The weight of Expectations

So there's two ways to look at FINAL CRISIS #1.

The first way is as the end of a "trilogy" of Crisii; the culmination of Dan Didio's editorial vision which, at this point, would make this issue #122.

(to whit: TITANS/YOUNG JUSTICE: GRADUATION DAY [3 issues], IDENTITY CRISIS [7], COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS [1], DAY OF VENGEANCE [6], VILLAINS UNITED [6], RANN/THANAGAR WAR [6], OMAC PROJECT [6] and the [4] part SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN crossover that spun from that, plus another special for each of those four series [4], THE RETURN OF DONNA TROY [4], INFINITE CRISIS [7], COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS [51], SALVATION RUN [7], DC UNIVERSE #0 [1], DEATH OF THE NEW GODS [8])

(That's me being nice and not counting AMAZONS ATTACK, or 52, or all of the individual crossover issues that happened in various comics, or event things like the JLA "Crisis in Confidence" storyline. You could certainly make the case that this is the 250+th issue if you're less charitable)

(And, of course, that's not counting the 30 issues of SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY, which really feel more like the lead-in to this than most of that other stuff...)

There's a lot of me that thinks that is a very very fair way indeed to look at it because that's exactly how they pitched it, and, to a large degree, the very title of "Final Crisis" puts that very weight upon it.

By that thinking, yes, I think this comic is largely a failure -- it is a slow build, it doesn't appear to have any direct focus, has seemingly important things happen in a small small, and lets seemingly unimportant things happen at a dawdling pace. It also appears to either directly contradict, or just ignore things that have happened in the last 2-6 months in the DCU universe -- the New Gods have already been dropping like flies, why is the GLC and JLA just noticing now as if it were the first time? Since SALVATION RUN is shipping late, a lot of these characters really should be running around, right? Where's the C-List Monitor Posse, starring Ray Palmer, who said they'd be the ones Monitoring the Monitors? And so on.

Plus, as Graeme notes, there ain't no explosions. And yeah, I think it a company universe-spanning crossover, especially one with a name like "Final Crisis" there shore should be some of dem purty spolsives, lordy yes!

I mean, honestly, after reading the issue, my first, gut-level reaction was "Well, where's the 'Crisis'?"

So, from the "Man, we've been reading the unending event from like 2003 now, where's my payoff?" POV, I can't give much more than an EH for this first issue.

But of course, the other way to look at it is without the weight of expectations, to completely let the last year of comics slip out of your brains, to not have the weight of a "Crisis" upon it, and just judge the book by itself.

And as that kind of reader, I'd call this a fairly GOOD book.

Because I think if it had come along with a different name, or not had a year-long lead-in (kinda sorta), or not been pushed as the conclusion of a trilogy, or even not come out in comparison with Marvel's string of similar events -- if people did not have the weight of expectations upon them, then I think the general internet reaction would have been very different.

Another book with a big Weight upon it was GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN #1, the big wrap-up to the Whedon/Cassaday story. And it, too, suffers I think, because of it. After all of the long ass waiting for it, I think it fails to impress, but that is because of the long-ass wait. I suspect someone reading it in TP form for the first time is going to think that was a pretty solid story and a GOOD ending to the run; me, I've been living with that wait, so it too was kind of EH, for me.

What did YOU think?

-B

DC Hits the Money Note: Graeme reviews Final Crisis

Reading FINAL CRISIS #1 after having read some advance reviews of it (and listening to the opinions of friends who’d read advance copies both obtained legally and otherwise), I fully expected to be disappointed by it; I kept seeing that it sucked, was too confusing, that nothing happened, and so on and so on, and I was convinced that it’d be another product of the Morrison mind that knows what it wants too well, so much that it sometimes skips telling other people what’s going on. Instead, I came away from it thinking that it was a Good opener, and wondering if most people these days just want simpler, explosion-filled, stories.

First things first; Am I the only person who read it and thought that it felt as if Countdown To Final Crisis and all the related spin-offs had been reverse engineered from the initial script way back when? There are the Monitors, talking about the destruction of Earth-51, after all, and there’s Orion, dying… but none of it really hinges on the Countdown events, and in most cases, works better when you ignore them altogether (Especially the Monitor scenes, which suggest that the independence of the Monitors has been around for a lot longer than less than a year, considering they seem to have constructed a legal system of sorts. Also, Nix is being punished for… what, exactly? Being somehow responsible for the destruction of Earth-51, when he definitely wasn’t, from what we saw in Countdown). Despite some complaints, I found it less confusing to approach the majority of this issue as if I’d not read Countdown or Death of the New Gods, because you get all the main things you actually need to know in the (somewhat melodramatic; Jog’s right, this is definitely Morrison channeling his JLA run again for good and bad, all broad strokes and epic scale) dialogue.

Overall, I liked that it was scattered and frenetic, which I’ve seen complaints about – There’s still a sense that it isn’t entirely random, despite the different pieces (We see the first and last boys on Earth getting messed with by Metron in different ways, interestingly enough; is this a comment on some baseline humanity tinkering that the New God is up to, or a throwback to the shrinking of time at the edges from something like Zero Hour? More easter eggs for longtime fans that can be read without that knowledge by everyone else, just seeing a caveman and a boy in some post-disaster New York City), after all, and it opens up the story and introduces the themes while keeping things fairly grounded. What it lacked, however, was what Secret Invasion #1 provided in spades: Big explosions and immediate threat for our marquee heroes. I don’t care about that – I liked the slow burn threat and creepiness of anti-life children, crystal Metron and serial killing of superhumans well enough, thanks – but I can’t help but wonder if a lot of the complains about this first issue come from those who expected more of a direct competitor to Marvel’s louder opening issue. Never mind the quiet, depressing murder of J’Onn J’Onzz (which was somehow even worse for the almost off-handed manner in which it took place), I wonder whether some people would’ve been happier to see Snapper Carr betray the League to Libra and blow up the Hall of Justice again…

(The worst thing about the book is, for me, the art. Oh, don’t get me wrong; parts of it are glorious, but the scene with Vandal Savage talking to Libra seemed oddly rushed and/or inked by someone else entirely… It stood out, and not in the way it was probably intended to. Is this the dreaded deadline doom hitting in the very first issue… or something much more sinister?)

Jog Presents: Grant Morrison's best comic from 5/29

All Star Superman #11:

Yeah, Morrison's best this week.

I mean, Final Crisis #1 was OKAY and all; it basically read like the start of one of Morrison's old JLA storylines, only with the very slick stylings of J.G. Jones backing it up. More humor than expected, along with a couple character deaths that're abrupt enough that I'm not sure we're supposed to feel shocked. I smiled at Dark Side wiping his face, since I'm a Seven Soldiers nerd. But it also came off as firecracker-thin as JLA sometimes did, particularly while the stories were still in the setup stage.

And Batman #677 was as EH as Morrison's Batman tends to be in single-chapter form, packed with tense, prodding conversations ill-served by an art team that isn't stellar with emotional nuance. Decent twist on the nature of the Black Glove in there, one that fits Morrison's running themes really well, but the story didn't have much else to it beyond overlong musings on the nature of Batman, broken up by fragmented threats - it's all starting to feel like Born Again as smashed into Mask, that old Bryan Talbot story from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne is laying in a hospital bed and the doctors are telling him he's only hallucinated his adventures as Batman to escape his horrible shit life. God, that one messed me up back in '92.

But All Star Superman? That one's got an ace up the sleeve it plays right on page one:

That's a great panel. Everything about it is awesome. The crazy dramatic hatched shadows, the zone of white light, the giant lever Lt. Handlebar has to pull to get old sparky roarin' while he makes dramatic note of the expiration of Lex Luthor's time among us... but it's the mustache that completes the scene. Let's be serious about that.

There's other reasons why this comic is GOOD. It's the penultimate issue of the series, so you'd probably expect it to be about the right time for a reprise of the Superman/Luthor relationship, as detailed back in issue #5 - you'd be right, and just about every Luthor page kills. I don't think it's spoiling much to reveal that Lex's execution goes terribly awry, but the action only serves to house some really fine supervillain character moments. I particularly liked his boast about curing cancer -- not only something he clearly has no plans to follow through on, but something Superman just did last issue -- and the continuing lies about the origin of (issue #3's) superpower serum.

Luthor, of course, is the ultimate skewed double of Superman in a series packed with them - if last issue showed Superman striving to bring out the finest in humankind, Luthor embodies his worst possible failure, a person made just about the Super-equal while retaining absolutely none of the kind qualities. The issue's portrayal also sports the most thorough mirroring the series has managed: a fortress packed with memorabilia and curious toys, a militia of robot helpers, and even his own goddamned evil sun, the help in "high places" first hinted at in issue #4.

Yet it's all an act -- Luthor stole his powers, and merely cut a deal with his sun -- and Morrison happily peppers his lines with childlike flourishes seemingly on loan from All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder ("You knuckle-dragging retards." "So how cool am I?"), but isn't any Frank Miller signal for fun. It's the essence of immaturity, of a Man unprepared to be Super.

On the other hand, not everything in this issue is about Lex Luthor, and not everything is as strong. Sure, I got a kick out of a 'red skies' gag showing up the same week as Morrison's own contribution to the Crisis series, and Frank Quitely is always great at tucking away special details that'll take more than one read to spot, like Bar-El from issue #9 terrorizing Phantom Zone criminals, or that photo of young Clark & friends slabbed so as to accomplish the plot of issue #6. While you're at it, compare Quitely's issue #1 Superman to the guy we're seeing here, and check out how his physical state has decayed.

But I think all the referencing here exacts a bit of toll from the story. A good deal of space is taken up with Superman's clash with Solaris the Tyrant Sun, a character that typically works great until it actually has to show up on the page and do stuff, at which point there's rarely much to do with it. It is funny when Quitely draws its big blue eye squinting when Superman socks its belly(?), but the whole sequence does little more than reestablish the loyalty of Superman's pals -- including a dramatic sacrifice Morrison laboriously foreshadows -- while haphazardly reminding us of the Superman's New Powers plot thread that's been hanging since shortly after issue #1.

It's not unentertaining, but it registers as conspicuous consumption of space when set against more interesting content - never mind the hint of a convenient resolution to the series' main conflict having drifted in from outer space! Still more than enough to keep you perked up for the grand finale, though - and in August there won't even be a Crisis to upstage.

Meow Meow Woof Woof Woof: Graeme looks back at last week's books

Thank God for that holiday weekend, which allowed me to… what’s the word? Oh, yeah, breathe. Perhaps it’s the ancient curse of May that’s been making myself and everyone I know so busy over the last couple of weeks, or maybe it’s that downturn in the economy making everyone work harder so that they keep their jobs. All I know is, there’re reviews once you hit that “More” button.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #560: Marcos Martin may be the ideal Spider-Man artist around these days whose name isn’t John Romita, judging from his work on this and the last issue, but that doesn’t really help this book break out of its only-Okay rut. I feel guilty for not liking this as much as I could; Dan Slott’s script is fine and built off of some fun concepts (I like Peter Parker as paparazzi, and find his holier-than-thou friends kind of amusing, if confusing, in their response to his new job), but it still feels like a solid but unremarkable issue from the mid-70s, you know? Having a cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until after the skip week is a new, and somewhat unwelcome, twist; it just emphasizes how random the “three times a month” schedule actually is – Why not just do it weekly, if you’re going to all that effort anyway?

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #13: As Mark Waid’s run starts winding down, we get the first truly done-in-one issue without running subplots, and it’s… Okay. The problem isn’t the interplay between the heroes (which is well done, and I like seeing the less-dickish Batman), but the threat, which is – perhaps necessarily, considering the fact that it has to be introduced and resolved in one issue? – cardboard and unconvincing. I’d be happier if Waid just got to do 22 pages of Jay and Batman sitting around, having a chat, I think.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #38: After spending the weekend reading Essential Captain America volumes 3 and 4, I felt properly ready to read the return of (spoiler!) the crazy 1950s Cap. That said, reading those books also made it much clearer how well Ed Brubaker is updating the book and concept while remaining true to its history; you can see the Steve Englehart influence all through the current issue when you know where to look, and I mean that as a compliment. I’m still not sure entirely where he’s going with this storyline – partially because, the more we see of him, the more I like Bucky as Cap – but if he keeps up the Very Good quality, I’ll stick around to find out.

FANTASTIC FOUR #557: It’s like listening to someone trying to sing a song that they’ve never heard, but have read the Wikipedia entry of, isn’t it? You kind of know what Millar and Hitch are aiming for, but they’re just…not getting it right. I can’t even really put my finger on why, either… It just reads too… I don’t know, calculated? Cynical? There’s a lack of genuine joy in it, for some reason, and lack of momentum, as well. Awful, then.

THE FLASH #240: Meanwhile, this book seems to be getting back on track after a shaky last few issues. Freddie Williams’ art takes a turn for the Art Adams (It’s got to be the appearance of the giant ape that does it), and Tom Peyer seems to be getting more of a grip on the characters (and why they may have been out of character earlier on)… I’m not convinced about the new Darkseid appearing out of nowhere and snatching the Flashkids, but I guess we have to have our Final Crisis tie-in somewhere… Okay.

IRON MAN, DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #29: Stuart Moore takes over the book for a guest-stint and it’s weirdly familiar after reading Matt Fraction’s new Iron Man a couple of weeks ago – Again, we have a villain who’s as smart as Tony that he’s responsible in some way for creating. Nonetheless, it works; Moore’s take on Stark is less hero-worshipping than regular writers the Knaufs, and regular artist Roberto De La Torres’ art is, as ever, beautiful to look at. Dean White’s colors are worth pointing out, as well; he matches the line art’s look wonderfully (He also does a great job in Mighty Avengers this week). Another Good tie-in to the enjoyable movie? Who knew?

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #21: Ahhh, so that whole “Sightings” banner is going to be used on pointless filler issues that set up other storylines in uninspiring ways? Good to know. Don’t get me wrong, Carlos Pacheco’s art is nice to look at and Dwayne McDuffie’s dialogue is snappy enough, but still – Was there some point here beyond “Hey! These guys are going to be important in Final Crisis #1!” that I missed? A low Okay for the craft alone.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #15: The pluses: That last page teaser, returning from the first issue. The minuses: Are we still doing this long, seemingly aimless, Gog storyline? Eh, I guess, but I wish this had some sense of heading in any direction whatsoever.

THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #14: Secret Invasion is turning out to be a very strange thing, much more enjoyable in theory than in practice. Take the Avengers tie-ins, for example; the idea of using the books to fill in backstory not necessary but useful for the core title is a good one, but everything we’ve seen so far has had an air of indulgent uselessness – Does it really take an entire issue to have the Skrulls realize that the Sentry is mentally unstable and easy to trick? There feels like there’s much more interesting backstory out there to be mined (When exactly did the Invasion start, for example? Who were the first to be replaced? What has happened to those who have been replaced? Why did the Skrulls not act during Civil War or World War Hulk?), but that’s probably all going to be handled in the main book, leaving these issues to be filled with stories like this one, or the slow “Nick Fury gathers together another team of Teenage Superheroes” of the last issue of New Avengers, that are just… Eh.

(And because I wasn’t around to talk about it at the time, Secret Invasion #2? Was there some kind of “Well, things happened in the first issue, so I’ll make sure nothing happens in this second one so that I don’t exhaust the fans” thing happening there?)

STAR TREK: ASSIGNMENT EARTH #1: IDW, I don’t know if it’s you or John Byrne or whoever, but someone needs to take more care scanning that art in so that it’s not as pixilated and jaggy as it is here. Also, if someone could take some time and maybe get a colorist who’d be willing to add some kind of complexity to Byrne’s mostly-backgroundless art, then everything would be much better. Also also, if you could rewrite the book so that it wasn’t so generic and Awful, that’d be great as well. Kthanxbai.

Coming this week: Final Crisis! Marvel 1985! And the potential disappointment that is Joss Whedon’s last X-Men issue!

New Returns, IDW: Jog got his return long ago but is still waiting for his rebate as of 5/21

IDW: where the paper quality is high, the licenses run free, the ads always sit in back, and it's $3.99 for a drive. IDW: what have you this week? 

Tank Girl: Visions of Booga #1 (of 4):

This is the publisher's second Tank Girl miniseries, from original writer and co-creator Alan C. Martin. You might recall the first issue of the last series (Tank Girl: The Gifting) being a strikingly odd bit of work, with Martin's happy-go-lucky short-form gag stories being wrung onto the page via the art of Ashley Wood. It really did look a bit like that old MAD parody with Bernie Krigstein drawing Bringing up Father, except as a wholly intentional bit of franchise reinvention rather than a cutting spoof. It was memorable.

After that, layouts were provided by Rufus Dayglo -- a decade-or-so experienced 2000 AD contributer who also worked with Wood on later issues of the Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty adaptation -- to a gradual upswing in straightforward cartoon style; I think he might have been the solo artist on a few of the short pieces near the end, or at least that's what the on-page signatures led me to believe. He and colorist Christian Krank are definitely the sole artists here, and they've got a very attractive style going, blending Dayglo's thick lines and manic action with a restrained scheme of faded hues (and lots of zip-a-tone patterns), warm colors gradually appearing to set off cool ones, more and more as the story goes on.

And yeah, it is mostly a single story this time. There's a five-page homage to Adam Ant and universal expansion in the back, but most of the space is taken up by Part One of a long flashback to Tank Girl and kangaroo paramour Booga in hard times, robbing a train for their pay and taking the fall for the Australian Mafia, then going on the run in what very well might develop into a road trip of discovery, populated by largely menacing characters asking for pain.

I typically like Martin's writing better in the short form, where he can stuff his off-the-cuff plot contortions, scatological gags and bits of wordplay into shots of experience - even his related prose book, Tank Girl: Armadillo, worked most effectively as vignettes strung together lackadaisically into a novel. This, however, seems comparatively diluted over the course of 18 introductory pages, its violent jokes isolated in story space and its depictions of corrupt authority shallower for the space given them. It's still OKAY, on the strength of Dayglo's and Krank's appeal - I'll want to see how Dayglo & Martin interface on their upcoming original project with IDW, pristeen16.

Dead, She Said #1 (of 6):

This, meanwhile, is a newer thing with even older roots. It's the first full-length comic to be pencilled and inked by Bernie Wrightson since... I guess it'd be Punisher: P.O.V. in 1991?

It's also Wrightson's latest work with writer Steve Niles; the duo teamed at Dark Horse last year for the miniseries City of Others, which saw the great José Villarrubia color directly from Wrightson's pencils. You can obtain a lot of effects coloring from pencils -- projects as visually diverse as All Star Superman and The Dark Tower make good examples -- but Villarrubia went for a minimally intrusive approach that only seemed to reinforce the 'unfinished' quality of the art for me, although I guess it was sort of appropriate for a story that barely managed to trudge through an introductory issue's worth of content over its entire length.

Dead, She Said, looks more complete, although Grant Goleash's dim colors are less menacing than murky, and Wrightson's pages are still lacking the compositional snap that he'd bring to even later-period works like Captain Sternn: Running Out of Time. He does manage a nice enough character design for the lead character -- a private eye who gradually realizes that he's become undead -- and there's a fun little stretch of physical business with Our Hero trying to keep his intestines from spilling out of a gutshot, but nearly every character here looks weirdly tired, posing in empty-seeming environments, especially when outdoors (where noir window shade shadows cannot hang).

Niles' story, as you can make out from above, is a supernatural detective thing, albeit not much like his Cal McDonald stories. For now. I can't really tell you what it is like, you see, since this first issue merely states the series' broad concept ('undead detective') and strings out a few plot details until the concept becomes slightly less broad ('framed for murder'). Meanwhile, nondescript characters encounter an unspecified threat, and the art isn't enough to enliven the scene. It's all pretty AWFUL for a four-dollar kickoff, and while I'm sure it'll pick up a little once there's added opportunities for grotesque visions, I doubt I'll have to urge to wait.

The Inventory #1: Jeff Considers Immortal Iron Fist #10-14

From time to time, it's been suggested in our comments that we post follow-up reviews of story arcs after reviewing them in issue-by-issue fashion for so long, as a way to see whether or not the whole thing came out in the wash. The Inventory doesn't quite do that but it's close: I'm so far behind on my non-manga reading that I thought I might review a batch of purchased issues of a single title at one go and see how they shape up.

First up, The Immortal Iron Fist #10-#14, plus The Immortal Iron Fist annual.

As you may remember, I've been a fan of Iron Fist from way, way back (like back when Claremont and Byrne first worked on the character) so I was delighted when writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, and artist David Aja tackled the character by crafting a story arc that re-examined the character's origin and took it as the jumping off point for an epic story that spun backwards in time even as it moved forward.

Part of what thrilled me about that it was unabashedly such a classic piece of Marvel storytelling: when I was growing up, Marvel characters were always having their origins re-examined, the gaps of believability being grouted over with more backstory and, whenever possible, more continuity. (The examples that stand out the most for me are both from Steve Englehart: his sprawling storyline in Avengers that revealed the true history of the Vision; and that great Captain America story that puts the Captain America of Marvel's '50s comics in continuity.) That stuff will probably always resonate with me, but never more so than when I was at the age where I was starting to figure out the underlying cause and effect in the world around me. There comes some point when it really sinks in that everything existed before you came into the world, and that everything has a history, and the effect is a little bit like those Marvel epics: even as you're moving forwards, this epic backstory of the world is spinning out before you simultaneously.

The first six issues of The Immortal Iron Fist have Danny Rand, the current Iron Fist, meet Orson Randall, the previous Iron Fist, and discover the true nature of his origin. At the end of it, he's whisked away to the magical city of K'un L'un where he was raised, so he may fight in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Issues #7-14 show that tournament, re-introduce us to K'un L'un and the political struggle behind its facade, introduce the other Heavenly Cities which are tied to K'un L'un, as well as the champions of those cities, fill in the backstory with Danny's dad and Davos, the villain of the first arc, and, in the end, set the warriors of the tournament and the warriors of K'un L'un against the forces of Hydra.

It's all audacious as hell, jammed to the gills with characters and action, cool fights and finishing moves. Even with the wit and insouciance of Fraction's dialogue, these issues of Immortal Iron Fist feel like Scott Pilgrim's deadpan cousin: Hong Kong movies from the '80s and '90s, video games, and Marvel comics all hold equal sway over the proceedings. At its best, the book becomes almost operatic while still being cobbled of out of little more than thirty years of beloved pop culture detritus.

Yet, weirdly, by the time I'd plowed through issues #10-14 (and the Annual, must not forget the Annual), I found myself simultaneously satiated and hungry, pleased and grouchy, content and unsettled. While comics have many, many advantages over movies and videogames, several of the biggest differences can work to their disadvantage: neither movies nor video games are assembled in a linear fashion, and the work on the slam-bang finale can be the first task undertaken. Also, comics both benefit and suffer from being the product of a much smaller team of creative personnel--when a member of the team takes a powder or loses interest, the change in the product is noticeable.

All of which is a fancy-dan way of saying that in issue #10, artist David Aja contributes fifteen pages, and Kano contributes five. By issue #13, Aja contributes three pages, Kano contributes six, and Tonci Zonjic the other eleven. And in the big finale, Kano does five pages, Clay Mann does five, Tonci Zonjic does the remaining twenty, and Aja is nowhere to be seen. (Unless he did the cover--why the hell aren't they crediting the cover artist on these books?)

Now, Zonjic has a clear, clean style--and Matt Hollingsworth's colors (which are so superlative throughout the entire series he deserves to be counted as one of the key creative personnel) help provide a visual unity with the preceding issues--but Aja's work gains its power from fluidly moving from elegantly simple linework to byzantine detail, and often in the same panel, in a way that underlined the ambitions of the book: Immortal Iron Fist similarly swings from the simplicity of a big, gaudy kung-fu fight book to a richly backstoried epic in almost as short a span. And so the big final issue, with all of the legendary warriors fighting side-by-side in Zonjic's clear, clean style, has a flattened feeling to it, just because a dimension has visually dropped out.

Additionally, the "Seven Capital Cities of Heaven" arc manages to more or less forget about the main character entirely, which is something Marvel's '70s epics never did. While some of this is because Brubaker and Fraction are too dutiful to succumb to mere hackwork--after setting up the reader's expectation that Iron Fist will fight against six other awesome kung-fu adversaries in the Tournament of Heavenly Cities, they have Danny lose his first match and remove him from the action--I can't help but feel, despite the writers' insistence in interviews, Brubaker and Fraction don't have much interest in Danny Rand.

Indeed, the real center of the piece turns out to be Davos, who starts off as a villain in search of vengeance, and ends up conflicted, torn between his self-righteous anger and the opportunity to truly act righteously. Issue #14 of Immortal Iron Fist really turns on that choice, and it's the resolution of his story that gives the arc tremendous power. It's kind of like if Lucas had done Star Wars right, and we really had started the story thinking it was about Luke Skywalker and finished it realizing it was actually all about Darth Vader.

And yet: couldn't the arc have also been about Danny Rand? As much as I appreciate that Brubaker and Fraction make Danny a genuine hero, noble and self-sacrificing and kind, I'm sort of frustrated they are either unable or unwilling to figure out what to do with the character apart from discover his origin. As Claremont and Byrne did before them, they surround the character with the flashiest supporting cast around. By the end of the arc, it's not enough that Danny already has an ex-girlfriend who's a detective with a bionic arm, a best friend who is a steel-skinned superhero, and a good friend who's partners with the bionic-armed ex and has been trained as a sword-wielding samurai--he ends up accompanied to Earth by the five other champions from the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. Danny Rand, Brubaker and Fraction seem to be saying, is basically a kung-fu Richie Rich from a magical city: after you've spent a story or two on that gimmick, you've got to bring in Robota and Dollar and Jackie Jokers, all of whom also come from magical cities, but who have an endless number of cool finishing moves that are fun to think up and splash across action panels. You have to keep attaching cool geegaws to hide that the center is dramatically inert. And that may be the case, but I didn't get the sense the creators were trying very hard to see if that was actually true or not. (That the creative team is pulling up stakes so soon after the conclusion of this story lends some weight to that suspicion.)

And so, if I had read and reviewed each of these issues on their own, they would've ranked along the spectrum of the Very Good rating (apart from the Annual, which I thought was shockingly close to Awful--all geegaws and nearly no point) but, read as whole, I would rank the storyline as highly Good, maybe a little more than that. Issues #10-14 of The Immortal Iron Fist are ambitious, clever, and the high points are, really, everything I want in a superhero comic. But the formidable skills of the creators may not be enough to conquer the realities of the marketplace, where a fastidious artist can become overwhelmed. Indeed, the skills of the creators may not be enough to outweigh their own creative passions, which may be drawn to places darker than a unambiguously good man may be able to take them. These issues of Immortal Iron Fist are certainly worth buying and worth reading. But they're also worth considering for their negative space, for the areas where they cannot, or will not, reach.

The Perils of the High

Look, a review (kind of!)!!

HUNTRESS YEAR ONE #1: I really don't get the thinking behind this "Year one" series, for the most part -- they seem to be focusing mostly on characters without their own books, and seemingly no particular thing coming up soon that they're an important enough part that you've got to retell their origin. (cf METAMORPHO YEAR ONE) Huntress is largely a third string character, made much more so by decoupling her from being Batman-and-Selina's child (the Earth-2 version). The Mafia-Princess-become-The-Punisher isn't the worst idea ever, but it strikes me as being one of those inherently limited ideas that isn't enough, in and of itself, to sustain a character.

Jeff Lester and I were discussing something similar a week or two back when he opined that he thought when they finally bring Captain America back from the dead that it might be cool if they more or less fully rebooted him to be Man From The Past in the Modern World he was circa AVENGERS #4.

I said, sure that's cool, and could be interesting... for maybe (MAYBE) a year, then anything interesting about it really dissipates in the same way that I was amused by the first "Oh, what is this strange and mystical thing you call a 'gas-o-leen pump'?" in Jodi Picault's WONDER WOMAN run, but by the third one I was gagging and "get over it already!"

That's the problem with High Concepts -- as a general rule they're designed for A story, possible two, maybe maybe you can push it to three, but then you need to reinvent things or else it stagnates. If a High Concept becomes what a book/character is ABOUT, then how and where can you care?

Fer example, I don't think Superman is ABOUT "rocketed to earth as a baby, he fights for ...the American Way". Sure you can do a couple of stories that are exactly about being an immigrant and an outsider, but I doubt that your personal Top 10 Superman stories ever actually feature that as a significant theme

(*waits for Kurt Busiek to post and tell me how wrong I am about that one*)

So, that's why "Mafia-Princess-becomes-The-Punisher" is clever enough, but it basically has no where to go from there -- either she loses against the mob (which no one wants to read), or she beats them (which ends the arc/conflict), or she joins them (which can't happen any longer in current continuity -- she was a member of the JLA after all!)

In fact, what it has left us with is a character who basically is just "anger management issues", which, again, is okay-ish, but also one that you can't go very far with. I'm speaking as a recovering Angry Young Man here -- it's only charming up to a point.

Here's the thing about this book: they can't possibly expect it to sell more than, say, 30k copies, and I think I'm being wildly optimistic there and wouldn't at all be surprised if it was 20k or under (like in CATWOMAN range). By the time it gets to issue #6, I'm guessing it will be 16k range or less, down to those kind of numbers that pretty much just represents the DCU fans with OCD who buy every DCU book because they HAVE to -- does anyone really even think there are even 5k *Huntress* fans? (I don't)

There's no bursting market clamor for Huntress as a character, that I can see -- and if there was, it almost certainly wouldn't be for a retelling of her origin, over some form of new work. The writer, Ivory Madison, seems to be an established writer, but not one that has a big bold body of work behind her that could draw in vast new audiences, that I can really see from her website there (though, to be fair, it's not like I'm the go-to guy for literary matters), so I'm really trying to figure out what the thinking involved here in green-lighting this series was.

Who knows, maybe its a little suck up to Paul Levitz.

As a comic book retailer, I am perpetually very nervous about overproduction, and this seems like such a misformed idea to me, one that really only exists to suck up another 1/20th of a point of market share, another 6 inches of rack space.

Be that as all of it may, the only question that matters at the end of the day is "Is it any good", and really, this was OKAY. The writing is good enough, the art is competent, and I liked the color palette used, but I think that if you're going to devote six issues to The Huntress, heck even more so, six issues to retell the origin of The Huntress, it really needs to be a whole heaping lot of better than just "OKAY".

As always, what d0 YOU think?

-B

Format Chit-Chat: Jog and a 5/14 pamphlet

Sky Doll #1 (of 3)

This is the first product of Marvel's new comics venture with French publisher Soleil Productions. It's a quasi-miniseries of sorta new work that will kind of run for three issues, more-or-less unedited in a relatively nice format. Essentially. Soleil has been around since the '80s, in case you're not familiar, and currently publishes a fairly international line of books, mixing European originals with French translations of English, Japanese and Korean-language works. They specialize in action/sci-fi/fantasy series -- although their partnership with book publisher Gallimard in reviving Futuropolis, a defunct, influential purveyor of avant-garde comics, has had them deemed bandits of cultural capital by sectors of the French small press -- and they've been enthusiastic in seeking artistic contributions from talent around the world. They seem as natural a fit as any French comics outfit would be with Marvel, in that their typical works might carry some crossover appeal to Marvel's core readership base.

However, French comics are not US comics, and questions always arise from several directions.

This first issue of Sky Doll -- the creation of Italian artists Barbara Canepa & Alessandro Barbucci (both are credited with writing and art) -- corresponds to the debut French album of the series, released in 2001. Each forthcoming Marvel issue will present one European album, as I believe it'll go for the whole of the partnership.

There's also an "of 3" in the issue count, but that's a little misleading; Sky Doll is, in fact, an ongoing series, with Tome 3 merely being as far as the creators have gotten with the main story (there's been a collection of shorts too). Issue #3 is therefore as much as Marvel can release. So, don't expect an ending or anything come July, because it hasn't been produced yet; Marvel even tacitly admits to the situation in the back of this issue, when it is mentioned in Canepa's biographical blurb that she's currently working on a part four, although I don't think this information has been made quite clear in the advertising.

And what about Marvel's presentation? What about the content, in which different cultural values regarding, say, depictions of the human body and its activities might be implicated? Well, I don't have access to the French original to do a panel-by-panel comparison, but it doesn't look like anything's been touched. So long as you define 'content' as 'inside.'

That's the French cover from which Marvel's cover is based, and I suspect just about every one of you has already figured out what's missing from Marvel's version: the French text. And the half-a-nipple.

Hey, I'm sure it saved a lot of retailers the need to somehow obscure the cover (mine plopped every copy in a bag anyway to prevent underage flipping), but you might recall that Marvel actually released an unedited version of the cover when the book's solicitation first arrived, which I guess got everyone's hopes up that the publisher would be adopting a more front-to-back liberal attitude concerning the material, which could have maybe prompted some interesting reactions, given Marvel's place in the Direct Market. It's not exactly a shocking cover, after all, but I think most readers have enough of an impression of what's 'acceptable' for Marvel that they can tell when the self-drawn line is being crossed.

Oh well - Marvel does include the unedited version inside the book as an illustration, and assures no interior edits via a big black & red MATURE CONTENT box, plastered over the lower half of the critter at the bottom left of the cover, which rather gives the impression that the lil' guy's penis is hanging out or something.

But hey, the cover could look a lot different.

This is what Sky Doll looked like on the stands when it was first released in English, less than two years ago. You might have heard from, oh, Marvel's solicitation that the series is "now finally presented in English," which seems to suggest that there wasn't a prior English translation... but there was, in the Heavy Metal Summer 2006 special, which went so far as to collect all three extant parts of the series into a single $6.95 magazine. Again, Marvel basically concedes the fact inside this issue itself (once more via Canepa's revealing biography!), which makes me wonder what they were getting at with 'finally presented in English' - they couldn't have just not known until the last minute (although if anyone said that or some other simple thing was the case on a message board or something, do bring it up).

An answer, or at least an underlying intent, might be found in the differing focuses of Marvel and Heavy Metal. The latter is no tiny presence in comics at large - it did have a total paid distribution of 58,108 copies per issue on average last year. But that's mostly to various magazine racks; it surely doesn't have Marvel's penetration into the Direct Market, and when you think of Marvel addressing its solicitation copy and its hype-in-general to Direct Market denizens, it makes sense that much of that audience would 'finally' be getting the stuff in English, if only for the places Marvel can get with the pamphlet format.

But shit, that's another thing. There's no undoing the fact that Heavy Metal has released the whole business in one hit for seven bucks, while Marvel's per-issue price is $5.99. And it's a decent enough pamphlet, with a press release-type intro to Soleil on the inside-front cover, what appears to be the original title and credits page art, the 44-page story without ads, a two-page interview with the creators, 16 pages of previews of forthcoming releases, those biographies on the inside-back cover, and, perhaps most importantly, a new English adaptation by C.B. Cebulski from Stephanie Logan's translation - Heavy Metal, as you've probably heard, is not famous for crackling English.

On the other hand, the art is squished a bit to accommodate the pamphlet format - it doesn't kill the reading experience, but Heavy Metal's magazine-sized images go down better for a work designed to be read big. And there's little denying that the magazine's got the more cost-effective system - even if they'd gone 'typical' with Sky Doll and spread the stuff out over various regular issues, you'd still have gotten the contents of this Marvel issue for $5.99, in a larger format, with an added stack of shorter comics and a good selection of anime porn ads.

Granted, you'd also be at the whims of Heavy Metal's iffy series scheduling, and then there's the translations (which, truth be told, were only stiff in Sky Doll's case)... I think Marvel's paper quality is slicker? There's always another question. But what's for sure is that there's multiple options, and the Marvel option isn't necessarily the best one, although it is the one they know how to work the best, given their base. I wonder if a less burdened series might have served as a better debut piece for the line? Ha, I wonder if these burdens even seem heavy when compared with the wider issue of comics pamphlet pricing in general today? Oh, French comic albums: also expensive.

So, um... how's the story?

It's OKAY. What struck me about Sky Doll the first time I read it was how it seemed to belong to its initial English-language venue: this is very nearly a quintessential 'Heavy Metal' type of comic, melding colorful/omnious sci-fi cityscapes, elusive spiritual ideas, sassy women in striking (or absent) attire, some blood & gore (not too much here), hallucinogenic visual passages, high technology, odd creatures and broad-as-a-Vatican-fresco satire.

Canepa & Barbucci add a little extra zest with an art style both informed by their work with Disney and eager to incorporate anime design tropes, several of which grew from the soil of vintage Disney animation anyway. I wouldn't call it manga -- the Japanese influence seems firmly planted in-panel, allowing for little of the extra-panel narrative thrust of comperable Japanese comics -- but it allows for some cute, semi-furry character designs with funny expression/body language work. Gobs of gloss in this thing.

The plot concerns the affairs of Noa, a very humanoid wind-up 'sky' doll -- pretty angels with which mortals can sin without fear of repercussion -- with the odd-for-her-type ability to retain her memories, and a longing to escape her dead-end life in Heaven, a 'sexy' spaceship wash station. She also hears voices and hides secrets that even she doesn't understand. Of course.

Hope arrives when she stows away with Roy & Jahu, a pair of novice emissaries for Papess Lodovica, the scheming, oft-topless god-queen of the ruling faith, kind of a Roman Catholicism as fatalistic capitalist carnival, with crowds screaming for holy blood and begging to be incinerated by divine laser beams while secret cardinals rule the media. Back in the day, there was a co-Papess, Agape, who balanced the spirit with Lodovica's carnality - she's gone, but her own followers still seethe with anger, ready to do some violence to clean out the decadence. Sensing any very basic parallels with These Times Today?

It's fruitless to go much deeper, since this issue is almost entirely setup. Mild, kindly Roy and zealous Jahu are presented as opposing types of religious faith, the notion of female sexuality as a commodity is circled, if not really explored, and schemes are set in motion. It's all pretty enough, and sometimes pretty funny, but its energy is never more than an engine's shaking as it struggles to start.

In case you're interested, it doesn't really turn over until issue #3, when the various combating forces come into clearer view, and the series stops to wait for #4 - until then, it's little parodies of fringe religions and That Damned Media. Who knows what the readers will say when that 'ending' is reached? It's a difficulty in bringing these works over to this language, in this format, and only one difficulty of many. I think Sky Doll's a nice enough series, but there's necessarily more going on to ponder than the cunning of half-naked catgirls, as nice a query as it is.

The stones have forgotten them: Douglas complains about two 5/7 Marvels

Actually, an announcement first: Because I have discovered the secret extra six hours in every day, I've revised and expanded my annotations for DC Universe 0, and posted them at Final Crisis Annotations, where I'll be making notes on FC-related stuff as it appears. So now the complaints, both about comics I more or less enjoyed, under the cut: THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1 and SECRET INVASION #2.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1: I liked pretty much the same things everyone else liked about this issue--the clever ways it jumps off from the Iron Man movie (the dial-style chest implants, Pepper's Girl Friday relationship with Tony), the return to Iron Man's roots as a guilty arms merchant, the computer-modeled artwork and coloring (this is one series where there's almost no such thing as excessive digital effects).

The part that irritates me is something that's not unique to this issue at all, and something I've complained about before: the totally cavalier way "terrorists" have become all-purpose bad guys, unconnected to any kind of politics. Terrorism is a means, not a goal. "Terrorists" are not the same thing as "people who go around killing everyone in sight indiscriminately because they just want to fuck shit up a little": they are people who attempt to further a specific political or ideological agenda by creating the fear of violence against civilians. Any terrorist action has an immediate and obvious political subtext, by definition; it's meant to change civilians' behavior patterns. But we don't get any politics here. There is no agenda; there is no ideology. All we get to find out about the guys who blow themselves up in the street at the beginning of this story is that they've blown themselves up.

And that makes no sense . Tanzania doesn't have much in the way of stuff that people blow themselves up over; in fact, the last significant terrorist action there, as far as I can tell, was ten years ago, when the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam was bombed. But to move the plot along, Matt Fraction gives us a a ripped-from-today's-headlines bit about the "three traditional terror outfits" near Tabora: "the Revolutionary Army, the Fist of the People, and the Tiger's Tooth." "Revolutionary army" is a fairly common phrase, but I can find no evidence of the other two anywhere near Tanzania. Whoops, guess it's not actually ripped from the headlines.

So what other terrorists might have been close enough? An "A.I.M. splinter group" called "Advanced Genocide Mechanics" in the Congo turns out to be responsible. (The Congo proper is rather a long ways away from Tanzania; maybe Dugan meant the D.R.C.) This is where the goofy but disbelief-suspendable idea of A.I.M. as a consortium of morally lax scientists falls off a cliff: nobody is just sort of generally in favor of genocide in the abstract--practitioners of genocide have a specific group of people they believe it's justifiable to kill, rather than a hankering to put together an institute to develop new genocidal mechanisms.

There's also the question of why Stane and A.G.M. would need to surgically modify people into human bombs if they're just going to blow them up; the old-fashioned strapping-on-a-bomb technique seems much more cost-effective. Surgical modifications are how the Iron Man armor works, of course, but the chief purpose of his armor, as with any armor, is to provide defense--to protect the user from harm, right?

Anyway. This issue's a Good start, and I'm sticking around, but I sure hope Fraction starts dealing with the messy realities of politics if he's taking this tack on the character.

SECRET INVASION #2: Tom Spurgeon has some interesting comments on the subject of comics costing too much; I'll simply note my annoyance at Marvel jacking up the price of a 22-page story by a third and offering up no enhancement in exchange other than a cover printed on slightly heavier stock. This also seemed like a weirdly lightweight installment of a story as potentially plot-driven as this is: four double-page spreads is definitely too many in this context, especially since most of the plot threads introduced last issue are ignored this time. (I probably would have minded a bit less if this were an issue of Mighty Avengers.) And I wonder if a monthly release schedule was really the right idea for an eight-issue story that seems to be taking place in a very short span of time and requires most other Marvel-universe titles to tie in with it. Okay, and the possibility that some of the SW6 Avengers are real is indeed pretty juicy, but I'm starting to lose patience.

Abhay Briefly Considers Secret Invasion #2

Aaah, lazy Saturday, reading my Secret Invasion… Before Having Read the Comic:

I really enjoyed reactions to issue #1 around the internet. My favorite criticism is from a Mr. Stahl at Newsarama which pointed out that Skrulls revert back into Skrulls when they die: “Detecting impersonators is trivial: Take a live tissue sample from a suspect, and see if it reverts, immediately upon being removed from the body or after the cells in the sample die. There’s no plausible way for a Skrull to retain control over the sample, especially after cell death.” I’m not being mean—I think that’s a great reaction. It’s a completely valid, logical solution to the logistical problems that extraterrestrial Skrulls would face in mounting an invasion of the planet Earth from their outer space hives.

My only way of arguing it is a cop-out: I don’t care about logic—I just want to see 2008 Luke Cage fight 1978 Luke Cage, and logic be damned. Logic be damned! Which… that’s how we ended up in the Iraq War, if you think about it. Which I haven’t.

I really enjoyed the reactions, but... I think a lot of times people complain about big crossovers—and with good reason. Very good reason. But I think what gets lost in all of that is… you know, a lot of people like these things. They’re not all bad people. So: what are they getting out of them?

I’m reading my first China Mieville book right now, Perdido Street Station. Mieville is an avowed Marxist and international law specialist who writes these very odd novels about monsters. I guess he's the cutting-edge guy in fantasy right now-- I don't usually read those kinds of novels anymore so I wouldn't know. I saw a quote of his from an interview the other day:

Well I think part of the problem with the modern 'liberal' novel is that it often tends not to conceive of the totality of social life: instead it abstracts one element (stereotypically the middle-class family), and universalises it. By contrast, fantastic fiction that 'world-creates' creates a world - a totality. So whether or not it explicitly spells it out, there's a sense that an economic problem conceived of as background and the romantic plot foregrounded are part of the _same universe_. Maybe there’s an analogy we can draw to the big crossover. A specific series can only cover so much geography—an issue of The Fantastic Four can talk about family, an issue of Captain America can talk about patriotism. But the daily lives of readers are rarely just one thing—life can often be a series of collisions between disparate elements, between balancing family and work, social responsibility and private needs, etc. People eat dinner with their families, then turn on TV and hear about crazy shit happening on the other side of the world. Everything collides together. Everything’s colliding faster and faster—try and follow the news anymore. One day, the Bush Administration’s corrupt, the next day they’re incompetent, the day after that, they’re back to corrupt—who can keep up? The same machine you’re reading this on, brings you pornography and music, you know? The pornography is sometimes about innocent schoolgirls who get caught cheating on their college geography exams, and have to pleasure their way out of trouble. Sometimes there are moustaches involved; sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the performances stops in the middle for the two lovers to kick open a piñata, and inside of the piñata are sex toys, and then the porn stars resume their lovemaking on top of the lust-piñata. Sometimes a young pistelero arrives upon the scenes and says “Madre de Dios! You have destroyed my lust-piñata with your naughtiness. I shall teach you both a lesson.” And then he does, sexually, and it’s horrible, and you want to look away, and you want someday to forget what you see, forget what happens next. But it’s border justice, and you learn to live with that.

Usually there are tattoos.

I think a big crossover can speak to that sense that beyond our own limited human stories or what have you, we’re part of a larger social organism, in a way that I don’t know of or can think of any other mainstream comic that can. So: maybe that’s something…? After Having Read Issue #2:

Not much "happens" this issue, so I don’t have much to say about any of it. This issue’s mostly just follow-through on the events of the first issue-- fight scene, cliffhanger, and done. I thought it was nicely balanced between the big fight scenes, and bringing key events down to a level of how specific characters react to the situation. I've read a number of crossovers which have failed dramatically at the latter.

Mostly, I suppose I liked this issue because there were three double-page splash pages of things going nuts. The hero of the issue to me is inker Mark Morales: having seen Leinil Yu without him, I have to say I’m happy he’s around. I liked each of the double-page splashes so I liked the issue. People who don't enjoy that sort of thing probably enjoyed the issue less, I'd guess.

Unfortunately, the issue hints that maybe the Sentry will figure prominently in this series. I don't think that's a very interesting character, so I'd rather he didn't.

The only part that jumps out at me as being especially interesting is the “cliffhanger” involving Captain America. Basically, a new Captain America pops out and the issue suggests New Cap is real and Old Cap was a Skrull for the last ___ years. I think that's something, but not because anyone is going to believe the cliffhanger for a second and believe that Old Cap could have been a Skrull. Readers have seen his dead body, seen his funeral, etc. Having him be a Skrull would be a horrible take-away on readers, and would badly derail the work done on the regular series. I think it'd very obviously be a huge, huge mistake.

But I still think it’s an interesting cliffhanger because it poses the question that… the Old Cap managed to rally half the characters behind him in Marvel’s Civil War; what kind of damage is the fake New Cap capable of? I think that’s a fun, solid question to end an issue on.

Like Unto A Thing Or Two Of Iron

He may have the biggest movie opening that isn't a sequel this side of Tobey Maguire - and, no, I haven't seen it yet - but that doesn't guarantee that Iron Man's new books are going to be any good. With both the blatant movie tie-in (IRON MAN: VIVA LAS VEGAS #1) and more subtle tie-in (THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1) released this week, it's almost as if Marvel's trying to, you know, get fans of the movie to buy comics or something. It's a crazy world of multimedia marketing and no mistake these days.

Thing is, the one that's going to grab most of the movie-hungry eyes is easily the worst. That's not just complimenting Matt Fraction's new Tony Stark-centric book; VIVA LAS VEGAS, Jon Favreau's comic debut, is really pretty shitty. Never mind the lifeless, static art of Adi Granov - his men in armor can't be beat, but his real people are scarily devoid of any life - and go straight to the appalling script that jumps from scene to scene choppily, has generic dialogue and really, seriously, opens on a skit that suggests that French people are - are you ready for this - apologists for terrorists who hate Americans! I know! Hilarious! And timely!

On almost every level, this book feels like a misfire, the result of normally more sensible heads being turned by Favreau's Hollywood glamor (Tom Brevoort, how could you really let this go out with your name attached?). It's not even interestingly bad, it's just kind of dully embarrassing, and pretty much all out Crap.

Much, much better is INVINCIBLE IRON MAN. You still have art that's not really firing on all cylinders (although I think Sal Larocca's work looks better - and less photo referenced - than it did on newuniversal, for what it's worth), but Matt Fraction manages to do everything you want it to do - Introduce the threat in an interesting way and show that he understands the main character while he's at it, making his take one that you'd want to read more of. I don't know if it's my particular political stance, but I find this kind of flawed, redemptive Tony Stark much more interesting to read than the more obviously heroic version in his Director of SHIELD book (it also seems more in tune with the character's history, what with Armor Wars and, you know, his origin and all of that). Giving him something to legitimally feel guilty about - and the Son of Stane villain definitely seems to be able to do that - feels like it's the hook for the reader to actually care about the character and the story, instead of either/or for once. This book both feels lighter and more modern than the other regular book - faster, more ready to reinvent itself - and it's something that I hope will continue past this first arc, however long that may be; I'm surprised to want to read the second issue as much as I do, and would like to be able to say the same for the second year, if possible. Very Good.

Wait, didn't some other comics come out this week too?: Douglas reads some more 4/30/08 stuff

Weekly comics, therefore spoilers, therefore under the cut. Specifically Action Comics and New Avengers. And glamourpuss, which is sort of impossible to spoil. Plus Whatever, which is not a weekly comic but a collection of weekly comic strips.

GLAMOURPUSS #1: I see that Dave Sim, God bless him, is now requiring anybody who wants to talk to him to indicate in writing that they don't believe he's a misogynist. Well, that'll cut down on the amount of time he'll have to spend doing interviews, I suppose.

I posted here about how excited I was that Dave would be doing a regular series again when he announced glamourpuss, and it's good to see him doing a kind of drawing he obviously enjoys. What I didn't quite realize was that the premise of this series would kneecap his work--it keeps him from acting on some of his greatest strengths as a cartoonist. One of the best things about Cerebus was his gift for constructing and developing characters. But as Sim himself notes in this issue:

Right: there will never be much of a character in glamourpuss, because it's impossible to develop a character when you may have access to six images of that character, ever. (Also, I still don't see why he uses "photorealism" as an adjective instead of "photorealist," but I'm sure he has his reasons.) Pretty much every image here is based on fashion-magazine photos; most of the rest are hand-copied from old comic strips. As Jog pointed out, the six pages of "The Self-Education of N'atashae" are as much of a story as we're likely going to get.

For that matter, Sim was a brilliant caricaturist in Cerebus--when he drew Margaret Thatcher or the Three Stooges, he gave us something that looked nothing like the real thing but felt exactly like the real thing. Tracing-and-inking photographs, which is the raison d'être of this series, doesn't leave much latitude for caricature. And it can only be out of petulance that one of the best letterers in the history of comics is using ComiCraft's Joe Kubert font.

What's fascinating about this comic, though, is seeing Sim--an artist with thirty years of experience--pushing himself, hard, into unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. It's an ongoing commentary on his own process, an ouroboros of art gazing at and correcting itself, a high-grade, polished-for-publication sketchbook documenting Sim working out some ideas about drawing that have obsessed him for years. (I can see hints of this as far back as his commentary in one of the Swords of Cerebus books about trying to imitate Hal Foster's ability "to make a thatched hut with rough-hewn wooden shutters look like a thatched hut with rough-hewn wooden shutters in four pen lines or less.") Not at all like what I was hoping for, but Good enough that I'm sticking around to see where he can possibly take this.

Speaking of photorealist comics: Karl Stevens was kind enough to give me a copy of his new book WHATEVER (published by Alternative Comics, but not yet listed on their site) at Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend. (I don't know if it's in comics stores yet, but Amazon's got it.) Stevens won a Xeric grant for his book Guilty a few years ago; this is a collection of his weekly strip for the Boston Phoenix. His stuff is very clearly photo-based--specifically, it's based on photos of himself and his friends, which he renders in an intensively crosshatched style that's wonderfully sensitive to light and shade and contours. (I really like this maybe-not-suitable-for-work one.) His art is splendid and disciplined, but his writing is much messier: the strip is mostly, as might be expected, about post-collegiate types in the Boston area being unsure about what they're doing with their lives, and its tone keeps fluctuating. Sometimes it's little slice-of-life incidents, along the lines of Harvey Pekar's old one-pagers; there are occasional attempts at continuity and farce, like a sequence where "the two titans of Allston breakdancing" meet after seven years apart and prepare for a challenge.

One running gag that doesn't quite work involves an aggressive, freeloading Russian named Olaf, and the reason it doesn't work is that photorealism and comedy don't seem to mix--Stevens' thoughtfully observed artwork doesn't play along with the broad caricature of his writing. (There's a Christmas strip in the middle of the book where Stevens is sitting on Santa's lap, and Santa's telling him "you should practice drawing from your imagination more"; it's supposed to be a joke, but I really would like to see more of what Stevens imagines.) The most effective strips here are the ones where he isn't pushing toward a joke, but taking us into one of his characters' experience of their bodies and their world--like an All Over Coffee concerned more with people than with buildings. Very Good, in any case, and worth checking out.

ACTION COMICS #864: You know, I used to really dislike both Geoff Johns comics and Roy Thomas-style continuity fixes, but I'm starting to enjoy Johns' run on Action a lot. I didn't get the buzz from this issue I got from DCU Zero (and that... everyone else seems to have not gotten from DCU Zero), but it's certainly a more effective "bridge" issue out of Countdown and into Legion of Three Worlds. And it's very smartly constructed: a thread from Countdown (the deaths of two Legionnaires) turns up, but it's treated as a mystery rather than as something readers will already know about, and the core of the story is the contrast between Superman's easy acceptance of the friends of his youth and Batman's automatic suspicion of things that don't make linear sense. The little name-and-powers explanatory boxes are useful guides for non-Legion-savvy readers; even the first page includes some offhanded references to things that have happened in Action lately and some things we haven't yet heard about, so they all act as teasers to one extent or another.

This one also features three of the very few on-panel editor's notes referring to earlier issues I've seen lately: the reason Batman distrusts the Legion is that he's met three different versions of them, and the notes mercifully indicate where. Fair enough: that's a sizeable continuity issue, and Johns is actually turning it into the nut of what looks to be an interesting story. (Although, speaking of continuity fixes, there's a weird disconnect between this issue and "The Lightning Saga"--seeing as how Johns wrote both of them, there's at least some chance it's intentional. Here, Garth makes some cracks about Thom being in a "nuthouse," and has never heard of schizophrenia. In JSA #6, Dream Girl says "The medicine of this time period is unbelievably primitive. They still use pills to help schizophrenia.")

Like DCU0, it's got a mystery narrator revealed on the last page (a different one this time), but even if you don't know who he is already, the narration makes his significance and motivation fairly clear. I don't know how I feel about Johns using Thom Kallor's schizophrenia as an opportunity to make him something like Poet from Suspended, an oracle whose cryptic utterances serve the same function as Johns' end-of-first-issue teasers, but I have to admit it works dramatically. Quite Good.

NEW AVENGERS #40: It's very strange to see Bendis essentially marking time while we wait for Secret Invasion #2--unless I'm drastically misreading this issue, which I might be, it doesn't seem to be advancing the plot at all. Instead, it's a sort of mini-history of Skrull politics beginning shortly after Fantastic Four #2, and ending with the revelation that Spider-Woman was one of the first people to be replaced by a Skrull. Except that's not really much of a revelation at all--it's been fairly clear for the last few months' worth of comics--and everything else here could just as well have been taken care of with a few lines of dialogue. Nicely drawn, but Eh.

And one other note: the best moment of Free Comic Book Day for me was going to the Iron Man movie in the evening, and seeing the maybe nine-year-old girl in the seat in front of mine TOTALLY RIVETED by the FCBD Iron Man/Hulk/Spider-Man giveaway comic. As for the movie itself... I really enjoyed any time Gwyneth Paltrow was on screen (has anyone ever written Pepper this well in the comics?), the first fifteen minutes are some of the best-edited moviemaking I've seen in a while, I'm glad to see that Bendis's re-conception of Nick Fury has come true (and Bendis got to write it!), and the action scenes seemed to be play-by-play identical to every movie action scene in recent memory and bored the heck out of me. And all the previews for upcoming movies (and, in fact, the Middle Eastern scenes of Iron Man) were about eschatology and/or xenophobia. No more Wacky Terrorists or Everybody's Dead (Oh, No) scenarios, please?

Stone Cold Sober as a Matter of Fact: Diana takes on 4/30

Well, I can't stay away from the Big Two forever, so let's check in and see what Marvel and DC have for us this week! I must've been possessed by the Great Cornholio to think I could make sense of DC UNIVERSE ZERO. Never in my entire life have I ever felt so excluded by a comic book - they might as well have stamped "THIS IS NOT FOR YOU" on the cover. Look, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the only person who expects a #0 issue (not even #1! #0! Before the beginning!) to actually present the starting point of a story, as opposed to trailers of stories that are already in progress. Is that an unfair expectation? I mean, am I wrong to think DC wants to attract new readers? Because the message I'm getting from DC UNIVERSE ZERO is that, if I haven't been following the 80-something-part storyline that's been threading through the entire DCU line for the past... what's it been now, two years? Three? If I haven't been doing that, I've got no business reading DC comics for the foreseeable future. CRAP, because I'm sick of wasting time and money trying to figure out the DCU for the sake of a decent story.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #14, on the other hand, is a textbook lesson on the benefits of accessbility. "The 7 Capital Cities of Heaven" wraps up after six issues, an annual and a one-shot, and you know what? I loved every minute of it, despite having never read an Iron Fist comic before. I thought Shou-Lao was that guy on MORTAL KOMBAT who laughs when you kick him, and Yu-Ti had me thinking I'd picked up a GI JOE comic by mistake. But none of that kept me from understanding - and enjoying - the Brubaker/Fraction run. A big part of why it works so well is because, aside from meeting the standard head-bashing things-go-splody violence quota, what we have here is an intricate storyline spanning generations, from Danny Rand to his father Wendell to WWI Iron Fist Orson Randall. Iron Fist has become the center of an epic, in the true sense of the word, and that's no small achievement in a year's time. The fact that this specific storyline also contains a martial arts tournament, an exploding bullet train, a gender rebellion and flashbacks to a Golden Age incarnation of the Heroes For Hire makes it all the more impressive. Of course, it's sad that this is more or less the current creative team's swan song, but this is a VERY GOOD, very high note to go out on.

X-MEN LEGACY #210 is a mixed bag. On the one hand, we're still neck-deep in Ye Olde Continuity, with a cover straight out of late-'70s Claremont. And yes, this is a book that's undoubtedly geared towards readers already familiar with a relatively large portion of X-Men history: if you can't recognize David Haller by sight, or you don't know what that excerpt from "The Little Matchgirl" is meant to evoke, you won't find out here. On the other hand, I think it's still possible to "get" what's being conveyed, even without the specifics - this is something Mike Carey does very well, referencing continuity without hinging the entire plot on the assumption that his readers know that continuity. For the purposes of reading X-MEN LEGACY #210, it's not vital that you know what went down between Xavier and Voght; if you do, you get a little something extra out of their last exchange, but if you don't? You still walk away knowing what you need to know. The big development in this issue deals with something Paul O'Brien has called attention to in the past - after a start that lacked any visible long-term direction, we now have what seems to be a concrete premise for the series, at least for the immediate future. Potential downside? The way it's set up, I'm not entirely sure Carey intends to move out of Ye Olde Continuity any time soon, and while I trust his storytelling sensibilities, there's entirely too much nostalgia in the mainstream these days, especially with the X-Men, and it'd be nice if everyone just took a big step forward someday. Let's go with GOOD and see what happens next.

Shifting over to Vertigo, JACK OF FABLES has taken a rather unusual turn. Much like its parent title, this comic occasionally steps away from the present-day plotlines to visit secondary characters or tales from the protagonist's past. Last month, the Pathetic Fallacy tried to stage a production of "Hamlet" that went hilariously wrong, and this month, we're in the Wild West, exploring Jack's first encounter with Bigby Wolf. Now, Jack's always been characterized as a bit of a douche, but Willingham and Sturges usually balance that out with a kind of roguish, immature charm that makes him mildly sympathetic. He's written as overbearingly full of himself, but it's played (quite effectively) for laughs. Not so with "The Legend of Smilin' Jack" - as the last page openly acknowledges, this isn't a funny story. At all. There's no redeeming element in Jack this time: he's cruel, he's murderous, he's a Black Hat straight out of a Clint Eastwood western. It's such an extreme change, in fact, that I'm betting there's something else at work here. A GOOD start, though I'd advise Willingham and Sturges to watch their step - there are certain lines not to be crossed if you want to keep your character likeable, and Jack's been on the edge for years now.

Zero Hour

Before I start, let me say "Cool!" for Douglas' Deconstruction of DC UNIVERSE ZERO (below), that was a rush I haven't felt since the good ol' days of 52 Pickup.

Here's hoping he does the same for FINAL CRISIS!

On the other hand, I'm not here to praise ZERO.

I think teasers and trailers are pretty cool. I especially liked the little "Glimpse" at the end of the "Sinestro War" storyline. That was awesome.

But it was awesome because it was a part of the package of entertainment that I had bought.

And that's my problem with ZERO -- I thought I was buying a package of entertainment, a story, an actual lead-in to FINAL CRISIS. And ZERO really isn't that.

Instead, it's basically that teaser at the end of GREEN LANTERN #25, times six.

Now, don't get me wrong, that's not a terrible thing in and of itself, I just don't think it is something that should be sold as an entertainment product.

What I think of most of all is Marvel's SECRET INVASION SAGA, the free giveaway that recapped a couple of decades of Skrull appearances before SI proper started. Retailers got x copies for free (a bundle of 25 for every 25 copies of WORLD WAR HULK you ordered), and you could also purchase more bundles if you liked. That's, in my mind, a better way to handle what's essentially a promotional tool.

Anyway, what did I get out of ZERO? Well, George Perez can sure draw those 80-jillion character pages; and I'm still not interested in "Batman: RIP" very much; and the Wonder Woman arc might be interesting, but not a great teaser; and yes, sure I'm still looking forward to "Blackest Night", but there's not much new there; and I haven't really got the slightest idea what the Rucka book is about from that preview; and FINAL CRISIS itself is sure to be gorgeous, but why are they charging 50 cents for this?

Apparently enough stores misordered ZERO, so that it is going to a second print (for a DOLLAR, sheesh!), which I can barely understand. But we've still got 3/4 of our order left and I'm sort of tempted to give it out on FCBD, actually, since we have so many copies left over, but I really really can't see anyone not already interested and buying DC comics decided they're going to buy anything coming out of this.

In an interview at Newsarama, Dan Didio said this:

"NRAMA: And as you’ve said before, this issue had to be a “primer” in a way for the DCU to readers who may be checking it out for the first time in a while?

DD: Right. When we did Countdown to Infinite Crisis, it really became a great jumping-on point just to get people in tune with the direction and tone of the DC Universe and familiarize or re-familiarize themselves with the characters of the DCU. This one again, has that same goal and agenda."

and I think that one those terms, this is a pretty miserable failure, because there weren't ANY introductions going on here, really, and there doesn't seem to be any discernible through-line going on.

I mean, I read each and every DC comic, and am a DC fanboy of the first water, but even I still don't really understand what FINAL CRISIS is "about", or, perhaps more importantly, where the hell the DC Universe is going AFTER it...

On the potential return of B*rry *ll*n, if that's meant to be a permanent change, and its not some sort of clever red herring, I do think its a bad idea. At the end of the day, he was really kind of a dull character himself, and there's only so far that "straight-edge" is going to take you (esp. when Superman fits that role in the DCU even better)

At my bottom line, I have a modicum of faith in Geoff and Grant to write exciting superhero comics, but I wonder if that's ALL that DC has going for them these days, and if there's any coherent plan that extends past those two writers.

For DC UNIVERSE ZERO, I'm going to go with either a high AWFUL or a low EH, depending on how cynical you actually are...

-B

I am the beauty of 4/30; hooray for beauty.

glamourpuss #1:

This is Dave Sim's new series, in case you hadn't heard. Your $3.00 will get you 24 b&w pages, with future installments to appear bimonthly (with Dave Sim, that's a promise) until the thing's finished. Sim estimates there'll be 20-25 issues in total, but I wouldn't be surprised if changes occur - unless Sim's got a blueprint pinned up somewhere, this is just the sort of project that could flow any which way.

The image above does a pretty good job of teasing the book's concept, but a little extra fleshing-out is warranted. At its core, glamourpuss is a comics-format essay on the 'photorealism' type of newspaper comic strip art, as exemplified by the individual styles of Alex Raymond, Stan Drake, Al Williamson and Neal Adams. Sim loves the stuff, enough so that he wants not only to tell us all about it, but essentially teach himself how to work in that visual mode over the course of his lecture; it's a bit like Lewis Trondheim's famous (and similarly 500-page) 1992 book Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie, in which the young author forged his signature style -- right in front of his readers' eyes! -- through a long, improvised quest of digressions.

Granted, Sim is a seasoned artist rather than a novice, and he's out to educate us as much as him. As a result, the artist's narration not only hovers around the expected portraits of period notables and the like, but darts inside the word balloons of sample images from pertinent works (Raymond's Rip Kirby is showcased), all of which have been dutifully traced by Sim - no simple reprints here! The work is consequently charged with a special, infectious enthusiasm.

Sim's digressions are a bit different too.

Yes, another one of the artist's working goals is to fulfill his post-Cerebus plan of drawing all the pretty women he wants; as such, big portions of this issue are also traced from fashion magazine ads, for various in-'story' purposes. The term 'glamourpuss' ('glamo[u]r-puss,' 'glamo[u]r puss') is an old one, and Sim uses it both as a general name for most of the models he's appropriated for his study, and as a title for a parodic fashion magazine the comic sometimes pretends to be, although there's also the occasional bit of superhero ballyhoo tossed in, since this is a Direct Market comics pamphlet release and all - Sim even provides an 'origin' sequence, in that he explains how he conceived the project.

All of this adds up to something akin to a movie musical, except instead of a movie it's a comic, and instead of talking people bursting out into song it's a comics history lession bursting out into hilarious gaiety... Dave Sim style. Central to this issue is a six-page sequence titled The Self-education of N'atashae, in which Sim demonstrates how difficult it is to construct an entire comics story out of images traced from preexisting sources - the result functions both as a narration-heavy comedy about a hopelessly smashing model's delusional quest for enlightenment, and a comedic attempt by Dave Sim to hammer out something convincing with whatever scrap he could find containing the same model. He's self-educating too, you see.

I found the book to be far more successful on that latter plane. Even at their best, Sim's jokes about dim fashion plates and the vapidity of materialistic culture amount to targeting an orbital laser cannon on a barrel of fish; when the jokes flop, Sim's tendency to run with his routines -- often over the course of full-page fake ads and spoof articles -- ensures that everything screams to a halt. I also suspect the underlying humor will not sit well with many who've taken great offense to some of Sim's prior works, even before he rolls out a character named "Skanko." And oh boy, she's gonna have a character blog and MySpace (though the series commits the cardinal multimedia faux pas of giving out the addresses before the content is up, which isn't terribly glam at all)!

On the other hand, the "COMIC ART SCHOLARSHIP" part of the legal disclaimer proves to be uniquely subjective in its melding of words and pictures. Sim knows that the eye might zip over his visuals -- his versions of other artists' visuals, actually -- and he sometimes halts the narration to ask you to flip back to a certain page and really look at how he constructed certain images, how he might only use a brush, or how he sometimes resorts to cross-hatching to control visual density. If anything, this comic will show you exactly how much variation can go into 'traced' images through the simple use of differing tools and techniques, and Sim is unfailingly critical of where he feels he's not measuring up to the ideals of Raymond and others.

And even then, the comic reaches one level deeper into the improvisation that can exist in between layers of reproduction. Sim doesn't let us forget that we're not actually seeing the art of Alex Raymond or John Prentice - we're seeing Dave Sim as Alex Raymond or John Prentice, guessing at where fine lines may have been lost from the boards to the page, and grasping for the perfect, inky sheen of his favored masters. Or judging how much detail to omit from those magazine spreads. It's almost maniacally self-conscious, and it encourages the reader to look that much more closely at what they see on the page.

A GOOD effect, although your mileage may vary wildly, depending on your appetite for art process chit-chat and your tolerance for bad jokes; I'll look forward to seeing how it sustains itself over a longer stretch of pages.

All Systems Intact, the Red and the Black: Douglas Looks at DC Universe Zero

Yeah, this one's spoilery. Not that everything hasn't been spoiled elsewhere, but I'm still putting this under the cut. Not a review, really, but annotations; if you want a rating, I thought it was Excellent as a teaser and value-for-money--I want to read what happens next--and n/a as a story.

Pg. 1: It's somehow fitting that, on the first page of a multi-title arc that will apparently draw on Jack Kirby's multi-title arc very heavily (and by the way, Jeff, that's a fantastic post right there), we get a tribute to one of his signature artistic techniques, the extreme long shot. This page seems to have been a last-second rewrite: in the version included in the New York Comic-Con program, the caption was "I am... everything." The present version's better by far. Note also that the captions start with a black background, and that the red creeps in from the right as the story progresses.

Also worth reading: George Pérez's comments on why this page and pg. 3 are "the simplest pages I've ever drawn."

Pg. 3: The first mention of red this issue--the infamous "red skies" of Crisis on Infinite Earths, which were sometimes about the only sign of tie-ins in other titles.

Pg. 5: It wouldn't be a Geoff Johns comic without dismemberment, but at least this character's meant to be one-handed--and "hands" are going to be a running theme in this comic, so take note. ("We could use a hand out here" appears on this page, too.) Tyr's name is the first direct reference to a god this issue, specifically Týr, the god of fistfights and single combat, a concept with which superhero comics of the era now ending are too familiar. This particular version of Tyr first appeared here, created by Cary Bates and the late Dave Cockrum.

Superman is wearing his Legion flight ring on his middle finger, oddly (it's on his ring finger here, as are the Legionnaires with visible rings on the next page. And can anyone identify the woman with Brainiac 5 and the White Witch?

Pg. 7: This appears to be the inked version of the preview image from a few months ago. I'm happy to see Night Girl (in the lower right-hand corner) again, although the peekaboo cut-outs on her costume's owl are sort of creepy. Also, note the building halfway down the right side: it's the 31st century HQ of the Daily Planet! And people say newspapers are doomed!

Pg. 8: A callback to the opening scene of The Killing Joke, of course, because Morrison can't stop slaying/honoring Highfather Moore. And here we go with red and black again... the version of the Joker follows on from this scarier version, rather than the one we've been seeing in Salvation Run.

Pg. 9: In The Killing Joke, the fake Joker of the opening scene seemed to be playing some solitaire variation of Klondike; here, the real one is just dealing cards. (In panel 4, he's doing a fancy shuffle--for a second I thought he was building a house of cards.) The Black Glove has been making mostly-offstage appearances in Batman, and this possibly extremely spoilery link goes to a very convincing theory by David at Funnybook Babylon on who the Opposite-of-White Glove is.

Pg. 10: Harlequin pattern on the card echoed not just by the floor but by the layout and color scheme of the page: nice! (And both the color-scheme trick and the splatter of blood on the card can't help but recall Watchmen...)

The "dead man's hand" is two aces, two eights and something else (here, cleverly, the wild card), supposedly the hand Wild Bill Hickcock was holding when it was shot. (The aces and eights are usually all black, but this fits the symbolic scheme of the scene and the issue better.) The term also recalls the Hand of Glory from The Invisibles; the hand missing a finger echoes the assailant from the most recent issue of Batman, and also suggests the name of Batman mastermind Bill Finger!

Pg. 12: I would like to congratulate myself on predicting the name of the Red Volcano almost two years ago. (Anyone want to predict who the water-elemental equivalent of R.V., the Red Tornado and the Red Inferno is going to be?)

Professor Ivo, of course, is the creator of Amazo. Doctor Poison first appeared here, although the one we're dealing with is most likely her grandchild, who first appeared here. I have no idea who that is in the Darfur scene; any thoughts?

Remember, kids, eating people is wrong!

Pg. 14: Anybody happen to know if the caption here references something Hal ever told Barry on-panel? In any case, Black Hand first appeared here, and continues the blackness/hands/Black Glove series. Hal, as the Spectre, burned Black Hand's right hand off here--it would appear that the right handprint is the one burned into the victim's chest, but he's able to reconstruct his hand by draining people's life force.

Is the "federal penitentiary" Salvation Run?

Pp. 15-16: The rainbow Lantern Corps were established in Green Lantern #25. In Roy G. Bivolo order, their motivating forces are rage, greed, fear (is that a Monitor?), will, hope, compassion, and love. And would that be a white lantern in the last panel? Or a black lantern? Apparently the ring in the Blackest Night previews is a Black Hand ring.

Pp. 17-18: Would someone who read Countdown maybe take a stab at what's going on here? Like, did Crispus shave?

Pg. 19: As far as I can tell, there's no DCU character named Carr D'Angelo, but there is a real-world person who produced The Hot Chick. Which was an awful movie, but I think the Spectre's response is a little extreme. Also: "I am somebody!" And I guess, from that ad, that it is "Revelations" with an S. Too bad.

Pg. 20: More of the 2-D/3-D play that Morrison's Seven Soldiers made so much of, especially Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle. The reddish and blackish planets in the first panel might be Apokolips and New Genesis, although it looks like there's more of a nature/tech dichotomy than a good/evil dichotomy going on there. And the falling character: would that be The Human Flame? Looks a little like The Ray, actually.

Pg. 21: "A runner poised on the line": yes, that runner. Doesn't this scene remind you of the Hood gathering all the bad guys in New Avengers a few months ago? Libra first appeared here, and at the end of that story, he became, in the words of some long-ago issue of E-Man, "several with the universe"--in other words, the position the narrator of this issue claims to be in at the beginning. It's not clear from that JLA issue what color Libra's eyes are--there's only one panel in which his eyes are visible, and they're colorless--but here they're definitely blue. As in the same color as the Flash's eyes in that Final Crisis poster. Anybody want to identify which copy of the Crime Bible this is?

Pg. 23: "Believe in him, that's all he asks!" Not only is this very much like the "he loves you" business going on in Secret Invasion, it explicitly echoes the "believe in her" refrain chanted by Lady Styx's followers. And Lady Styx, of course, makes the dead rise...

Then, of course, we have the matter of the hand clutching something that looks like Kirby-dot energy--the culmination of this issue's hand imagery. I've written about the giant-hand-in-space motif before, but the short version is that it seems to be the closest thing DC has to a creation-story icon; maybe it's present here to signify the beginning of the Fifth World, or the end of the Fourth, or maybe there's something else going on.

This, I believe, is the first time in many years--maybe even post-Crisis?--that the Secret Society of Super-Villains has been referred to by its full name, rather than simply as the "Secret Society." (Incidentally, the third page of 52 #1 referred to a rampage by the "Monster Society"; in the trade paperback, that's been corrected to "Secret Society.") It's weird to see them calling it that; as the final chapter title of "The Lightning Saga" put it, "the villain is the hero in his own story."

"And this is me": is Barry Libra? And doesn't one usually see the lightning before hearing the thunder?

Pg. 24: Lightning plus red sky plus enormously oversized moon equals Flash costume. I assume "Twisters" is where the Society's meeting; Morrison has mentioned that this is where Final Crisis proper begins, an instant after this scene. (Is the club's name a hint at something involving the Red Tornado?)

As for Barry Allen's return--well, I don't really understand why that's an alert-the-media! big deal, since it's got what Wikipedia's perfect phrase calls "primarily in-universe" significance. I'm not exactly excited at the prospect of having him back and starring in a monthly Flashcomic, just because I like stories that have ended to stay ended: it makes me more invested in the ones that haven't ended yet. But Johns had Barry popping in from the future in Flash #200 and telling Wally West that that was the first of three times they'd see each other; the second was in #224, and the third hasn't happened yet. (I don't think the cameo via the Speed Force in Infinite Crisis #4 counts. Barry's end-of-career timeline is mostly detailed here.) "The Lightning Saga" teased Barry's return very heavily; I'm sure there are going to be plenty of callbacks to that story in the months to come.

The Suppleness of Shame: Jeff Looks at Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 4

The fourth and final volume of Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus suggests the editorial staff at DC are either far ballsier, craftier, or more ignorant of the material than I thought: although printing four titles in the order of their publication (instead of grouping them by title) did a superb job of initially highlighting Kirby's protean imagination, reading the first 250 pages of the fourth volume is like watching the weakening death throes of a formerly-powerful animal: it's awesome in a truly depressing way. The schema had been problematic before Volume Four: the arrangement strips the first seven issues of Forever People--basically one sprawling epic on its own--of any momentum, putting seventy pages of material between one cliffhanger and another. But considering the second volume, where this frustrated the most, also showcased a creator working at arguably the highest and final peak of his long career, the frustration was easier to dismiss. And although the problem disappears entirely in the final volume--both the Forever People and New Gods end in the first seventy-eight pages, leaving the final six issues of Mister Miracle to run consecutively--a far worse one takes its place: I would rank those final six issues of Mister Miracle as among some of the worst things Kirby's done.

Now, a statement like that requires a buttload of caveats--not only is there a ton of Kirby material I haven't read, but I'd rank the worst Kirby material as far above the worst material other writers and artists have produced in the field. Indeed, taken on their own, the issues reprinted consecutively in this Omnibus have a ton of charm. One of the pleasures of late-period Kirby is recognizing the familiar formulas while still being surprised by whatever crazy-ass shit the man decides to throw in there--it's a lot like watching a great blues guitarist tackle a classic piece. So, for example, I initially was delighted by Mister Miracle #14 where Mister Miracle and Oberon go walking in the woods and randomly encounter a crazed Satanic cult. It follows a standard pulp plot of "high-tech crooks posing as supernatural forces to scare off trespassers" but Kirby cranks the whole thing up past 11: Satan gets mentioned as often as three times a page in the first half of the book, the cultists wear impressively grotesque masks, and until Mister Miracle does his patented next-to-last page reveal of his face (and a panel or two of P.R. man Ted Brown smoking a pipe), the most normal looking person in the book is Oberon the dwarf. The whole thing is a bit like someone had tricked Fellini into directing an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Unfortunately, just three issues later, Mister Miracle, Big Barda, and protege-in-tow Shilo Norman check into a mysterious hotel after their car breaks down and what follows hits most of the same beats as issue #14. Considering that issue comes on the heels of a story where Jack uses the infamous "it was all a dream--or was it?" cliche, the middle stretch of Omnibus Vol. 4 reads like a talented but inattentive creator running out the clock. And even before then, I'll admit Kirby had already turned Mister Miracle into pretty rote stuff, despite tossing in first Big Barda and then the rest of the Female Furies as a supporting cast. Every issue opens up with Mister Miracle performing a trick while everyone around him freaks out, and nearly every fight scene features a moment focusing on on a villain performing a can't-miss killing move on M.M. only to then look around in dismay when the smoke has cleared and there's no body to be seen. (And later issues have variations on the same panel where Scott Free removes his mask at the end and we see the circuitry he's built into it--it actually looks more like Scott has sneezed up pieces of a mother board to me). In my long-ago review of Vol. 1, I'd suggested that Mister Miracle represented a dream image of Kirby himself as creator and freelancer--"a man raised in the violent war-state of Darkseid's brutal society who is not himself violent or brutal and who supports himself and enlightens others by freeing himself again and again" is the way I put in my review. If so, perhaps it's not wrong to see in those final issues a frustration on Kirby's part with the Mister Miracle concept as the cancellation of his other Fourth World books revealed that self-image for the dream it was: in each issue Mister Miracle's victory feels a little more hollow and far-fetched ("I suppose you that you have a gimmick that opened a slit in its hull!" is one of the more detailed explanations given for a deathtrap escape, to which Mister Miracle helpfully clarifies, "That's how I escaped!") until in the last issue he doesn't really win at all. The last issue of Mister Miracle--and what Kirby must've thought was to be the last issue of the Fourth World Saga--ends with Darkseid summing up (the issue and perhaps the entire saga), "It had deep sentiment--yet little joy. But--life at best is bittersweet!" All things considered, it's actually a pretty cheery take on things from a man helpless to stop his epic vision from being cut short. And if that had been the end of things, the end of the Omnibus, this review would go on to chastise DC for cynically choosing the publication format they did, for frontloading the great stuff at the beginning and sticking the bad stuff at the end and keeping readers from having a real choice as to what material they could buy.

But, of course, that wasn't the end for the Fourth World Saga. In 1984 and '85, Kirby was given the chance to come back and create an ending in the form of The Hunger Dogs, an original graphic novel, along a forty-seven page prelude titled "Even Gods Must Die!" that bridged the original stories and the graphic novels. We get apologies for the material both in the front with Paul Levitz's intro ("[F]or if the Hunger Dogs is neither the ending Jack originally hoped to do nor crafted with the same sure hand as had a decade earlier, it is still noble to try[.]") and Mark Evanier's afterword ("Jack gave it his all. Jack gave everything he did his all but he really put his heart and soul into this one, and ordinarily it would have been more than enough...but with all the problems, especially the short page count, it wasn't enough," as well as "Finally, The Hunger Dogs was published. I wish I could tell you that it was everything Kirby fans had been expecting by way of a Fourth World conclusion, but it really wasn't that. For one thing, the Fourth World wasn't concluding. For another, Jack still didn't have the thousand or so more pages it might have taken for him to build his story to the kind of climax he'd imagined.") It's safe to say the current take on this final work is not favorable.

And that's a shame. Because I found those final hundred-plus pages to be absolutely brilliant, some of the most stunning stuff Kirby's ever done. I've had The Fourth World Omnibus Vol. 4 for maybe three weeks now, and every night for the first two I'd read those last 100-plus pages again and again.

It's probably because I didn't follow Kirby after he left Marvel in the late '70s, but "Even Gods Must Die!" shocks me in its departure from earlier Kirby work: It's brasher, bolder, nearly a caricature of itself, but Kirby reframes action in ways I hadn't seen in his work since the '40s and '50s: circular inset panels, arrhythmic action scenes with arrows, confrontations where the panel borders run diagonally, making the tension of the scene literally explicit. Months ago, when reading Tezuka's Buddha, I found myself in awe of Tezuka's willingness to experiment with a page so late in his career and wondered if doing so made him a better artist than Kirby. Here, if only for a few pages, is Kirby breaking his patterns, moving finally from the blues to jazz.

Even better, the change suits the story: the circular panels reinforce the circularity of the story as Orion finally brings the battle to Darkseid, and father and son battle as a prophecy has foretold. The characters themselves are encased in circular panels, at many points appearing trapped, just as they're stuck in the cyclical nature of myth. This is something Kirby nicely underlines in his writing--in the early chapters of the New Gods, Darkseid is likened to a tiger, but in "Even Gods Must Die," that same comparison is made about Orion. If Mister Miracle was Kirby as he imagined himself to be in the '70s, the Orion of the Omnibus' final pages is the man Kirby finally realized himself to be: a man incapable of giving up, powered by a terrifying, inexhaustible anger, an anger that allows him to claw his way to the truth.

What really killed me was the scene in which Darkseid, after watching the behavior of the revivified men he's gained the power to resurrect, says to a lackey, "They don't fully return...do they?" If you think about it, that's a tremendously ballsy thing for an author to put in a story he's finishing after a decade-long absence. Kirby is speaking to the audience through Darkseid and openly telling them: "You know what? This doesn't work." In that regard, what seems like every other faux-Stan Lee title you've ever read, "Even Gods Must Die!" is in fact an apt summation of the story's point: Things are supposed to end. For most of us, that's a hard-earned truth. For a superhero comic, that's heresy.

Like "Even Gods Must Die!", The Hunger Dogs is a victory stolen from the jaws of defeat and loss, and the irony is this victory is accomplished by open acknowledging defeat and loss. In The Hunger Dogs, Darkseid sees his coming obsolescence in the face of The Micro-Mark, the digitized destroyer that is the brutal male successor to the kindly Mother Box. In a staggering page, Darkseid listens to the Micro-Mark's inventor crow about the passing of Himon and wordlessly realizes that his own time has also passed. "His day is over, great Darkseid!" the collaborator boasts. "Regard him as a pitiful, harmless object! This is Micro-Mark's hour! There's no need for intrigue or great strivings--the cosmos lies open to button-pushing babes!"

(Oh, and by the way? Holy. Fucking. Shit. It's one thing for writers, artists, photographers, and musicians these days to complain about the digital age having opened doors in their fields at the cost of lowered standards. It's another thing entirely to do it in nineteen-eighty-fucking-five. Fans of the prescient will also appreciate how both Darkseid and Lightray use suicide bombers to take out their enemies, the planet-destroying dirty bombs planted surreptitiously on New Genesis, and how Highfather turns such a terrorist attack back in on itself.)

I was raving to Graeme about all this the other day and he put it best: The Hunger Dogs is the work of an old man, possessing an old man's wisdom and an old man's sorrow. (I don't want to give away the identity of the Micro-Mark's creator, but I will say it's pretty easy to see past the origin presented and infer disgust on Kirby's part at the way the baby boomers--his beloved New Gods--grew up and sold out.) And while Kirby may have dreamed of an epic finish to his epic saga (the conclusion he sketches out here has to settle for evoking Moses leading his people out of Egypt), I found the climax to The Hunger Dogs more satisfying, truer to life: some things change, and many things don't. Although we're told Darkseid takes control of Apokolips again, our last glimpse of him is a figure made lonely and small by distance and time: even through the anger, the scorn, and the violence, Kirby evinces pity for the most horrible of his characters.

It's a good lesson to take from the Fourth World Omnibus, for although these four volumes are a tremendous achievement and will occupy a prized place on my bookshelf, it's meaningful they sit below Buddha, the three thousand page epic Tezuka created at roughly the same time in the manner the artist wanted, at the pace he preferred (collected in hardcover in America, it should be pointed out, before The Omnibus). It achieves very little to focus only on the shame of such a thing. And yet, to look at the whole of Kirby's achievement and see only the wonder, and not the warning, would only compound the shamefulness further: the compromises presented in the final volume of The Fourth World Omnibus mirror the compromises a reader must suffer in seeing such Excellent work simultaneously transcend, and fall victim to, the paucity of its era.

Abhay Continues to Read Blue Beetle; Episode II

This is part two of an irregular multiple part series of essays looking at the first 25 issues of the BLUE BEETLE comic book series, recently published by DC Comics. Part One-- a statement of intentions and a look at the first issue of the series-- can be found HERE. This installment will look at BLUE BEETLE issues #2-6.

I.

The first full storyline of the comic is about Blue Beetle's confrontation with his first set of antagonists. Blue Beetle's "secret identity" is a Mexican-American teenager. So... the first challenge he has to face? A street gang. Named the Posse.

Race is a motherfucker. It’s a tough issue to deal with in any capacity, and I appreciate that the writers are on a tightrope—put in the street gang and you get the “oh, why must we see the street gang” crowd; leave out the street gang and you get the “why’d you white-wash the Mexican-American hero”; have him get a B in Spanish and you get Cheech & Chong fans excited but everyone else gets confused. That damned-if-you- do bind is a reason I think other creators might want to shy away from writing those characters—but also a reason they shouldn’t.

The Posse, though? The same name as the Jamaican bad guys from the Steven Segal epic, MARKED FOR DEATH?

Unfortunately, unlike MARKED FOR DEATH’s Posse, BLUE BEETLE’s Posse are neither Jamaican nor super wicked awesome-est street gang ever; they kind of suck. Luckily, they aren’t featured in the comic very much beyond this arc.

Per the classic shonen fight-comic formula, as the arc progresses, Blue Beetle ultimately teams up with the Posse (who in these issues suddenly include his best friend) to face off against a greater threat—the lady crime boss, La Dama! (Who he will later team up with to face the greater threat of so-and-so, and so-on, as the formula dictates). So although the Posse are the bad guys of issue #2, by issue #6, they’ve become the good guys.

Which… is kind of weird. Because fun-fact about the Posse:

They’re engaged in narco-trafficking.

About 400 tons of cocaine enter into the United States every year. That’s not counting the tons of heroin, meth, etc. So… you know, statistically speaking, if Blue Beetle’s friend ever looked in the back of a truck, chances are he’d discover a big mountain of ye’ old yayo. But on the bright-side, maybe it’s sex slaves—- 15 year old child-brides for our professional ballplayers, if that’s the sort of thing that makes you feel better. Or guns intended for child-soldiers. Or a dirty bomb.

Statistically, though—come on, read between the lines: he’s engaged in narco-trafficking.

The first issue has the main character not caring if one of his friends being physically if not sexually abused by her father— now in issue #5, we have the main character not caring that his best friend is engaged in narco-trafficking. Thank god the space aliens show up in a few issues and change the trajectory of this comic—otherwise, it was really just a matter of time before Blue Beetle’s dad would’ve had a couple baby skulls mounted on his cock, and Blue Beetle would be holding pom poms and cheering him on, and that’d be the cover. “This issue, Blue Beetle’s polygamous first cousin makes a flesh necklace from the ears of his many Vietnamese war-brides, while Blue Beetle eats a delicious French Apple pie.”

There will be readers who’ll insist that the trucks might be carrying pixie dust or robot apes, since this is the DCU and the DCU is built on top of a frothy cake of whimsy and bullshit. Their argument would go: “because the DCU is built on top of a frothy cake of whimsy and bullshit, we can suspend our disbelief and believe it’s possible that a street gang involved in illegal smuggling operating out of EL PASO, TEXAS, is smuggling something that is illegal but does not offend our sense of right and wrong the way smuggling drugs, guns or people might.”

Fine, fine, eat your cake. But the comic still has a street gang in it. And is specifically stating that they financially support themselves by operating in an extra-legal way. And those characters are the positive characters. The negative characters? La Dama’s big crime in the arc is taking a baby away from… a street gang whose engaged in operating in illegal behavior.

Uh, that exists outside the DCU: it’s called Child Protective Services.

II.

La Dama is taking super-powered children from out of the barrio or away from the street gangs, and is keeping them in a safe, structured environment in which they’re provided with an education. The arc ends on a bizarre note where the characters who had been “kidnapped” are urged by the head of a street gang to return to the barrios. They’re urged to abandon the safety of Child Protective Services and to return to the bosom of the societal institutions provided by extra-legal street gangs.

You don’t need white institutions to protect you because now the Mexican-Americans have their own superhero! Gangs ahoy! At least Blue Beetle looks embarrassed by all this, I guess, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the character reacting to the speech, or the artist reacting to the writing.

I think we can all agree at least that La Dama is in the wrong for having been engaged in kidnapping children from their parents in order to raise an army of magical Latinos in the hopes of someday conquering the world. But the rest? Well, at the risk of repeating myself: race is a motherfucker. Sometimes things sound different ways to different people. The arc was perfectly fine to most people who read it. Perhaps most people read the “safety versus freedom” aspects as a commentary on the civil rights situation in this country following this country’s botched response to 9/11. And not the way I read it which is, you know: “minorities should avoid the social support or interference of white institutions in favor of their own institutions—no matter how criminal or decrepit or involved in the narco-trafficking business-- even if it means their friends get beaten by their dads.”

I’m sure fans could angrily argue that the bad guys can’t be a metaphor for white institutions because La Dama is a minority character herself, but—- well, I wouldn’t find that a very convincing argument, and they would, and there’s the impasse. But say a fan argues that “La Dama is the bad guy and she’s a minority, so everything you just said is wrong.” Here’s the thing I don’t get then: Blue Beetle only defeats this threat by exposing La Dama’s wrongdoing to … a higher authority, specifically a cameo from The Phantom Stranger:

So even if you set aside everything else, in the first arc, the minority heroes haven’t really changed anything, but have only created the conditions necessary for a magical White Guy to step in and rescue the minorities from themselves. The arc says a Magical White Guy is the necessary solution to keep the evil minorities and the good minorities in a proper bargaining relationship. If bad minorities act out, the good super-minorities rat them out to the Magical White Man. Uhm, yeah: no.

But look, we all have our different perspectives, and hey, that plus refracted light is what makes us a rainbow.

III.

The 2nd issue continued to have a “future storyline” taking place after the previously published Infinite Crisis miniseries, along with a “past storyline” taking place before or contemporaneously with said miniseries.

At the end of issue 2, the series adds in the "twist" that the "future" storyline (and the rest of the series) takes place exactly one year after the crucial events of the "past" storyline. Why? Because it's DC and that means... EDITORIAL FIAT! Yay!

At or about the publication of the second issue of BLUE BEETLE, DC's latest EDITORIAL FIAT! du jour was "all of our books take place one year later than the last moments of INFINITE CRISIS." So, BLUE BEETLE, like the rest of the DC line (I guess…?), jammed in a “one year later” subplot.

One Year Later? Really? Even if it's a new book, launching a new character, that doesn't need any added confusion? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if it damages the compact between a reader and a book that a comic is a window into another world with its own people and geography and rules, by reminding us of the bizarre, haphazard creative forces that go into that world's creation? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if it damages the relationship between a reader and a creative team by reminding the reader that the creative team includes a bunch of fucking editors? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if Kyle Mclachlan reached into a kangaroo pouch and pulled out a severed ear, and the kangaroo punched him in the skull, and the ear was on fire, and the kangaroo was on fire, and our loins were on fire, and the whole world was on fire? DRUGS!

Earmuffs, Blue Beetle! Earmuffs!

IV.

The arc isn’t very meaningful long-term. I don’t know if that matters. The Posse plays hardly any role in the rest of the series— red herring.

Blue Beetle’s goal is to meet one particular member of the Posse so she can explain his powers to him. She never does or explains anything of any value, and is never seen again— red herring.

The arc sets up an archnemesis for Blue Beetle, La Dama, who doesn’t really ever do anything I remember being especially evil for the rest of the series— red herring.

The arc sets up a third nemesis for Blue Beetle, a magician henchman for La Dama who never really ends up mattering very much— red herring.

The entire arc is about magic in the DC Universe, and Blue Beetle learning about magic, and coping with magic. The rest of the comic is a space opera sci-fi adventure— red herring.

The most interesting bit is the series sets up a dilemma: should Blue Beetle save his friend from her evil Aunt and save himself the hassle of having his secret identity exposed, or should he allow her to be raised by a crime-lord for his own convenience?

Guess which option he chooses. Also: who ultimately resolves the moral dilemma? Not Blue Beetle— it’s resolved for him by external events. So, I’d personally categorize that under “herring, red.”

V.

Something this arc got me thinking about is Blue Beetle’s relationship with his power.

The Marvel characters-- the nature of power is split for a Marvel character. You either achieve your powers (e.g. Tony Stark builds his Iron Man suit) or you’re victimized by them (e.g. whoops: Hulk). Power in a Marvel comic is not something to be merely enjoyed ala a DC character like The Flash or Superman— there’s more to it than that.

Captain America? Victim: a man out of time. Iron Fist? Achievement: learned kung-fu. Spider-man? Both: achievement-- built his webshooters, but also victimized by how his powers force him to be responsible. The X-Men? Victims. Daredevil? Uh: handi-capable. The Fantastic Four? Both victims and achievement-based heroes! And so on. The Marvel characters … there’s a certain fission element built into their DNA. Their relationships with power defines a lot about how or why those characters work.

The big DC characters are not as interesting in that respect. Sure, there’s Batman (both victim and achievement), but more of them were just sort-of handed their powers. Green Lantern is literally just handed a power ring—end of story.

How about our boy? How about Mr. Beetle? In the first issue, he learned that he had superpowers, and after that—he just goes off and uses them.

In this arc, he’s never really victimized by his powers— he’s more than happy to use them willy-nilly. No, he’s victimized by the unhappy situation of being a part of the DCU. He’s victimized because he was taken away from his family for a year due to the One Year Later stunt event-— that has nothing to do with his powers. He’s victimized by DC editors, which… get in line.

He certainly didn’t achieve his powers-- a magical rock crawled up his ass. He was sodomized with superpowers— wee. The only achievement was on the part of his sphincter.

Anytime I watch a James Bond movie, I want to know how to play Baccarat (it's an absolutely retarded card game). James Bond is all about achievement. James Bond fans want to dress like Bond dresses; smell like he smells.

Who’d want to smell like the Blue Beetle? Or his sphincter?

Not me, sister.

Not me.

Week 103: One More Year Later

It's almost a year after 52 ended--as of this Wednesday and DCU Zero, the next cycle of DCU stuff is about to begin, and I'm a lot more curious about that than I was about virtually anything in the Countdown era. (The line in this week's DC Nation column about how Countdown's goals "met with various levels of success" is a delicate way of putting it.) But before that starts, I thought I'd take one more look at the afterlife of the series I spent a year writing about.

52 opened up a bunch of possibilities, opportunities and resources for the DCU setting, and the last year has not been kind to many of them. Here's what's happened with each of 52's main characters and plot threads:

ADAM STRANGE, STARFIRE, ANIMAL MAN: The outer-space plot of 52 didn't quite build up the force it was supposed to--where it seems to have been going at first was that they not only had to make it home but save the world from Lady Styx when they got there, which didn't happen. And the point of throwing these three characters together was that they didn't really belong together, or have much in common except for being different kinds of exiles longing for return. (The one who got to go back was Animal Man, which functioned dramatically as the end of Buddy's story: he's integrated himself with his understanding of what's beyond the fourth wall.) So putting them back together for Countdown to Adventure was a horrible idea: they are not a team, and have no dramatic reason to continue to work together, and there was no new angle to make it worth bringing them back right now.

BATWOMAN: Wasn't she supposed to be the Sensational Character Find of 2006? There actually may have been some demand to do something more with her--like explaining what her deal is--but after a year and only one appearance (in Crime Bible) that bothered to actually do anything with her, I suspect the urgency is gone. As of New York Comic-Con, there don't seem to be any announced plans to do anything with her (although she did show up in that Adam Hughes promo piece recently). Then again, if that Rucka/Williams project with her ever happens, I'm there.

BLACK ADAM: Look, the whole point of the end of 52's Black Adam arc was that it was final--that his pride had destroyed him and that he'd spend his remaining days wandering like Cain, searching for his magic word. It also meant that when he inevitably reappeared, eight or fifteen years down the line, it would have this massive return-of-the-repressed impact. And then he showed up again... THREE WEEKS LATER. Thereby undercutting all the dramatic force of his story, and making it totally exhausting every time he's appeared since. Also, the resolution of the "lost magic word" thing in the Black Adam miniseries was as stupid as it could possibly have been.

BOOSTER GOLD: The first few issues took off from the tone of the Booster sequences in 52, it's a clever idea, and I've enjoyed most of it so far. There's no denying it's an exercise in mining the past, but it gets away with it because "mining the past" is its premise.

RALPH AND SUE DIBNY, DEAD DETECTIVES: On the other hand, Batman and the Outsiders? In 2008? It's like turning on the TV and all you get is The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, except that all the characters are dead now and it's stories about their ghosts running moonshine and making business deals. Next up: the Arak, Son of Thunder revival, yes?

RENEE MONTOYA/THE QUESTION/THE CRIME CULT: I love the character, I'll read anything Rucka writes with her, and I really enjoyed the first couple of issues of 52 Aftermath: Crime Bible: The Five Books, Excuse Me, Lessons of Blood: What, Were We Supposed To Mention Our Character's Name Somewhere in the Title? It's probably as close as I'm going to get as that "superhero comic about introspection and self-discovery" I imagined a year ago. But if you're going to end a miniseries on a cliffhanger, maybe it's a good idea to indicate where that cliffhanger's going to be resolved. (Final Crisis: Revelation, right, but that wasn't clear at the time.) (More title confusion, actually: is it Revelation or Revelations? Can I vote for the proper, singular, John-the-Divine version, especially since Wildstorm already used the plural a couple of months back?)

STEEL: The most awkward thread of 52--his plot never went anywhere all that interesting, and the "metagene" business was so unclear that it all ended up shoved back into its box by the end of the series. Peter Milligan's Infinity Inc. is kind of a clever idea (superheroes as metaphors for various kinds of psychological disorders and mental illness), even if he tends to bang his thematic drumbeats a little too obviously, but trying to hang it onto the 52 peg has probably hurt more than helped.

OOLONG ISLAND/THE FOUR HORSEMEN: Well, I couldn't have imagined that there was any more story to be told on this front--but Giffen and Olliffe managed to evoke the tone of 52. The Four Horsemen miniseries was unnecessary and vestigial, but at least it wasn't parasitic.

THE MULTIVERSE STUFF: The idea that there are parallel realities that sometimes intersect is one of the coolest concepts in DC continuity; I was glad to see it return. It would have been nice to have it floating around as an occasional story resource, not to have the 52 worlds pinned down and summarily zipped through the way we've seen them in the past year.

There are also still a ton of dangling plot threads left over from 52. I maintain a dim flicker of hope that the Waverider/Time Commander/Clock Queen business will eventually be wrapped up in Booster Gold, and that the Intergang/Gotham City/Apokolips stuff will get at least a nod in the course of the impending Kirby-legacy barrage of Final Crisis, but I'm still wondering what the business with Adam Strange and Alan Scott's eyes was, for instance. Also, um, Super-Chief.

What I miss most about 52, though, is its tone--the sense that anything could happen from week to week, that all the plotlines were hurtling somewhere far from where they started, that cool new creations and resonant echoes of history could turn up on any page, that the DCU was becoming a deeper and richer and more interesting place every week. It made me want to know what happened next. 52 gave us Oolong Island, Batwoman, the Crime Bible, Everyman, Lady Styx, the Four Horsemen, Rip Hunter's chalkboard, the Great Ten, Supernova, the Cult of Connor, St. Camillus, Sobek, Osiris... and then, when it ended, its inventive energy mostly dissipated. I'm really hoping that the Final Crisis cycle, and Trinity running in parallel, will build for the future at least as much as they evoke the past.

Count this!

Haven't done a proper comic book "review" in a really long time, and despite being swamped with getting ONOMATOPOEIA done this week, and having to make a serious dent in the new order form, I thought I'd jump back in here for a minute.

I'm reasonably sure that better writers than myself will tackle the complexities and joys that were COUNTDOWN (I'm especially waiting for Chris Eckert's deconstruction -- Downcounting, when he wrote it, was WONDERFUL), but in the meantime you can deal with my bleating.

DC has had a pretty bad last two years. Their editorial vision has been, in my humble opinion, horrifically broken, and, more importantly, completely and utterly out of touch of the interests of the audience. What successes they've had have seemed to this observer to either be completely accidental (SINESTRO CORPS) or actively worked against (the end of 52, and the multiverse, etc)

I've been selling comics in my own store for nineteen years now, and we've always been a "DC store" -- selling more DC comics than Marvel comics. This makes us a rare and unique creature in comics retailing, as far as I can tell from speaking with my brethren and reading the sales charts.

And right now in 2008, we're selling more Marvel comic books than DC. If it weren't for DC's superlative backlist program, and the strength of Vertigo titles in that format like Y and FABLES and DMZ, it would be a total and complete rout.

Marvel, to be sure, has been on a strong run with the of-the-Zeitgeist CIVIL WAR, but it is clear to me watching our sales figures and listening to my customers that an equal measure of this switch has been DC completely and utterly bobbling the ball.

The first real signs, for me, was "One Year Later", which was about as unmanaged and poorly fitting of an idea as anything I can think of. Virtually every DCU book took a sharp downwards spike in the wake of OYL, as the readership didn't understand what was going on in the books they followed, and given no real incentive to pick up new ones.

That could have been managed had it not been for COUNTDOWN, "the spine of the DC Universe" -- a spine that virtually no one enjoyed, and that had what seemed to be a billion-jillion awful tie ins and crossovers and "spin outs" all predicated on branding and ideas that no one (not even, it seems) the creators were especially enthused by.

COUNTDOWN finishes this week with COUNTDOWN #1. The original plan was that COUNTDOWN would finish with a #0, but that #0 has been repositioned as "DC UNIVERSE #0", leading to the silliness of "1 and counting" in this week's COUNTDOWN, when it isn't any such thing...

DC's previous weekly, 52, wasn't amazing through all points, but it least it had narrative character arcs that actually lead to somewhere meaningful for most of the involved characters -- virtually each character went through some form of character growth during the series and ended up in a different place and head-space than they were at the beginning.

Not so with COUNTDOWN. Let's look at it:

HOLLY & HARLEY: I guess they're girfriends now (? Was that what we were supposed to get from the end?), which really seems out of character for Holly at least -- why isn't she looking for Selina? I guess technically this is a change, though a very hamfisted and out of character one.

MARY MARVEL: Started off evil, ended up evil, didn't learn a thing. Heck, Black Adam showed more character growth in COUNTDOWN, and he was on, what, 4 pages?

PIED PIPER & TRICKSTER: Well one is dead, while the other magically isn't. PP decides to "be on the side of the angels" -- but he already was until the editorially-mandated death of Bart Allen.

JASON TODD: Still a psychotic fuckhole, didn't even keep the "Red Robin" costume. Sheesh.

The "CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN" (that is, Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner, and Ray Palmer) are all left not even an inch different than they started (Ray is mopey, though), and given a new "mission" that will last about as long as Donna stayed a Darkstar, if that long. Said mission barely makes sense anyway -- any one Monitor has been pretty clearly shown to be stronger than any 10 superheroes combined, what on earth could these three (and that bug-girl from the Olsen storyline) (?!?!?! WTF is she doing there?) possibly hope to do anything against the monitors? And, anyway, even if they COULD (which they can't), just exactly how are they going to transverse the multiverse in order to do so, without that Monitor helping them constantly? Wha?

JIMMY OLSEN: Started a schlub, ended a schlub, didn't even get his story. As the "everyman" of the story, he fought gods (*rolls eyes*

JACK KIRBY: Pretty much shat upon. The Fourth World is annihilated, to no real good end, the final prophecy is rewritten to serve a lousy story. OMAC is reborn with the mohawk, but in a way and method completely the opposite of what Kirby did, and not for what sounds like any good story reason. Kamandi also seemingly re/unwritten.

And all this for $152.49 -- 51 times $2.99.

At the end of the day, COUNTDOWN was an complete mess, going nowhere, doing nothing, and not even doing it well. Utter CRAP.

In a lot of ways, DC's future really depends upon FINAL CRISIS -- it's got to be REALLY good in order to draw people back to the DCU. And while Grant Morrison and JG Jones would sound like the people up for the job, if anyone is, the rumor columns are suggesting that it isn't going to ship on time (and the buzz around the freelancers is that project is already compromised)

I don't have a ton of faith in TRINITY at this point either -- our preorders for 52 while it was running were around 35-40 buyers; preorders on COUNTDOWN dropped down to about 14 bodies. Currently TRINITY is sitting at NINE people signed up for it, despite a pretty a-list creative team on it.

Plot should flow from character; characterization should not be dictated by plot. DC *has* to learn this and learn this very quickly if they don't want to lose more market share and customer interest.

What did YOU think?

-B