fault of the creators, because this was clearly meant to be a fairly low-key conclusion that could never stand up to a six-month wait, but at the same time, for the creators involved, this was sadly underwhelming. Maybe it’ll read better in the trade. Eh.

WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1: Surprisingly enjoyable, in large part because of the art, which looks as if Steve McNiven and Ariel Olivetti had a particularly cartoony baby, and manages to make this comedy look as if it fits in the current, grimacing, Marvel Universe. Dwayne McDuffie plays the concept relatively straight – well, as straight as it could be, anyway – and it’s still a good concept after all these years. It’s definitely not the kind of thing I’d want to read on a regular basis – too much self-referencing in-jokery is never a good thing - but as a refreshing change from the mighty Marvel sturm-und-drang that’s never ending, it’s a Good thing.

X-MEN #207: And talking of mighty Marvel sturm-und-whatever, I definitely cannot be the only person who feels as if the ending of Messiah Complex not only came from nowhere, but also is exceptionally pointless and sensationalistic if Professor Xavier isn’t actually dead as a result. “Look! He’s been shot! We have to break up the X-Men because his dream is dead!” Wait, why, exactly…? It felt as if, instead of this crossover having any kind of ending that fit the story, it was rewritten at the last minute to set up something else down the line, robbing the crossover of any sense of climax or meaning. Eh, sadly; the rest of the crossover was better.

Next week, of course, is a biggie: New Captain America! Last Y: The Last Man! Big Star Wars crossover! Alex Ross tells us that Golden Age superheroes are the bestest one more time! Can you handle it, Earthlings?

Please no gimmicks, she telliing me to chill: Graeme gets Wonder from 1/23.

While I’m talking about things that wowed me in the second issue after an initial disappointment, I’m sure that I should mention Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman – I wasn’t too down with the first issue, which seemed to be trying too hard for my tastes, but the second was exactly what I’d been looking for: An almost effortless tying together of the mythical with the superheroics, and a story that seemed true to the character and that it could only be told with this character. A shame, in that case, that WONDER WOMAN #16 is (like ASM #548) a third part that isn’t quite as good.

A lot of that, sadly, comes from the fill-in art in the middle of the book. Ron Randall is a fine artist, but his strengths aren’t the same as Terry Dodson’s, so seeing him attempt to take on some of Dodson’s chunkiness (and stylistic touches – Check out Etta Candy’s nose when she appears, which is very Dodson), or fail to bring the same heft and power to the fight scenes, makes for an uncomfortable and awkward break, especially when the switch occurs mid-scene and you’re left with the more delicate art for the splash page promise of carnage. The switch takes the reader out of the story, and the switch to that particular artist robs the scene of the dynamism and plain, dumb, oomph that it should bring.

Elsewhere, the story suffers from external pressures that really aren’t its fault; people who read Countdown know the outcome not only of the battle for Paradise Island and also of the issue’s cliffhanger, because we were already told that this story takes place prior to what’s happening in the weekly series. It’s frustrating – and, to be honest, almost moreso when you consider that this threat to the island is more interesting than the one happening in Countdown – because, taken on its own merits and away from the context of the greater DC Universe, this is a good story, and the cliffhanger a great one, considering the recent history between Diana and her mother.

After a first issue that still, upon re-reading, feels too eager to please, Simone has found her footing with the series and the script for this issue is a pretty good slugfest-middle-issue that keeps plot and characterization up there along with the punching Nazis. If you ignore inappropriate artist switching and a lot of the tension gone because of plot spoilers, then it’d be something to tell people to track down and read, if they’d rather their Wonder Woman wasn’t on the cover of Playboy. Even with those things taken into consideration, it’s still rather Good, after all.

808 Prebuild: Douglas does Damage Control and Wizzywig, and has a question

Just time for a couple of quick reviews, but I wanted to note that WWH AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1 is awfully Good--the most welcome mainstream-comics surprise of the week. I managed to miss Dwayne McDuffie's first three Damage Control miniseries, circa 1990, but now I'm tempted to go dig them all up. The premise is cute (Damage Control is the company whose job is to clean up and repair stuff after superhero fights), and McDuffie uses it as a vehicle to play with the current state of the Marvel universe (the upshot of Civil War, as far as civilians are concerned, is basically just additional bureaucratic hassle) and riff a little on real-world politics. I cracked up at the editor's-note gag and the bit about being "liable under S.H.R.A." Plus: Black Goliath! I'm not totally sold on Salva Espin's artwork (with Guru eFX coloring)--it's an uncomfortable mixture of rubbery cartooniness and the Epting/McNiven hyper-modeled Marvel house style of the moment, and when some of Ernie Colón's old characters (like Gene Strausser) show up, there's a real disjunction. But this is essentially a talking-heads setup issue until the last couple of pages, and he manages to keep it moving anyway. Title of story: "Whatever Happened to All the Fun in the World?" Ad tagline in same issue: "Cyclops' covert wetworks team doesn't protect the dream, they erase the threats... Bloody variant by Clayton Crain."

Ed Piskor was kind enough to send me a copy of his self-published book WIZZYWIG, VOL. 1: PHREAK, a fictional biography of a computer hacker-in-the-making growing up in the '70s (there are apparently three more volumes to come). The book's protagonist, Kevin Phenicle, is essentially synthesized from the histories of two famous hacker-type Kevins, Mitnick and Poulsen, as well as bits of other well-known hackers' life stories. This volume is slowly paced, and the scenes of Kevin's early social alienation drag on a bit (guess what? he was beaten up by other kids at school! and he was scared of girls!), but the stuff about his fascination with figuring out and exploiting systems is mighty interesting. Mitnick has written about how "social engineering" is at least as important as technical knowledge for hackers, and Piskor works with that idea here; the best scenes are the ones where Kevin is gradually learning how to get other people to trust him. Piskor's artwork reminds me a bit of Chester Brown's Louis Riel--the steady clip-clop of square panels, the compositions built around a couple of small caricatures, the empty circles for eyes--and his fine-lined feathering is worth lingering over. It's Good, if kind of pricey; Piskor has posted the entire first half of the book at his site, and if you're into hacker culture, it's absolutely worth a look. Also, it's the first time I've seen a TRS-80 in a comic book since this one.

And a question: For various reasons, I often don't get to read trade paperback and hardcover collections until they've been out for at least a few months. Quick and non-binding straw poll--are reviews of several-months-old books interesting to you at all, or do you prefer to read about stuff with at least a little of last Wednesday's warmth still radiating from it?

It's Just Another: Very Quick Commentary from Jeff about (sigh...) One More Day.

Not really a review or anything, just a bit of (very late) Monday morning quarterbacking: in finishing up the first three issues of "Brand New Day" and finally reading the last issue of "One More Day," it struck me J. Michael Straczynski is either a far more gracious man--or a far more thick-skinned professional--than I could ever hope to be. Despite the last issue of "One More Day" being dedicated at the very end to JMS, and a back page filled with hosannas by fellow professionals, the two-page recap of Spidey's status at the end of the first part of "Brand New Day" suggests a company eager to sweep eight years of the man's stories under the rug.

I mean, I can't imagine Grant Morrison co-writing a last issue story arc on New X-Men that would remove Xorn, the Midwich Cuckoos, Mutant Town, Cassandra Nova, and the destruction of Genosha. Yet JMS's final story on ASM not only removes Mary Jane as Peter Parker's wife, but retcons away anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and brings back the mechanical web-spinners. That last one in particular struck me: I wasn't a big fan of the Spider-Totem idea, but if it's waved away with some fancy-dan Mephisto hand magic, the bulk of JMS's run is removed. No Ezekiel storyline; no mystical wasp queen; no "The Other." Considering the emotional highpoint of JMS's run--Peter revealing his identity to Aunt May--is mooted by the removal of anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and it's hard to see what's left. That 9/11 story; Norman Osborne's "o" face; that gamma radiation gangster; and maybe the lame Molten Man impersonator who burnt down Aunt May's house (except she's back to having her house, so maybe not). It's not "putting the toys back in the box," so much as "throwing most of the toys into the fire and watching 'em shrivel up and blacken."

(And not that it's pertinent to this discussion, but is the end of "One More Day," where Mephisto talks about the daughter Peter and Mary Jane could have had but will now never have and will never exist, some sort of swipe at the Spider-Girl title? If so, I only wish I had the chops to examine what might've been running through Editorial's head when that went in.)

Mind you, I'm not upset that a lot of this material is taken off the board: I don't think this retcon invalidates the enjoyment I got from the issues I read, and there was stuff (a lot of stuff) in JMS's run I felt screwed pretty strongly with the iconic appeal of Spider-Man. But I find it all very strange. Maybe when Straczynski first came on and made it clear he wasn't interested in having editorial vet his work, he and Marvel editorial had an explicit understanding that everything he did could (and probably would) be undone. And, of course, any savvy freelancer toiling for the big two is aware their work can be retconned, invalidated or turned on its head whenever Editorial sees fit. But as a way to handle a heavyweight creator with whom one would want (I would think) to continue a working relationship, it seems like very, very odd behavior: "Thanks for all the great work, Joe! It'd mean a lot to us if you'd put your name on this story that invalidates the vast majority of it! If not, we're gonna do the story, anyway. Love ya!"

You know what? I'll break my thoughts about "Brand New Day" into a different post, so as not to dilute my point: J. Michael Straczynski, you got what looks like a raw deal to me.

Brand New(ish) Day: Graeme still reads, kind of enjoys, Amazing Spider-Man.

Maybe I’ve been dosed with the Kool-Aid, but I can’t help but admit that the 70s retro Spider-Man revamp has grown on me. Part of it really is the frequency of the thing helping offset the lightness of each issue (by which I mean “almost rushed, throwaway nature,” not lightness of tone) – Something that 52 excelled at, and maybe one of the lessons that Steve Wacker brought to this project: Keep up the momentum and it almost doesn’t matter if the issues are good or not on an individual basis – but there’s also just something nostalgically agreeable about not only this particular version of the character, but also seeing the character treated in a light-hearted manner and given stories that aren’t “This time around: SPIDER-MAN IS ON THE EDGE AND HE’S GONNA MESS YOU UP,” like, oh, the last year or so of Amazing. So, on the whole so far? Brand New Day = Win.

That said, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #548 was weaker than last issue, and I think at least part of that is down to the same thing that made the first part of Brand New Day so disappointing – Dan Slott is either too aware, or makes his readers too aware, of how important Brand New Day is for the book, character and franchise, in terms of relaunch. For the most part, he handles it well (The Spider-Mugger storyline isn’t really that involving right now, but the Maggia deciding that Spider-Man is one of them could be fun down the line, and if nothing else, a lot has happened in the last three issues), but then you get something as clunky and show-stopping as the narration at the end of the book:

“Did you catch all that? Back in costume for one day... The cops think I'm a killer, a new super crook wants me dead, the only people who like me are the mob... And, on yeah, I didn't get pictures of any of it! Aw, who am I kidding? This isn't just the Parker luck! I've got a gift for this! Can't wait to see what I do for an encore!”

Gee, thanks, Mr. Exposition. I might have missed something, if you hadn’t just recapped the story I’d just read. Don’t get me wrong; some kind of summing up of the new status quo, I can see the point of. But to do it in that unsubtle a way, and ending it with a variation of “And just wait to see what we have for you next month!” felt cheap and, well, kind of desperate. It’s a shame, because the majority of the rest of the issue was fun enough, if rushed; for every smart turn-around (the poison is keyed to particular DNA, so Spidey’s okay!), there was something that felt off (Mr. Negative’s secret identity reveal came way too early – It’s a very Stan Lee Spider-Man idea, sure, but it didn’t work this time out because we didn’t care enough about either identity of the character for it to be a surprise, or even for it to be that interesting). There’s obviously a lot of enthusiasm and excitement amongst those working on the books, and equally obviously, a lot of love for the character and good ideas… It’s just that, right now, that’s kind of overwhelming the talent of those involved when it comes to making great stories. This is Okay, but everyone involved has done better.

Countdown to Killing Joke Headlines: Graeme is done with 1/16

Man, Heath Ledger, huh? That really depresses me, for reasons I'm not entirely sure about. If nothing else, he was so young. CNN are, apparently, already hinting that playing the Joker contributed to the whole thing on air, which is both tasteless and the kind of thing that Warner Brothers marketing are both cringing and excited about simultaneously. Shall we think about comics, instead?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #547: The cheap joke would be to leave it at “Well, at least Spider-Man shows up this issue,” but that aside (And it really does feel like a cheat, the way the whole “I’ve quit being Spider-Man, even though I keep wearing the costume under my clothes! Hey, now I’m Spider-Man again!” thing is done so off-handedly, as if the only reason it was there was to keep Peter out of the outfit for the first issue to build suspense), this was more enjoyable than last issue for the most part – Slott does good Spidey dialogue, and the bad guys are enjoyably forgettable, which felt like a nice throwback. The story fits the weekly pace, as well, and so the whole thing seems enjoyably Good.

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #3: Wait, what? Admittedly, I missed the second issue, but someone seems to have had a word with artist Franco Urru, because everything’s actually easy to follow this time around… well, artwise, at least. Plotwise, I’m still lost, especially with that last page cliffhanger. That said, it still reminds me of the TV show’s weird off-kilter aesthetic more than the Buffy comic, and still seems pretty Okay to me.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #15: Things continue to happen! And I continue to not care! Eh, if only because the ideas here should be much more compelling by this point.

THE FLASH #236: The first couple of issues of this revamp were wonderful, wonderful superhero comics with an energy and sense of purpose to them… So why did I find it hard to care about this final part of the storyline? Part of it may be down to the shift in art (I have no idea why I find Freddie Williams’ stuff less appealing here than I did when he was doing Mister Miracle, but I do), but it’s also that the stop-start nature of the threat – and the tenuous way it was revealed to be linked to the retconned piece of the Flash legacy that’s only been mentioned in the back-ups over the last few months – seemed to undermine any momentum the story tried to build for itself. I loved the character interaction, and the idea of the superheroing family is still fun, but almost everything else about this run seemed to slow down from a running start to this faltering, uncertain, Okay finish.

I still look forward to Tom Peyer’s run, though; I loved Hourman, way back when.

NEW EXILES #1: Finally, Chris Claremont has a book where he can recycle all his favorite character bits and fetishes without having to deal with continuity or what anyone else is up to! I’m not even that sarcastic in saying that; there’s something perversely compelling about seeing just what he’ll end up doing with this new team made up on pet characters and characterizations (C’mon, this Sabretooth is really just mid-80s Wolverine but taller) given relatively free reign. Also interesting/depressing: He really wrote a good Fantastic Four for those couple of pages before they died. Does that mean I’m stuck in the past? Nonetheless, more Okay than I would’ve expected. Almost Good, in fact.

STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION: INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #1: It’s as if someone at IDW had said “Take Graeme’s least favorite two ST:TNG characters” – Yes, I really do like Deanna Troi more than Data. I’m sorry, all – “and make a slow, but nicely illustrated mini-series starring them.” Reading like one of those dull filler episodes that you’d watch because nothing else was on at the time, but with cartoonily wonderful art, it took me a couple of minutes to remember that I haven’t liked Star Trek comics since Peter David did 'em. That, alone, has to be worth an Okay.

What did you all think?

Diana Goes Digital #3: Why Don't People Understand My Intentions

The Mad Scientist is a common staple of the superhero genre: you've got Victor von Doom, Tivo spokesperson Arnim Zola, pre-Crisis Lex Luthor and many more. More often than not, these characters skew towards a very specific personality archetype: the megalomaniacal whackjob with Simon Cowell's ego and Tyra Banks' love of monologuing. Of course, since most mad scientists serve as foils to the heroes, these are good qualities to have, because they ensure that we'll want to see the crazy person get taken down. Conversely, this is also the reason there are many stories with mad scientists and few stories about mad scientists, because would you really want to read a six-issue story arc where Doom goes on and on about his brilliance and his heritage and his family tree and then he grows goat legs and uses magical cellphone powers to summon robot insects that... hmm. Right. Moving on... Anyway, that brings us to today's double-feature: NARBONIC by Shaenon Garrity and A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE by Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs. These webcomics are noteworthy not just for the fact that they directly feature mad science and mad scientists, but also for their very different interpretations of that character type.

To call NARBONIC a comedy is at once oversimplifying things and oddly appropriate: it is, after all, a very humorous and funny story with a fair share of whimsy, and even at its most dramatic points, it never lets the reader take things too seriously. And yet Garrity planned her plotlines so carefully, so methodically, foreshadowing events that would take years to unfold, that the term "comedy" just doesn't seem apt enough.

The story concerns Dave, a Computer Science graduate hired by mad scientist Helen Narbon and her gun-happy henchwoman Mell Kelly. The first thing you'll notice about Helen is that she's unlike any mad scientist, male or female, that you've ever seen: she's obsessed with gerbils, charming even when she lapses into her "mwah-ha-ha" mode, and talks about killing people with a cheerful grin straight out of a Disney movie. All of Garrity's characters are endearingly quirky, and they keep on surprising you as the series progresses.

One of the aspects I most enjoyed was the way Garrity never stuck to a specific situation or formula for very long. The status quo got shaken up so often I'm not even sure there ever WAS a status quo. And there was a tremendous amount of variety in terms of output: for example, every new year would start with an eerily prophetic homage to LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. Sundays were occasionally devoted to our heroes' Victorian-era counterparts, or to chapters of an epic fanfic concerning evil yogurt (is there any other kind?), or to guest strips amusingly framed as the cast's desperate search for a new artist. And that was just the peripheral stuff - there was no lack of unpredictable fun in the series proper, ranging from a visit to Hell to a Mad Science Convention to a James Bond-esque adventure story.

But what left me most in awe of Garrity was that, from November 2002 to the very end of the comic, she used the filenames of the strips themselves to tell a prose story about a defining moment in Helen's life. That just blew me away, because I'd never seen anything like it - for printed comics, it would be like using the lines between panels to tell a parallel story to the one playing out on the page. That was an ingenious technique, and very demonstrative of the wit and cleverness Garrity used on a daily basis for over six years. If a rank higher than EXCELLENT existed, I'd award it here.

Kilgannon and Sachs' A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE takes mad science in a decidedly different direction: these are the bombastic, domination-oriented nuts we've seen before, but what's emphasized here is something that's (surprisingly) rarely touched upon in this sort of fiction: the fact that mad scientists are, in fact, mad. In this webcomic, mad science is a form of mental illness, a "meme" that cmpels its victims to follow a precise behavioral pattern that, ironically enough, is the quintessential formula for the mad scientist archetype: first they come up with a ludicrous scheme, then they build a giant robot, loudly announce their plans, get chased by the authorities, and finally surrender on the condition that their research is kept intact. This is intriguing notion because it turns what has traditionally been seen as a character archetype into something different.

What appeals to me with regards to A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE is its particular mix of genres and styles: artistically, there's a strong manga influence (big eyes, odd hairstyles/colors, etc.), but it reads like a Warren Ellis story (well, at least Ellis prior to his Year of Whoredom and the resulting creative STDs) - a hard-boiled detective with a dark secret in his past is paired with an avatar of a living planet, chasing down leads on an impending crime across the solar system. It's an adequately-executed premise that doesn't get bogged down by technospeak, as can sometimes happen with sci-fi. GOOD, because the story is fun and functional but it doesn't reinvent the wheel.

Technical notes: NARBONIC ran from August 2000 to December 2006. There's a link on the main page leading to the "Director's Cut" of the series, with added commentary by the strip's creator, Shaenon Garrity. It's primarily in black and white, with the occasional color strip. Additionally, Garrity toyed with panel length and size during the series' run, so keep an eye out for scroll bars on your browser. The Table of Contents is indexed by storyline, and every link leads to a week's worth of strips.

A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE ran from 2000 to 2007, black-and-white for the first chapter and switching over to color for the rest of the story. Unlike NARBONIC, Kilgannon and Sachs have provided a distinct chapter division for A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE; it's a much shorter read, around 400 pages to NARBONIC's 2000+ strips.

Whatever happened to joy?: Graeme wonders why Booster is sad.

BOOSTER GOLD #6 is a surprisingly depressing book, considering that the good guys end up winning. It's so heavy with foreshadowing that there's no way to actually enjoy the fact that it achieves what was set out as a goal way back in the first issue of the series, and so oddly paced that it doesn't really feel as if it has achieved anything at all.

Okay, that last part first; what's with the end of this book? It just kind of... stops. There's no real sense of climax, and the last scene isn't even a cliffhanger (Why someone didn't suggest that they push the two-page interlude with Daniel and Rip to the end of the book to at least give some kind of dun dun DUN to the finish, I have no idea), it just... stops. Underplayed scenes, I'm happy with, but this was slightly too underplayed; it feels like the book just ran out of room and finished a scene or two before it was meant to. Coming, as it did, immediately after the big battle, I felt cheated of some sense of the good guys having won, even if that was fleeting. I'm not saying that I wanted a full end of Star Wars moment or anything, but still.

That kind of gets back to the foreshadowing. It's not enough that we had an entire issue last issue to tell us that what appears to be done this issue is impossible, we also had a character tell us that again this time around (Rip's "The future is open, but the past can't be changed." In fact, he's the voice of foreshadowing for the start of the issue in almost everything he says: "Use your head. It's entirely too convenient. Three Blue Beetles from across time just suddenly show up like this?"), we also have the one person who leads this mission impossible being a mysterious masked man that we know nothing about. Give it three issues and he'll be revealed to be some kind of equally mysteriously bad guy: "Evil Beetle" or "Dark Beetle" or something (We've already got Supernova as "Booster Dark" after all, so why not "Dark Beetle" to match the Blue and Gold team?).

It's an odd switch for this book, to move away from the light-heartedness in favor of something so clearly pointing towards gloom, and doing so in such an obvious mannner. On the one hand, good for planning, but on the other hand, knowing that something is just going to end up depressing you makes for a pretty Eh reading experience.

I remember the 1970s!: Graeme's Blues Explode over '76.

I'm oddly upset that '76 #1 didn't work so well for me; I like the basic idea, and there's nothing really wrong in the execution. It's just that... it doesn't gel for me, for maybe the stupidest reasons possible.

The writing is clearly influenced heavily by Quentin Tarantino's movies - especially Cool (Jackie Karma is Tarantino by way of Power Man and Iron Fist, which is a fun enough idea, but there's not enough in this first issue to get you completely involved in the story - The split book idea again seeming nice and retro, from Marvel's playbook in '76, but it works against both stories here, I think) - but the visuals don't have the stylization or slickness that Tarantino's movies have. There's nothing bad about the art, but I can't help but wonder whether something less scratchy and, well, rounder - think Byrne and Austin's weirdly-disco Uncanny X-Men run - would've felt like a better fit. It also doesn't help that both stories feel like pastiches instead of stories in their own right, ironically-distanced exercises in nostalgia that aren't meant to evoke 1976 as much as the 2008 idea of 1976 as seen through the lens of the movies and comics of the period; you can't get that into the stories because they have too much of a hipster feel without the substance or humor to back it up.

The strangest thing about the book, though, is that it's the things other than the writing or art that let it down the worst. The lettering, for example, is stiff and inorganic both in terms of the typefaces and the balloons, drawing attention to itself instead of the sinking into the background, pulling you out of the story instead of letting you dig a character being called Cherry Baum that little bit longer. Likewise, the non-comic pages of the books are downright ugly, undesigned things that could've been used to evoke more of that '70s comic aesthetic (Imagine a Bullpen Bulletins look, instead of the bell-bottomed headline being squished on the second page of the interview)... Maybe I'm just being a former art-student design snob - the covers, in contrast, are really nice, and makes me wonder what happened elsewhere - but, still.

(While I'm nitpicking; wouldn't it have been great if this hadn't had glossy heavy pages, but newsprint? Me and my tactile experience theorizing...)

It's a frustrating book - too much focus on surface, and too little space to give us something more meaty, but not focusing on the incidental aesthetic details that can make and break the experience - because I want to like the book better than I actually do. I want it to be more than just Okay, but it's not there yet. Maybe by 1977?

It kinda flies right into my face and out the other side: Graeme finishes off 1/9.

Wow, so that wasn't exactly a banner week for comics, was it...? Or maybe I'm just more bitter and twisted than usual...

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #16: I'm really tempted to make some kind of snarky "And it only took eight months for something to happen!" comment, but even with something happening, I'm not that involved in the book. Am I really supposed to be invested in a big war between two cosmic entities that I still don't really understand the motivations of or care that much about? Still, at least Pete Woods is getting work. Okay, but I'm pretty much ready to skip to the end and get Grant Morrison involved already.

GREEN ARROW AND BLACK CANARY #4: After three issues of my feeling better about the book than most people on this site, I think I've reached my limit of superhero angst with this go-around... Maybe it's because the comatose-in-hospital angle is a little too touchy for me right now, or maybe it's just that it's as if the book can't take a step forward (I really like the casual sense of superheroics displayed here, if that makes any sense) without taking one back (Can people stop dying/being presumed dead/being depressed, please?) - It's as if the book wants to be a light-hearted adventure book, especially with Cliff Chiang's art, but it can't quite escape deadly melodrama. Eh to that, for now, at least.

JENNA JAMESON'S SHADOW HUNTER #0: Imagine my surprise when the worst part of the book was reading Deepak Chopra's son admit his familiarity with Jenna's porn. I don't know why that freaks me out so much - Shouldn't he be meditating or something instead? - but it got the most reaction out of me in the entire book, which has to be some kind of problem, right? Shouldn't I have been more interested in, you know, the actual content of the book? Problem is that, even in the few preview story pages, there's absolutely nothing here to differentiate the book from numerous other t&a books, even in the sense of it being worse; it's like a black hole of Crap.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #7: Here's the problem with this book being, what, four or five months behind thanks to Frank Cho's perfectionism: This feels like yesterday's newspaper. We've already seen the end of the Venom invasion - complete with roughly sketched out solution - in New Avengers, and so, seeing it start (and knowing that it's going to continue for another couple of issues)? Old news. Same with Tony Stark's reaction to Elektraskrull - which we've seen in more depth in New Avengers: Illuminati #5 - and Spider-Woman joining the team, which has also been shown in New Avengers. Everything that would have been surprising or interesting when originally planned has been seen before, leaving this as a pretty Eh example of Deja Vu. It's a shame; the idea of the two interrelated Avengers books is a good one, in theory.

NOVA #10: I'm sure this issue is probably very interesting to someone, but coming after the last couple of issues, this straight-forward story feels pointless and filler to keep the slow and dull "Will Nova succumb to the techno-organic virus" plot alive until the annual and continuation of Annihiliation: Conquest. It's the first real bum note of the series, to be honest, and a glimpse at how generic a book like this could get if not treated properly. Crap, sadly.

THE SPIRIT #12: Oh, man, talk about going out in style... Adapting not just Eisner's stories, but also his art style in the flashbacks (with really, really well done colors), Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone really end up with their best issue so far. Everything about it is tone-perfect, even if throwing the Octopus in there seemed a little bit like overegging the pudding. Excellent stuff, and the easiest way to make sure that I'd check out whatever Cooke does next, even if that was already a foregone conclusion.

THE TWELVE #1: Meanwhile, in the alternate universe that J. Michael Straczynski lives in, there is apparently a demand for this Captain America rip-off that you can just tell is going to have Watchmen pretensions down the road. It's a shame that Chris Weston is on this book, because his art makes it all seem much more worthy than the unimaginative, overly-familiar, Ass that it actually is. Nice cover design, though.

If I were doing PICK OF THE WEEK, it'd easily be The Spirit, while The Twelve wins PICK OF THE WEAK by showing just how life-sapping a lack of imagination can be. Next week (which happens to be tomorrow)! More Amazing Spider-Man, just so I can see if Dan Slott can get more annoyed at me, and on the more enjoyable side of things, 76 and Booster Gold. But what did you think, as the saying goes?