Graeme Finds Out That Some Wars Are, In Fact, Good For Absolutely Somethin'. Huh.

THE WAR AT ELLSMERE is the kind of book that makes you wonder why its author - in this case, Faith Erin Hicks, who did Zombies Calling a couple of years ago for SLG, which was also a lot of fun - isn't much better known and feted as a "meteoric talent" or "one to watch" or something similar by a hundred bloggers. To spoil the review, let's start with me telling you that it's Very Good, and go from there.

It's a tough book to talk about, because what makes it work so well is the execution as much as anything else; to talk about the plot could make it sound a little too like a less magical, less sentimental Harry Potter (although, I admit, if there was a new "The [Blank] at Ellsmere" book every year, I'd be a happy man) or like too many other stories; a poor girl gets into an exclusive private school on a scholarship and discovers a world of snobbery, cliques and mystery. But Hicks isn't a lazy writer, and for every familiar plot device she uses, she gives it enough honesty and originality to win you over nonetheless (The dynamic between heroine Juniper and lead Mean Girl Emily is more complex than you might expect, and more interesting because of it, for example); for all their familiarity, the characters feel individual and not like stereotypes, and you believe in them.

(Also, the argument can be made that YA fiction - of which this is definitely an example, and in a weird way, the Minx book that never was, although that sounds like more of a backhanded compliment than was intended, especially considering the critical/commercial failure of much of that line. It has much more... energy, perhaps? Enthusiasm? than any of the Minx books, and feels much less studied and focused, in a good way; perhaps it's a good model for what Minx could have been - can get away with a more familiar, simpler story with more familiar, simpler characters. I'm not sure that I completely believe that, but something that I kept thinking throughout the entire book was that it was a perfect book for its target audience, and not in the negative sense.)

All of this is helped considerably by Hicks' art, which has progressed from Zombies Calling towards something simpler, more graphic and immediate - Yeah, I know there've been comparisons to Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim art, but there are as many differences as similarities, to be honest. It's like a scruffier take on something like Craig McCracken's stuff, but with the occasional surprising note of something unexpected (No-one else will see this, but I swear there's some Dave McKean in there. Some Hope Larson and Craig Thompson, too), but all without seeming too derivative and managing to feel all of its own style, at the same time. If nothing else, take a look at the book for the art alone - especially Cassie talking about trees on pages 63 and 64. It's a wonderful-looking book.

I'm almost suspicious of liking something as much as I did this book; I second-guess myself and wonder if I'm missing some flaw that everyone else will see straight away, or whether I've been lured in by great art and enjoyable story and there's some larger ART point that I've forgotten (That last one I tend to get over pretty quickly), but fuck it: This book isn't perfect (the ending is a little too "THERE MUST BE A SEQUEL") or for everyone; people who want to see Bullseye dress up as Hawkeye and shoot arrows through people might not appreciate it, but who cares? It looks great and warms the heart, while making you smile and worry that everything'll turn out okay. Like I said at the start; it really is very good.

Graeme's 10 Thoughts About Showcase Presents: Brave And Bold Volume 3

1. The title - SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD BATMAN TEAM-UPS VOLUME 3 - feels as if DC was trying to win some kind of award for longwindedness; would it have killed them to just call it SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD VOLUME 3 instead? I know, they're probably trying to plan ahead for when they do Showcases of the non-Haney/Aparo issues, but still.

2. If, like me, you've been following the series eagerly up until this point, Bob Haney's weird and poetic way with words has not only become normal by now, but also comforting in a way. "The Brave and Bold Beat continues! Miss it never!" Miss it never? It's like Bizarro Stan Lee, but it works.

3. Also wonderful: The operatic, emotional Batman that Haney writes. Never mind the dour, grim Dark Knight people are familiar with, this is a Batman so filled with life that he'll literally shake a fist in the air and swear an oath if needs be... but also one so secure in his manliness that he's got no problem calling Aquaman beautiful at the end of one story.

4. To be fair to Bats, Aquaman is pretty beautiful in that particular story, thanks to Jim Aparo's lovely, lovely art. Aparo's work in this collection is variable; you can see when he's rushed and hacking it out, at times, but there are also some pages that just make you wonder why he's never really gotten his due as an artist. As someone who first came across his work in Batman and the Outsiders, but soon came to consider his Batman as "the" Batman of my childhood, it's somewhat gratifying to see that the preteen me wasn't entirely lacking in taste.

5. Something that's very apparent in black and white: What a magpie Aparo could be, stylistically. There are some very Neal Adams-ish panels in this book, and during the Sgt. Rock issues, some great Joe Kubert-style touches in the inking.

6. The Batman scene in last week's Final Crisis that everyone's not been talking about? Add in some ridiculous narration and that could've easily been the opening to one of the stories in here; the follow-up, of course, would be precisely the same follow-up that Morrison is inevitably going to end up doing himself - Batman lost in either time (the Forever People solution) or the Life Trap (Morrison's Mister Miracle solution), and fighting his way out by being the Ultimate Man. Morrison's Batman was pretty much always Haney's, but a little bit older and grumpier, anyway.

(6.5. I pretty much think that FINAL CRISIS #6 was Good, all of the problems with it, aside; I liked the choppy sense of immediacy that Morrison brings to the writing, the genuine sense of emergency and everything happening at once making it feel like a Crisis, if not necessarily the "Final" one... Whether that's intentional or the result of rewrites, I'm not entirely sure, but it still worked for me; I also like that a lot of it happens off-panel, but not in such a way that you feel completely cheated, or at least, not yet. It's a shame that deadline issues and stupid production mistakes - Since when was Mister Miracle white? How is Hourman in two places at once at the end of this issue? - have killed a lot of this series' momentum, because it's really kind of awesome, in its own way. That said, I still think that it's definitely not the kind of thing that linewide event books are made of, and that it suffers from its more overt attempts to fit into that hole.)

7. Haney's choices for guest-stars is enjoyably B-list, for the most part (Wildcat, Mister Miracle and the Metal Men all appear in more than one story in this collection), and when big-name heroes appear, it's not as fun (Well, with the exception of the Green Lantern story).

8. That Green Lantern story, though... Man. It made me realize how much of this book - and the previous two collections -don't fit into what we now think of as the superhero formula. For one thing, they're mostly devoid of supervillains; lowlife hoods or criminal masterminds, sure, but guys in costumes with superpowers? Not so much. And, as over the top as the emotion may be, there's no angst or soap opera; it's literally "Here we are introducing the concept, here we are dealing with it, now we're done."

9. That economy - and, to be honest, also the way in which you get the idea that Haney might be ripping off whatever the movie or TV show he saw last night may have been (Seriously, how else do you get a story where Batman gets mentally tortured with the latest brainwashing techniques and almost breaks after following Green Lantern once he defects?) - really reminded me of early 2000AD, especially John Wagner and Alan Grant's stuff before they started taking themselves more seriously. On the one hand, they were hacking the stuff out, trying to write as many pages as possible as quickly as possible while still being entertaining, but "hack" is too much of pejorative to use, because the stories are still readable - enjoyable - and successful in what they set out to do decades later. Someone needs to tell me what this kind of thing is called when you're trying not to insult it (Pulpy? No, that's not it, either).

10. If these collections were weekly, they wouldn't come out quick enough for me. Fun, stupid, thrilling and never-really-giving-a-fuck, this book was Excellent.

You already know what happens, right?

Final Crisis #6 (of 7):

Oh no, he's come for my interest in this series!

Hang on - let me run for a bit. Get that blood flowing. A little Speed Force never hurt! If there's one thing about this issue that really stands out to me, a Grant Morrison tragic, it's how the Doomsday Singularity and its accordant collapse of Earthly reality has resulted in a quantity of infinite Morrisons.

Look! The Atoms are shoving off on an emergency trip to a new reality not unlike the Atom 1,000,000 story in the old DC One Million 80-Page Giant, and the Marvel family is pulling off a depowering stunt not unlike that from the Black Adam climax of 52! You know about Batman this issue, right? His little throwdown with Darkseid evokes both The Invisibles and JLA: Rock of Ages, all while rolling around in Seven Soldiers references (visual and otherwise) and literally concluding Batman: R.I.P. - it's the heart of the storm, after all.

There's a great little joke(?) in that; if R.I.P. was a dark version of Morrison's All Star Superman, the shared-universe Gotham to a fabulously aloof Metropolis, then it's very fitting that Batman's *GASP* *CHOKE* violation of his twin vows against killing and discharging firearms outside of an authorized target range should recall the finale of a crucial All Star influence, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, in which what happened to the Man of Tomorrow was that he killed a reality-crushing threat and then had to scrub his confirmed capacity for murder away with fast-acting Gold Kryptonite. Morrison's Batman is darker to the end, shooting the essence of evil and dooming himself to a succession of hopeless lives-within-life.

Well, until he gets out. And he will - Morrison says so through a separate allusion: Darkseid's chamber as the Dark Side Club. Final Crisis itself has always functioned as something of a mirror image of Seven Soldiers -- transformed from a set of songs about superhero renewal to an all-out black alert of evil creativity remaking the world into shit and struggle -- so why not have Batman relive (and relive, and relive) Mister Miracle's run-in with the Omega Sanction? Shit, we know he's coming back now, because Mister Miracle is standing around elsewhere in the issue! His whole 'not really dying' thing was the last image of Seven Soldiers! You're wrong - Batman (and Robin) will never die!! It's Lex Luthor's stifled yawn at Final Crisis #1's roast of the Martian Manhunter on a cosmic scale, the enthusiastic shrug of Writers and Time Tailors midwifing the Fifth World from the stuff of innumerable alternate numbers.

Is that guy on the skis still behind me? Oops, shouldn't have lo

There's fundamental problems with Final Crisis #6. Mainly, it's sort of boring and the art isn't very good. It's probably a decent model of how a supercompressed comic can go wrong, devoting mannered attention to uninteresting plot devices while sapping the immediacy of the work's flow. Morrison, for his part, has already promised that the final issue will zip beyond supercompression into something that's "almost a new style." Channel-zapping comics, apparently fit for the televisions surrounding Nix Uotan’s head.

I hope that happens. I certainly thought the frenzied second half of last issue was as good as the series has ever been, with Morrison and his rapidly expanding art team really starting to cook all the DCU's clashy superhero concepts and their planet-spanning peril into a bubbling stew of absurd glee. To switch metaphors, it was very loud and very layered, and merrily discordant in the way a collage of diverse metahuman properties probably ought to be when thrown together by a dire threat. It's the patchwork coat of Seven Soldiers facing an especially tough wash cycle, one that threatens to soak out all the ill-fitting superhero style, all the idealism of the construct. Decadence! Anti-Life!

Unfortunately, this is neither last issue nor next issue, and it isn't terribly keen on universe-shattering metaphors rendered in broad genre strokes, or even much in the way of cacophonic style. In fact, it's the very picture of aesthetic conservatism in Event comics, a deeply formulaic plot-resolution-through-hitting piece, the kind of thing that settles on lining up the subplots and knocking them off with a minimum of fuss (if a maxiumum of space, since there's a lot of field to plow). It could have worked too, I guess, had the series been particularly effective at building up subplots in a traditional manner.

But earlier issues focused Morrison's density of content mainly on burbling, doomy mood, with dozens of flavors of corruption arriving to sour the good world, slowly. Superman's specific plight, for example, was never all that well-tuned as a plot point -- an explosion hits the Daily Planet juuust right, sending Lois Lane into a near-death state that only Clark's frequent attention can preserve, at which point he's whisked away to a tie-in -- but that didn't quite matter, because it mainly functioned as the concept of heroic self-sacrifice fading in luster as a distraction from endemic problems. And when Anti-Life struck, the results tossed the series and concepts into disarray, sometimes strikingly so.

Here, however, the series primarily hones in on specific resolutions to the conflicts facing specific groups of superheroes, few of which prove to be interesting. I imagine the Tattooed Man summoning the mark of Metron to his face in resistance to Anti-Life is supposed to be rousing, but there really hasn't been much done with his character save for a bog-standard redemption arc in a tie-in, to say nothing of the Green Arrow/Black Canary conflict, which leans entirely on the reader's preexisting investment in the characters for even the slightest resonance.

I mean, I'm 12 years old, so I laughed at Talky Tawny ripping a mean tiger's guts out and straightening his bow tie, sure, but the final fate of Bad Mary Marvel amounts to little more than Freddy Freeman puzzling out a (pretty obvious) means of depowering her, then goodness restoring itself via a decent pair of slacks. There's hardly any impact, partially because we're now up to six credited artists, some of which appear more rushed than others and none of which manage much panache in the midst of keeping the story information straight, but also because few of the subplots have to foundation to withstand the focus they're given. It all seems like a lot of flying around over nothing; pages filled up, maybe some pieces being put in place for future storylines.

It's not all dreary, no. Sometimes the flavor creeps though. I liked the first three pages a lot, a perfectly Morrisonian slice of silly high science synching up with superheroic wonder; the feeling it engenders manages to overcome the glaring absence of a pertinent tie-in issue, late in true Final Crisis fashion. These things have power. Style has power. Form. This issue seems so beholden to typical concerns, just far enough off from the series' poise to knock the whole thing down.

I wonder if it can get up? Maybe I can still escape the Black Racer. Maybe I'll think of Batman, and live by his example. Ah, but how am I supposed to embrace the poetic resonance of Bruce Wayne shooting a god with the very bullet that caused the series' first murder, the very kind of weapon that moved Batman to begin, when it's conveyed through a plot apparatus that requires all the legions of Darkseid to have somehow forgotten to check the Caped Crusader's utility belt for dangerous items in all the time he'd been held captive? Kind of a synecdoche for the whole series, that. What kind of asshole world conquerors are these?! Maybe the whole series is really a critique of governmental mismanagement? A little realistic. Let's get going to the next plane. EH.

I'm going to tell you some things I've thought about saying to several Americans, and various foreigners too: And I didn't think I'd get the chance

The Winter Men Winter Special

God, The Winter Men. Where did this thing start publishing? Atlas/Seaboard? Was issue #1 published on the date of my birth? Be this my destiny to write a spoiler-packed internet review of the final issue? Is this really the final issue? Two and a quarter years after the last one?

I mean, that's pretty remarkable. That it's here, I mean. A lot of things happen in 27 months - plans change, publishers shift gears. The WildStorm of 2009 is very different from the WildStorm of 2006, far less inclined toward supporting a self-contained quasi-superhero book, or really much of anything that isn't a shared-universe title or some media tie-in thing. Oddly enough, one of the few exceptions has been the 2007-08 Peter Milligan/C.P. Smith series The Programme, which dealt with the deadly return of a hidden legacy from the Cold War, much like The Winter Men, although all 12 of its issues were released within the gap between this Winter Special and its direct predecessor.

But at least the new comic is here. And 40 pages long! With no ads! A real ending, just as promised! It's a rare thing for a seemingly dead series to even get such a chance, and rarer yet that it's not only VERY GOOD, and a very logical, satisfying part of a whole, but oddly contemporary too, as if it somehow had to show up in 2009, even as it bears the marks of earlier times. Doesn't the 'Winter Special' designation seems like a wink at the old seasonal specials WildStorm used to run every so often? Actually, the Wildstorm Winter Special came out in late 2004, back when this series was still cooking, though not yet published.

Here, let me explain.

As far as public knowledge goes, The Winter Men was initially intended as an eight-issue Vertigo miniseries. The creators were writer Brett Lewis -- best known at the time for his contributions to Bulletproof Monk, a 1998-99 Flypaper Press production for Image that later got adapted into a movie, albeit without credit to the comic's working-for-hire creative team (which also included artist Michael Avon Oeming) -- and artist John Paul Leon, working in collaboration with colorist Dave Stewart and letterer John Workman. A two-page sample of the upcoming miniseries appeared in the April 2003 Vertigo X Anniversary Preview, a promotional pamphlet that the reader was given the privilege of paying 99 cents for; neither Stewart nor Workman were credited in that excerpt, and both the colors and letters would change when the pages later appeared in the series proper.

And as it went, those two pages were the only Winter Men material actually published by Vertigo; by the time issue #1 appeared in August 2005, the series had become part of the short-lived WildStorm Signature Series line of creator-owned works (with DC Comics retaining the applicable trademarks), although Vertigo senior editor Will Dennis shared an editing credit with WildStorm's Alex Sinclair on issues #1 and #2, suggesting that the switchover came a good ways into production.

(tangentally, the Vertigo X preview also featured coverage of another famously troubled work, Garth Ennis' & Steve Dillon's perpetually forthcoming 'literary' comics opus City Lights - "there's no stopping us now," declared Ennis, inaccurately)

When it eventually arrived -- and I'll confess I only picked that first issue up when I heard people enthusing about it online -- The Winter Men already seemed a bit like something from years earlier, a 'superhero' comic wherein the superhero elements were pushed as far to the back as possible, as was the trend among several of Marvel's early 21st century projects under the tenure of president Bill Jemas.

Yet it sure didn't read like a Marvel comic of that time, or 2005 for that matter - loaded with narration and labels and dialogue and tight, buzzing panels, the first issue seemed the very antithesis of decompressed 'widescreen' comics, with Leon's modulated linework (thick 'n inky up close, scratchily cartooned in longview) blending with Stewart's muted palette and solid hues to create a tone more akin to some handsomely understated European album than nearly any North American super-comic. The plot was both intricate and enigmatic; Lewis' density of scripting focused mainly on detailed scenes redolant with offhanded cultural references and carefully metered dialogue, as if to evoke a very intuitive translation of something originally in Russian. Bits of story progression were sometimes only sprinkled among chit-chat about the Moscow power grid or the web structure of Russian organized crime.

The primary narrator and key anti-hero was Kris, a former Spetsnaz man and self-styled poet who was once a member of Red-11, a Soviet-originated team of specialists clad in flying armored suits, nominally for use in dangerous missions but really to act as a check against the nation's potentially dangerous superhuman program, which was centered around a near-legenday propoganda figure known as the Hammer of the Revolution. All of these competing forces were known collectively as the Winter Men, even as they were tasked by design with destroying one another for power's or suppression's sake - draw your own USSR metaphor.

But it wasn't superhumans that killed the Red-11 squad. They suffered a crushing defeat in Chechnya -- presumably the First Chechen War, with all accordant symbolism as per the troubles of the post-Soviet Russia -- and the haunted Kris was left a man between useful seasons, doing odd, dirty jobs for judges and the mayor of Moscow. This frozen state led him to a confrontation with Drost, a lifelong soldier for something or another and a fellow ex-Red-11, who agreed to swap a quick resolution to a nagging criminal-political matter (in the series' privatized Moscow, a free-for-all among rival gangs and governmental bodies, crime and politics are pretty much the same thing) for a no-win murder/kidnapping case involving a young girl who got a black-market liver transplant from what turned out to be a Very Special Source: a potential superhuman.

Needless to say, the plot then spread to include approximately half the population of northern Eurasia, with a special emphasis on three of Kris' four surviving Red-11 teammates: Drost, the aforementioned soldier; Nikki, the gangster; and Nina, the bodyguard. A mystery teammate known only as "the Siberian" remained off-page.

Kris travelled to America to infiltrate the Russian mob and crack its organ trade. He faced off with the CIA, and raised an army in Western Asia with a handful of money. He murdered trusting friends in cold blood, got lambasted for never moving forward, got a mafiya tattoo urging him (specifically his fist) to move forward, and never saw his wife leave him. Hell, he even rescued the little girl at the end of issue #3, although it soon became clear that the saga was far from over.

All the while, writer Lewis structured each issue as a discreet unit, with each chapter's action broken off from the others by time's passage and shifts in location (hardly a trait of decompressed superhero comics!). And even within each issue, small segments would bump Kris forward in time -- months and months pass in issue #2's America alone -- as his narration doled out pertinant trivia and background information. Often, while sinking deeper and deeper into the international conspiracy, Kris would opine as to the obsessive-compulsive nature of the old Soviet intelligence, never prone to allowing for coincidence - it sometimes came off as Lewis trying to cover for his less tenable plot contortions, just as all that lived-in detail occasionally seemed like heavy research getting plopped onto the page.

Also in issue #3, as he waited to brief CIA operatives on his mission, Kris mused that "I'll have to leave out some small other things too -- and with what's left -- the story becomes difficult." That later became very important.

Issue #4 of the series didn't arrive until April 2006. Scott Dunbier had become the editor, and suddenly, according to the cover, the miniseries was only going to be six issues. All that despite the issue itself posing as an Interlude (one suspects for the halfway mark), focused on Kris & Nikki driving around town, picking up protection money, restoring citizens' power, discussing the plot, drinking heavily with strangers and shooting a man in the head at the behest of a local judge.

I think that was when I realized that the series was truly something, a crime comic matched perfectly with a vividly drawn foreign locale, and warm and authentic friendships (and very crisp dialogue) contrasted harshly with moments of amoral cruelty, the former informing the tolerance of the latter. The superhero content acted as strict, potent metaphor, the dangerous days of a world superpower recalled with wonder and fear, and the people left scrambling for dangerous shards of that old Communist power in a post-super world, after the big times ended. Even the romantic/terrible grit of lawless Moscow was real enough to work; when Nikki the gangster mentions good times of dealing in Ninja Turtle toys, it brings to mind that old interview Kevin Eastman did with The Comics Journal (issue #202; read it here), in which he mentions signing with a Turtles sub-licensing agent and possible gangster on a deal to truck toys into Russia - the copyright/trademark would be defended with his fists.

Then the series vanished for a while. Issue #5 landed in October, its solicitation announcing that there'd be eight issues again, and its final page happily noting that it was the final regular issue, with a special edition forthcoming to resolve everything. Plot points were hustled through with considerable speed; some content promised in issue #4's Next Issue box simply didn't appear. Hints and suggestions appeared. "Your endgame is rushed," an elderly architect noted to Kris, who later ended the issue's narration with an even more telling line: "And wouldn't that have been a good ending?"

Do you think?

So this is the real, 100% authentic final issue of The Winter Men, may it trade and multiply forever, and I think it's safe to declare it a choice example of 'supercompression' in North American comics, akin to Casanova and the later, crazier bits of Seven Soldiers in poise (if not tone). There may be two issues' worth of space in this comic, but Lewis packs in three or four issues worth of stuff; that doesn't quite make up the difference, mind you, since the each issue of the series typically included the stuff of two, but it's still noteworthy.

The supercompression approach serves both creators well. Leon -- still with letterer Workman, although frequent collaborator Melissa Edwards has replaced colorist Stewart, to a slightly washed-out effect -- is perfectly adept at packing small panels with minutely-carved detail, while Lewis builds upon the self-aware and 'self-contained' style of earlier issues to advance the plot forcefully in the same bursts of action that marked earlier issues, although this time (probably) to the effect of leaping over material he can't otherwise hit from space constraints. As a result, the series reads shockingly well as a whole, given the endless problems it encountered during production. Not to mention its narrator's tendancy to say things like "I will just tell you the good parts..." - hey, it's just Kris being Kris by now.

It's not just plot-plot-plot either. Actually, I'd suggest that a trait of the supercompressed comic (among straightforward genre works, at least) is that it doesn't just stuff in shitloads of plot, but layers on digressions and backstory and flavor, as a means of making the work especially rich. I don't think there was any particular need for Kris to enjoy a two-page sexual idyll with his separated wife, but I'm extremely glad it's there for the dimension it adds to Kris' character, which Lewis then cannily exploits three pages later when Our Hero cuffs a girlfriend in the face to scare her away from the dangerous life of the Red-11.

There's also a sudden resurgence in the fantastical elements of the story, with a trip to a 'former' Gulag featuring a flame-spewing cyborg guard, and a train ride to Siberia seeing Kris & Nina facing off with a flying armored suit, itself prompting a flashback to the Red-11 calamity in Chechnya and some awesomely clunky mecha designs. Granted, the dark secret of Kris' trauma turns out to be somewhat pat -- he was once in love with Nina, but left her for another female teammate who died when Kris froze, maybe due to equipment malfunction, maybe due to sheer stupid terror -- but it does explain why Nina is so lightly characterized compared to Drost & Nikki. This is Kris' story, told by him, and subject to his edits and biases, and he adores Nina as a perfect element of a happy, lost past; there's a fight sequence in issue #5 where Nina kills the hell out of oncoming forces and Kris' narration just stops for a full page until she's done and she gazes straight at the reader in close-up and Kris simply declares "Nina -- the barricade girl." And it all becomes so weirdly romantic the second time through.

The Siberian also comes into play this issue, probably the most bloodied from the series' abridgement. You can all but see his journey from the Gulag to civilization doled out through issues #6 and #7 (or maybe some earlier version of issue #5, since issue #4's Next Issue thing promised his involvement), building him up as a consummate badass armed with info that even his teammates aren't aware of, and noting his secret connection to the man behind the whole crazy affair, the chessmaster moving the pieces. As it stands he remains something of a puzzle, if given exactly the detail needed to explain his motivation for taking on the Hammer of the Revolution.

That's right. Lewis eventually reveals that the Hammer, the legend himself, was behind the whole deal, scheming extravagently to erase any weapon that might kill him, and hopefully getting different weapons to destroy one another. He's quite a charged figure, blue and glowing in his true form as an obvious evocation of a certain temporary anti-Communist from another DC-released comic book; the timing couldn't be better!

But Lewis' marvel of science isn't nearly as prone to transcendence. He's like the glowering spirit of revolutionary impulse, his origin tied to the Tunguska event of 1908, so close in proximity to the 1905 Russian Revolution. Stalin couldn't control him, though, so the Soviet state roiled itself into finding ways to both mimic him and counter him, creating a mad rush of competing interests that eventually broke down totally into the web of gross desires that runs the streets.

He tells Kris of the collapsar -- a notion first brought up by a schemer in issue #3 -- where both of them are, chess pieces on the same space, superman and rocket man set by politics to erase one another, somehow despite the collapse of the State itself. Revolution Means a Circle, as the issue's title proclaims, and it does seem that nobody, least of all Kris, has moved forward. Need I mention that the Hammer was posing in the mayor's office as an architect -- amusingly, the same one that delivered the above-mentioned line alluding to the series' lack of space -- whom Kris once told to 'go build something,' that very wish repeated with a different connotation as part of this issue's all-action climax? The promise of a beautiful, revolutionary future spoiled?

Everything seems inevitable by the end, as if there really aren't any coincidences. The Hammer was present in issue #1, in disguise. Reading the series over again, I noticed all sorts of little hidden aspects, like a traitorous gangster character from issue #3 hanging around in the background of issue #2, or little hints that Kris' girlfriend is going to begin an affair with Nikki. In issue #4, Nikki is already showing Kris bits of the Winter tech he'll use in the endgame. The Hammer is eventually brought to his knees by Drost, the man who was supposed to head the whole damned investigation to begin with before he traded off with Kris at the top of the first issue.

Through it all, some flaws remain evident - for all its oft-stated claims of being unlike your typical Western action tale (yeah, like everything, that's mentioned in-story), the whole thing does build to the old-as-the-hills trope of the (sympathetic) villain offering the (anti-)hero the chance to work with him and Our Man turning him down to set up the final throwdown. Which leads to another problem, one common to supercompressed works - the action just doesn't have a lot of room to build up power on its own, so three pages of Kris strapping on a cobbled-together approximation of the ol' armor to fulfill his purpose seems less mighty than pat from lack of space, like it's something he just had to do to gild the circular lily.

Yet, in the end, The Winter Men is about people and a society going in circles; its title refers to competing, mutually destructive forces crated for the 'good' of a state, and its depiction of Russia is full of the echos of a lost superpower, and most of its poorer traits as made even worse. From there comes the crime and the mystery. Good thing it's a strong, well-made genre piece, deeply clever and strangely immediate, given its own life of struggles. At least something moved forward to a conclusion! It even has the cheek to nod in the direction of a sequel, so maybe a Winter Men Spring Spectacular will show up in 2012, along with Big Numbers #3 and City Lights #1. If I can go by what's here, it'll seem like no time has passed at all, its heavy approach given the tenor of good conversation and a keen sense of skipping around and honing in on what's important. Like Kris says:

"...and it is what you leave out that makes the story."

Hey, Didja Hear About This Movie Frank Miller Directed? Jeff Watches The Spirit

Frank Miller has a small role in The Spirit, the movie he wrote and directed, playing a cop by the name of Liebowitz. Miller's character dies about ten minutes into the picture; his directing career follows suit ninety-five minutes later. Counting me, there were twelve people in the showing I attended and four of them walked out before the movie ended. (Another one snored audibly when I passed him on the way to the head.) Since Miller considers himself a provocateur in the comics world, I wish I could say the four that left stormed out furious, but no: they left with the resigned air of people cutting bait, already figuring which multiplex theater they'd stop by next.

Me, I was busy trying not to succumb to the myth of linear filmmaking--the first twenty minutes had me convinced I was watching the worst movie ever made, the middle hour was tedious, and the last twenty were basically competent although already scuppered by everything preceding it. It was tempting to think Miller had gotten better as things went on.

[More--by which I mean "more amateur Freud than you can shake your father's stick at"--after the jump.]

Although frequently dull, The Spirit never bored me: the pretty visuals, the constant shout-outs, and the fascinating smear of psychological subtext all kept me preoccupied. I guess that last is to be expected--most of my sub-rudimentary knowledge of Freud comes from Miller's own comics, where I inferred the Oedipal implications of Daredevil's origin by Miller's creation of a female character with a parallel origin named Elektra. (And let's not get into that sequence from The Dark Knight Returns where Bruce Wayne remembers the death of his parents in super slow motion, his mother's string of pearls slowly breaking apart in panels separated by shots of Bruce Wayne's horrified rictus--an evocation of ejaculation in the midst of all that death, the underlying childish Oedipal fantasy become nightmarish reality that causes the guilt that leads Bruce to punish himself with his heroic undertaking.)

So, I admit it. Until I'd seen the first leaked footage of The Spirit from SDCC, the trailers had me thinking Miller's adaptation would be a canny bit of transference: he would adapt the character best identified with Will Eisner--his artistic mentor, sparring partner, father figure--and savvily usurp it. I figured that was why there were so many Millerisms in the first trailer (so many, many Millerisms) and so few Eisnerisms. To put this even more crassly: if Eisner was the father of Miller's inspiration then The Spirit was the mother, and Miller was going to put it to Mom nice and good while all of Hollywood cheered him on. Either the movie would be a hit, and everyone would associate The Spirit--and The Spirit--with Miller, or the movie would be a flop, and the mother (and by extension, the father) would be ruined.

(Yes, yes. As Hibbs would say: "Lester, you have issues.")

But the footage leaked from SDCC made me re-think things: oh sure, The Spirit and The Octopus slugged it out in what appeared to be an overflow of liquid feces--nope, nothing Freudian going on there!--but the banter, the cartoon sound effects, the vaudevillian slapstick...it reminded me, however faintly, of Will Eisner. (Kyle Baker goes on to underline this much more emphatically, and amusingly, than I could ever hope to, here.)

Long before the movie came out, I began hoping that Miller was trying to update Eisner's Spirit for a modern audience and had tumbled to the idea that the closest analogue to Eisner's oddball mix of noir and vaudeville, slapstick and sturm-und-drang, melodrama and high yucks, that the audience might know would be...Frank Miller.

Miller's work--even his later work as a god-damned cartoonist instead of a writer/artist--isn't Eisner's, but you can see in the movie a bridge being made to carry Miller's moviegoing audience of today to Eisner's comic-reading audience of yesteryear. (That bridge, alas, snaps about ninety seconds in, and the remaining hundred and six minutes are watching the interesting shapes made by the wreckage splintering on the shoals.) For a guy who likes to have draw mustaches and Satanic van dykes on the faces of Jim Lee's DC Universe, Miller turns out to be a more dutiful son in the pinch than I might have imagined.

Well, at least as far as the father is concerned, anyway. The one fascinating bit Miller adds to The Spirit mythos, at least as far as I'm concerned, is The Spirit's relationship to women and his city. Although I'm not the best read Spirit fan in the world, I think Feiffer's explanation in The Great Comic Book Heroes (for all the superheroes of the Spirit's time) explains The Spirit's relationship to women nicely:

Our cultural opposite of the man who didn't make out with women has never been the man who did--but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, Lil Abner's, or Superman's was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to hep them. And then get the hell out. Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.

Instead of just a modified version of this tack, Miller's Spirit is a man who is catnip for the ladies, but clearly can't help flirting back. While proclaiming to love Ellen Doran (Sarah Paulson)--here, a surgeon who keeps sewing his semi-invulnerable body back together--he is haunted by the lost love he shared as a teen with Sand Saref (Eva Mendes, not nearly as bad here as in Ghost Rider, although I should tell you I consider that one of the worst performances in movie history), but capable of flirting with rookie cop Morganstern (Stana Katic), while having visions of the mysterious and thanatic Lorelei (Jame King), and still finding time to make time with Plaster of Paris (Paz Vega), etc., etc. (etc., etc.).

Factor in The Spirit's voiceover referring to Central City, his city, as a woman that needs him, referred to alternately as his lover and, yup, his mother. The Spirit says he loves women, and I'm sure Frank Miller does too, but then why in this movie is embracing a woman equated with embracing death, and a mother is equated with a couple of garbage cans in an alley? Although Miller offers up his props to Sergio Leone in The Octopus's absurd sombrero in the opening (and the plaintive harmonica near the closing), the parts of The Spirit I enjoyed most--and were disturbed by the most--were when the movie played like Fellini's 8½ done as an episode of the Batman TV show.

There's shitloads of problems wrong with the movie, mind you: Miller spends so much time trying how to shoehorn Eisner's work into a modern context (and it's probably not a good sign that even though I could kind of imagine how the movie might play out on a comic book page by Eisner, I could imagine precisely how it would do so by Miller), he didn't bother to shoehorn a good story into that. But where else can you see stuff like Samuel L. Jackson playing one scene in blackface, or an African American actor and Jewish actress romping around in Nazi outfits (I still don't know what to make of the fact that The Octopus, delightfully jumping about and cutting henchmen in half for the hell of it, or dressing up as a Nazi or a samurai or a glam rocker whenever he feels like it, isn't evil so much as pure unbridled id) or the weird sexual anxiety in a scene where The Spirit loses his pants while dangling from the edifice of a building in the shape of ram's horns? (Yeah, where'd I get all that crazy Freudian nonsense from, anyway?)

That all of this still manages to be so dull and walk-outable is a testament to the world of difference between the pacing of a filmmaker, who must sculpt time, and a cartoonist, who must sculpt space (and then there's the cartoonist's use of their own chops as compared to a filmmaker's use of their actor's, which in the case of Eva Mendes is a very difficult task indeed, the woman being essentially chopless). While The Spirit is more or less terrible, it's interestingly terrible, and even shows promise. With time, Miller could maybe make a movie that could be enjoyed even without the use of vicodin and animal tranquilizers. Hard though it may be to believe, I genuinely hope that, like the title character of his movie, Miller's directing career is harder to kill than one would expect.

Douglas looks at some latter-day Dredd

JUDGE DREDD: ORIGINS: I picked up this 2007 paperback from a half-off bin a little while back, noting that the front cover misspells artist Carlos Ezquerra's name. One of my minor New Year's resolutions is to read more of John Wagner's future-cop Judge Dredd stories; I've actually been batting around the idea of working my way through the twelve "Complete Case Files" volumes that are sitting on my shelf and reviewing them all here. (If Laura and Leigh can do it with Cerebus, I can do it with Dredd, right?) I like the fact that Dredd is an American character whose stories are almost always by British writers, for a British audience--he's a European nightmare of what an American hero would be like. It's great to see Dredd's co-creator Ezquerra drawing most of this volume; I can't think of any other superhero series where an artist's new work is still so potent and so contemporary-looking 30 years after he started drawing the strip. (I bet it'll continue to age much better than the uncredited, airbrush-happy coloring, too.) His style is enormously different from the kind of Brian Bolland/Cliff Robinson continuum that's more closely associated with Dredd (at least in the States), and I can see why the publishers went with a Bolland cover for this volume, but I love Ezquerra's nasty, grimy felt-tip-marker-ish dots and blobs, and the enormous chins he draws on half his characters. (There's even a gag in here about how "chins have kinda grown since the big rad hit.")

This volume is where Wagner lays out the chronology that was the mostly-unstated foundation for the previous 1500 or so Dredd stories: how America turned into a fascist police state, how its big cities grew into Mega-Cities, and what's up with Dredd's genetic heritage. It's pretty GOOD, not as much for its broader strokes of violence and comedy (as far as Wagner's concerned, yokels are always funny) as for its hot jets of political bile and the way the backstory--which mostly gets revealed in long, moderately unwieldy flashbacks--evokes a whole culture's slide into catastrophe. (Wagner's obviously writing for the trade: this was serialized over 27 issues of 2000 A.D., and I couldn't even tell where most of the installment breaks were.)

But a couple of times, Wagner does my favorite trick of his: the sudden jolt when you realize that as a reader you're rooting for the wrong side. There's a little moment like that when you see Dredd softening to the idea of mutant rights, not because he's seen the light but because he now knows that some mutants are his blood relatives; there's a bigger one when we see the villain of the piece, President Robert L. Booth--who's got GWB's smirk and Reagan's knack for sanctimonious cornpone speechifying, not to mention a resonant last name--ranting about how Dredd and company "called democracy a failed experiment! These, the judges who ripped up the Constitution!" Of course, he's absolutely right.

There's also a huge payoff at the end, when Dredd's ultimate authority figure, from whom he's been longing for approval the entire book (as much as he can allow himself to desire anything, which isn't much), tells him that the system to which he's devoted his life is completely fucked:

--Which, of course, Dredd can barely even process, and can't admit he heard. And which makes me want to read Wagner's other recent Dredd material even more. Any suggestions about other Dredd volumes from the last ten years or so I should pick up?

Reign Down, Reign Down, Come On, Reign Down On Meeeeee

I have to admit, I'm not sure I get Dark Reign.

I mean, on the one hand, I get why Marvel are doing it; The Initiative branding gave the post-Civil War books a feeling of importance and consistency that they wouldn't really have had otherwise, so why not do the same thing for the post-Secret Invasion books?

(And to take a detour for a second, I may have missed the last couple of issues of Secret Invasion because of the move and the citizenship thing and everything else, but still: What happened? As much as the entire series was kind of playing for time and everything, what with nothing actually happening for most of it and all, the last couple of issues still managed to feel like an incredible anti-climax.)

But, plotwise, I don't see the point of Dark Reign; it feels like Marvel's creative hivemind has decided "Hey, that whole Police State thing that worked so well with the Initiative? The kids loved that. Why don't we just do that, but moreso?" and then tried to sell it by claiming that it's yet another All-New Status Quo and Everything We Know Is Wrong. Only problem being... it's pretty much the same Marvel Comics that we've been reading for the last two years or so, isn't it?

Don't get me wrong; I haven't missed the whole "Norman Osborn is now in charge of things! And he's evil! And nuts!" schtick - partially because it keeps being rammed down our throats - but... well, hasn't he been in charge of governmental superheroes since the start of the Ellis Thunderbolts? And, aside from the fact that we keep being told that he's, like, crazy and could destroy America just to make Spider-Man frown! and whatever, I don't get why a police state run by Norman is necessarily worse than a police state run by Tony Stark, no matter how sympathetic Matt Fraction tries to make him.

Okay, yes; obviously benevolent dictators are better than psychopathic dictators. I understand that. But in terms of plot mechanics, all this really means is that we have different characters playing the same roles: We have vigilantes who are really good guys but forced to operate outside the law (Still the New Avengers, but we now have Iron Man joining this side), we have good guys operating within the system despite the unjustness of the system (Still the Mighty Avengers and, presumably, the Initiative), and we have bad guys given freer-rein-than-they-should-be by the system (I look forward to the "Dark Avengers Are The New Thunderbolts" t-shirts). There may be an added threat of Osborn losing his shit and going nuclear on Howard The Duck or whoever, but that won't happen until Marvel's ready to finish off this status quo in favor of whatever comes next.

(Hibbs, in his infinite wisdom, pointed out to me that Dark Reign is clearly act III of an overarching "This Is Why The Superhero Registration Act Is Ultimately Wrong" plot that started with Civil War. So, does this mean that the next New Status Quo is really just the old status quo? I hope so, but can't really see what else they could workably do otherwise. I shudder to imagine, however.)

The problem is, I guess, that I've seen this before, and it didn't end well last time. I mean, if Marvel were really being honest about their "DC's Greatest Hits" medley (Civil War was Legends, Secret Invasion a mash-up of Millennum and Invasion!), Norman would have to shave his head and get a promotion, but fudging the details doesn't stop this from feeling like a rehash of the whole President Lex Luthor storyline that went... well, nowhere, really, from DC at the start of this decade. Should we start preparing for the end of the story being done in a new "Captain America/Iron Man" series by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness already?

(Even the name is derivative; remember Black Reign, the JSA/Hawkman crossover from a few years ago?)

All of which is just a preamble to:

SECRET INVASION: DARK REIGN #1: Yes, yes, I'm late to the party, but come on - You can't look at that cover and not wonder whether Alex Maleev had ever seen Norman Osborn before in any other comic ever, or just got a quick description of him from Tom Brevoort before the cover was due: "He's, like, a slimy businessman. I don't know. But could you make Doctor Doom look like he's shaking his fist at the reader and saying 'Get off my lawn?'"

The weird, unnecessary, feeling of the issue isn't helped by the fact that Maleev draws almost every single character differently inside the book - Maybe it was Skrull Alex that drew the cover - and Bendis fails entirely to either sell the concept behind it or convince the reader that he's just spinning his wheels for 30-odd pages in order to give his new branding an appropriately expensive launch. Entirely Awful, although drunken, lecherous balding Namor was an unexpected (and maybe unintentional) joy.

DARK REIGN: NEW NATION #1: Well, this is more like it. Admittedly, it'd be even more like it if it'd been free, or $1 or something other than $3.99 for what is essentially five trailers for new series launching around the brand, but I'll take what I can get, and at least two of the teasers (Secret Warriors, surprisingly, and Agents of Atlas, unsurprisingly; I love Jeff Parker's stuff) made me want to pick up the first issue of their respective series, at least. The others... I had no interest in War Machine before, and the Vertigo-lite preview possibly made me actively dislike the idea of the book. The Skrull Kill Krew strip seemed... okay? I guess? I kind of forgot about it before I'd finished reading it, to be honest. And the New Avengers: The Reunion short was just depressing; it wasn't that it was bad, because it wasn't, more that... I don't know, I guess I'd hoped that we weren't going to go from "You're alive! You're alive!" to "I am running away from you and keeping secrets" cliche quite so quickly, I guess. I'd wanted to like it much more than I did, to be honest, because I like Jim McCann, but... Yeah. Not for me. Overall, though, this book did its job pretty well, so I guess it's an Okay, in a way...?

SECRET INVASION: REQUIEM #1, THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #20 and AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE #20: Here's how you know that you failed with your big emotional climax of your big crossover event - When you have to spend three separate books afterwards telling people that it was a big deal, and it still feels like you're trying to explain why Xanadu was a fitting end to Gene Kelly's career. There wasn't any real reason for Janet Van Dyne to die, other than the misguided idea that doing so would give Secret Invasion some weight (Misguided because, well, in order for that to have been the case, someone would have to have done something - anything! - interesting with Janet Van Dyne at any point in recent memory, so that we'd care that she wasn't around anymore. And, no, having her say things like "Hey, Tony, how much damage can some aliens to do to New York in a day... Oh my God" doesn't count), and by the end of reading these three special memorial issues, I started to become convinced that the only people who actually care about, or believe in, her death are Dan Slott and Brian Bendis. Also, Hank Pym? Not any more interesting with the addition of self-righteous anger, guilt and a lot of "How could you let this happen while I was kidnapped by aliens," sadly. Crap, Awful and Awful, in that case.

NEW AVENGERS #48: Is it just me, or did this feel like a rehash of everything we'd seen in this title before? Here's the team getting together - again! And they're underground! Again! But there's a traitor having to betray the team - again! And that last part just didn't ring true at all; I believe that Luke loves his kid more than life itself, but it felt too soon for him to go to Osborn - half an issue wasn't long enough for we as readers to feel like every other avenue has been exhausted, and I can't believe that going to Osborn was anything other than a last resort for him. Overall, the entire issue felt half-assed and rushed, as if Bendis was going through the motions in order to get the characters where he wants them to be for the stories he really wants to tell. Awful, sadly.

In a weird way, I can't help but feel as if Dark Reign is really, really shittily timed. Dark Avengers, the core book for the branding, gets released the day after Obama gets sworn in as President of the United States, and it's that cognitive dissonance that sticks in my mind. Marvel, for all their faults, are normally more in tune with the cultural zeitgeist than Dark Reign; it feels oddly... wrong, and somewhat DC-ish, to see them plunge into a depressing world of misuse of power at a time when we're about to bring in a President who made the country believe in Hope and Change again. Maybe they know something we don't... or maybe this is a sign that they've lost their touch.

A Flock of Reviews: Jog struggles to keep the short stuff short in re 1/2

Final Crisis: Secret Files:

Ha ha, well, turns out the real secret here has been 'what the hell is in this thing?' And anyone trusting in DC's original solicitation for "Art by Frank Quitely and various" are gonna be pretty steamed when they notice it's all various, no Quitely on the inside. Nor is alleged co-writer Peter Tomasi anywhere to be found, although there is some interior content by Greg Rucka & Steve Lieber, who are not credited on the cover. The best I can say is that it all somehow seems too bona fide haphazard to qualify as a bait 'n switch - I really do wonder what the original idea for this thing was.

Anyhow, the vast majority of what your $3.99 will get you is a 24-page Origin of Libra comic, in which character co-creator Len Wein effectively remakes his original 1974 Justice League of America Libra story -- which I do believe was just reprinted this past July in DC Universe Special - Justice League of America #1 -- with artist Tony Shasteen in place of the late Dick Dillin. There's also some added background details, and a crossover-appropriate through line to bring us right up to the present, which sort of suggests that the character's mysterious nature won't be playing much of a role in Final Crisis proper at all.

That's a shame, although it doesn't reflect too much on Wein's script, which I thought was actually charming at times in its old-fashioned 'supervillain has a story for YOU' style; I liked Darkseid's grandiloquence ("Or are you so foolish as to tell me that, for even an instant, you would dare to forget DARKSEID!") and I loved that last page. Shasteen's visuals do a decent enough job of squaring away the '70s origins of the stuff with the glossy realist Final Crisis style set down by J.G. Jones. But the irony of this expanded Libra's motivation -- a man seeking the power of the cosmos to escape his ugly family situation, only to fall happily into the thrall of the ultimate Anti-Dad -- don't have much of the resonance of conclusion, since this is a crossover tie-in and we can't really end the arc here. I do understand now what Grant Morrison saw in the character, though, even while I suspect I might have gotten the same effect from reading that reprint half a year ago.

The rest of the comic is filler of various types: Morrison himself presents a one-page mini-essay on the Anti-Life Equation that falls somewhere in between a recap of past storylines and an answer he might have been saving for an interview at some point in the future; Rucka & Liber have an excerpt from the Words of Lilith, which I presume ties in with Final Crisis: Revelations, and is otherwise too oblique to have much value; and then, since there's four pages left, we get stuff that was apparently left out of the Final Crisis Sketchbook, in much the same captioned designs format (this is the basis of J.G. Jones' cover credit, by the way), honing in on the Final Crisis: Superman Beyond supporting cast, various Anti-Life figures, and, er... Aquaman. Because... he's there?

Hmmm, maybe that says something about the comic as a whole. Deep, deep EH, although your feelings will probably be lower if you're already up on Libra.

Punisher: War Zone #4 (of 6):

Now here's some happier dissonance: a movie tie-in that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie it's tying in with, save for the presence of the title character. And I'm pretty fine with that! More than anything, this weekly series has behaved as an amusingly early opportunity for writer Garth Ennis to return to his signature corporate-owned comics character and show 'em all how a toss-off storyline gets goddamned done, even though I secretly know that Santa isn't real and the script has been sitting around completed for over three years, by Ennis' own admission (as to the script, not Santa).

It's been a good time, but what's striking is how much Ennis' pacing is aided by the miniseries' weekly schedule; what occasionally seemed a little too deliberate in monthly form (I can't be the only one who stockpiled issues of the MAX series before reading them) comes off as nicely needling when you know it's only a few days until the next part. Granted, that's all academic if you're just planning on reading this in trade form -- which is probably what Ennis is really pacing for, and arguably what more people will opt to buy since these weekly suckers are $3.99 a pop -- but it's nice to have a smoother experience for those who can't wait or like pamphlets and/or hate money or something.

And what's even more nice is that Ennis is skilled enough a writer to maintain a high level of accessibility for a plot that's essentially a chain of callbacks to the writer's 2000-04 Marvel Knights version of the character, in particular the character-reviving Welcome Back Frank storyline; frequent cohort Steve Dillon again provides the art. This particular issue sees Frank and witless mob underling Schitti (yep) still on the tail of the alive and seemingly omnipresent family boss Ma Gnucci, despite having already killed her multiple times this miniseries alone; little does Our Man know that a deeply odd supervillain team-up is happening behind the scenes!

Now, admittedly that's nothing you didn't know last issue - the plot is in 'inching forward' mode right now, and while Ennis has drawn the best comedy of the series out of steely police lieutenant Molly Von Richtofen and her increasingly horrible obsession with her roommate/lover, the level of zany antics in this particular issue (including a two-page fantasy sequence!) smacks a bit of padding. But few can bide time quite like Ennis, and Dillon always seems to tease out something a little better onto the page. OKAY as an issue, but you can bank on the whole being better.

Incognito #1 (of 5):

I don't know if Criminal has set my expectations too high by this point or if there's just so damn many superhero comics around that it's harder to be striking, but I wasn't very piqued by this new Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips creation from Icon, despite my bottomless love for the term 'science-villain' and a general fondness for rough, pulp magazine-informed costumed adventure folk. This is a sort of supervillain noir piece set in a dim urban setting, with one-half of the infamous Overkill Brothers, our narrator, planted uneasily into witness protection.

But on a more immediate (if superficial) level, it's remarkably similar to Mark Millar's & J.G. Jones' Wanted, featuring an angry man with awesomely violent potential skulking around a boring work life, filled with loathing for everyone who pisses him off and half the people who don't, suddenly gaining the means to taste the power and freedom of amorality. There's a dead super-relative in his past, a mad science mentor and a shady organization that's wormed its way behind the operations of society, keeping the human sheep in the dark.

It's close enough that I wonder if this introduction isn't intended as a deliberate takeoff; certainly Brubaker is less fussy about the concept than Millar, letting us and his narrating character in on his wicked past right at the top. The dead relative is a twin brother and the mentor is also the 'father,' carrying through Brubaker's usual theme of family. Heaven knows Phillips and colorist Val Staples are far away from the slick glamor of Jones and Paul Mounts. And interestingly, the shady controller types are the heroes -- Jess Nevins presents a short backmatter essay on The Shadow, who wasn't exactly a paragon of active democracy -- while Brubaker cleverly has his villain blow off his newly re-powered steam by becoming a superhero, in the classic leaping down and socking muggers manner.

The thing is, all I'm seeing right now is potential, coursing through some fairly bland sequences of misanthropy and worldbuilding. Brubaker tends to a character-focused writer anyway, so maybe he just needs to get some added science-people into the picture to get the thing crackling, but for now it's mostly Phillips & Staples heating up the violence (outer and inner) with color and grit to keep attention. And even then, they're working in tight panels that mainly serve to muffle the science-action impact and draw attention to the former Overkill's psychological strife, which just isn't terribly interesting in its longing for freedom of the fists and skies.

OKAY in terms of possibility and technical chops, but it hasn't gotten me itching for the next issue like the better of this team's work.

Let the monkey row: Douglas dips into some 12/17 Marvels

THOR GOD-SIZE SPECIAL #1 is a very pretty-looking comic, and I don't mind paying the $4 Marvel toll, even for a series I don't normally read, to get a 38-page Matt Fraction story plus a Walt Simonson reprint. (A 22-page story, on the other hand... well, I suspect I won't be buying certain titles much longer.) It's a Fraction riff on a particularly charged scene from 1985's THOR #362, which is the backup reprint, and it's got fancy high-gloss artwork from Dan Brereton, Doug Braithwaite and the previously-unknown-to-me Miguelángel Sepulveda, as well as Mike and Laura Allred doing their Allred thing. But only the Allreds' section looks anywhere near as interesting as the splintery power and scenery-chewing grandeur of the 23-year-old Simonson artwork; the other three artists are pretty much channeling a "painterly" look that I associate with the sub-Frazetta cover artwork of third-rate fantasy paperbacks from the '70s. And after I re-read the Simonson story, it started to bug me even more that Fraction's story was getting basically all its juice from nostalgia for a sequence that Simonson did perfectly well in six pages. EH, overall.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #20: Bendis's one-incident-per-issue schema for the Avengers tie-ins to Secret Invasion had its moments, but it ended up leaving a lot to be desired. This issue could have fleshed out the ending of SI, or set up something with Nick Fury's team of larvae that didn't end up doing much in SI proper, or given some kind of dramatic closure to the "government-affiliated Avengers team" concept that this series barely even touched under Bendis despite that being its ostensible premise, or clarified the multiple-stranded flashback structure of Bendis's SI material (within the story, rather than in Tom Brevoort's blog), or... anything. Instead, what happens? Hank berates Tony at Janet's funeral. That's it--and the five straight pages of clip-reel "remember our last few Big Event Comics?" in the middle are particularly maddening. AWFUL.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #8: This, on the other hand is GOOD Fraction and a good setup for Dark Reign, even though my suspension cable snapped instantly at Dark Reign's premise. The obligatory action scene isn't much to speak of (Tony lifts a heavy thing! It doesn't go well!), but Fraction packs a lot of other lively stuff in there--a nice character sketch of Maria Hill, a heavily freighted moment between Tony and Pepper, Tony and Maria snark-flirting, Tony and Norman Osborn playing Number Six and New Number Two, and the setup of a credible conflict to drive the new storyline, accompanied by the eating of Chinese takeout. It snaps right along. I'm still not totally sold on Salvador Larroca's artwork--a little photo-ref, a little CGI-type near-reality, a little more photo-ref--but I'm getting used to it as the look of this series.

Back to Hell on 12/17: Jog shouldn't have sworn an oath with his final breath

Hellblazer #250

(art and color by Rafael Grampá & Marcus Penna; there's also captions in the actual comic)

John Constantine, how long has it been? Just over 20 years since this thing started up? Almost 25 since The Saga of the Swamp Thing? That's a lot of Silk Cuts, a lot of magic. A lot of politics - there was once a whole goddamned issue (#3) on the Conservative election victory of 1987. But there's some enduring character to this Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette & John Totleben creation too; I often wind up thinking of Eddie Campbell's parody version in Bacchus, who had the poor barmaid climb all the way to the top shelf, only to make her climb back down bottom to fetch the same label. "It's 'cos I'm a vicious bastard, ennit." Soon thereafter he burned his own head off lighting a smoke, fortuitously before his lawyer could arrive.

Campbell wrote a handful of proper Hellblazer comics too (#85-88), and he's now returned for this 48-page, $3.99 anniversary special. So has the artist from his run, Sean Phillips (now of Criminal and others). So has the fellow who wrote the 1987 election episode, Jamie Delano. It's not often you see an old-and-new-faces 'landmark' issue for a series like this; it's really a superhero thing. Often a tedious, self-congratulatory superhero thing at that. But just as Hellblazer started out as something among the superheroes, yet different, its #250 uses its commemorative status as a means of exploring different aspects of John Constantine, whose many adventures have indeed seen various sides of him emphasized.

The results aren't all good, but it makes for a decently-paced package. I'd have liked to see a far stronger opening story, though; aside from writer Dave Gibbons' amusing decision to cast the piece as a sequel to his last Constantine tale, an illustrated prose story from nine years ago (in Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3), there's almost nothing that seems particularly attuned to the strength of Hellblazer. It's just John Constantine chasing after a bad guy who's stolen a magical sharp thing to slaughter a baby and become immortal.

And sure, Constantine interrupts some rich people having a party, and he saves the day by kicking someone in the balls and a pretty girl shows up and a cork pops off a champagne bottle in a suggestive manner in the final panel, but that's all fairly generic low-down supernatural action hero stuff; it does work for Hellblazer -- it's not inappropriate -- but it doesn't offer anything striking for the curious reader, save for the visuals of the aforementioned Sean Phillips (with frequent colorist Val Staples). Those are as crisply-laid and glowingly dingy as ever, although I wonder that large, distracting white space on his first page was supposed to hold the credits at some point.

A better two-fisted Constantine story is later in the issue, from veteran writer Brian Azzarello and Rafael Grampá (he of Mesmo Delivery), one of the better two-fisted action artists to get attention lately. That's one of Grampá's panels up top (printed noticeably darker on the page, mind you), and I think it nicely summarizes his utterly gleeful approach to the project, loading his pages with nimbly caricatured faces and funny details, even as handles the moment-by-moment of Azzarello's barfight-with-a-demon scenario with fine precision. Even the coloring (from Mesmo cohort Marcus Penna) comes off as a very broad take on the stereotypical Vertigo palette, all rusty and muddy browns and blood soaking into white and grey.

It mixes nicely with Azzarello's script, actually a poem presented via captions, chronicling Constantine's trip to Chicago to lift the Curse of the Billy Goat from the Cubs. Of course, Our Man can easily summon a demon, but it's up to the people to eventually take responsibility for their own shortcomings, so "our battered dreams and hope" might bloom better in the spring. Feel free to look for metaphors where applicable!

(art & color by David Lloyd)

Other stories are quieter. Jamie Delano & David Lloyd (of The Horrorist) offer Constantine the Observer, divining the sad histories of combatants in a holiday poker match. An element of human exploitation is present, as it often is with Delano, but he remains as sure in the compassion of regret as Lloyd is with his effortlessly lovely art, the present lit as if from a maze of roaring, off-panel fireplaces, and the sad past getting more icy and blue as things slide closer to hell.

Meanwhile, debuting series writer Peter Milligan has Constantine encounter ghosts and politics in a low-key investigation that ties a personal haunting to Our Man's own troubled past, if not in a melodramatic way or anything. It seems abrupt at only six pages, wherein the stewing emotions of the piece's focus don't have a lot of time to cook. Campbell provides the visuals here, and while he draws a wonderfully aged and worn and tired Constantine, his work doesn't gel much with Dominic Regan's shiny digital colors, which add a distracting sort of body to Campbell's characters, trampling whole sequences with gloss. Oddly, two of Campbell's panels are presented beneath the book's table of contents in a black, white and blue style, which I thought was more effective.

But then, Jamie Grant (of All Star Superman) is also a very shiny colorist, and his work mixes better with Giuseppe Camuncoli (breakdowns) & Stefano Landini (finishes) in the book's fifth and final story, maybe because the duo have a rounder, sleek style going - their Constantine carries a whiff of manga along with the tobacco. Prose novelist China Miéville seemed like a good fit to write the material when announced, and he proves to be as adept as expected with a vivid, funny social justice adventure, playing up the series' tendency to mix social ills with droll supernatural society. Hell, he even pulls out the demonic yuppie, hell-as-corporation idea born in the '87 election issue - this really is a journey through the years!

It's the last thing in the book, and probably the most broadly entertaining. A company spits poison dust into the streets, where children play. Their work is literally evil -- as in, they're trying to manufacture it -- and Constantine is retained by demons pissed that perdition's exclusivity is in danger. Phantoms rise and angels act in less than beatific ways. John Constantine, ahead of them all, urges tomorrow's adults to wage supernatural war on the sins of salt mines and cocaine plants. Not a bad way to leave him after a GOOD enough party; he might be making crazy wishes, but reaching issue #250 seems a little crazy on its own, yet here we are.

Not Comics: Jeff Checks Out Punisher: War Zone

[Warning: I intend to spoil plot points from the movie Punisher: War Zone--to the extent anyone can spoil anything in a movie called Punisher: War Zone; also, technically it's misleading to call them 'plot points' since that suggests Punisher: War Zone has what one could call a 'plot,' so really I guess I should be warning you I intend on spoiling 'events' from the movie Punisher: War Zone--so if you really do intend on seeing the movie stop reading and go catch it now because it won't be in theaters more than two weeks, tops.]

I saw Punisher: War Zone the other day with my pal Robson and two friends we helped sneak in to the theater, Asahi Super Dry and Sapporo Premium. Possibly due to keeping such fine company, I enjoyed the movie as bad-but-entertaining, the type of flick that keeps the gunfire and gore abundant (reminding me of last year's grindhousey Rambo flick which was also bad-but-entertaining), and is clever enough to introduce a gang of parkour-using scumbags solely so one of them can be blown apart by a rocket launcher in mid-roof-to-roof somersault.

Ray Stephenson from Rome is Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, and Dominic West from The Wire is Jigsaw, a.k.a. Billy Russoti; and I confess I found their presences a little distressing, as if this flick was commissioned by another premium movie channel for the express intention of subliminally soiling HBO's reputation. In fact, although I suspect it's unintentional, Punisher: War Zone also made me think of The Sopranos: not only does West seem to be doing the longest Paulie Walnuts imitation ever committed to celluloid, but at about two-thirds mark, the horror gore, the crime cliches, and the very big can of beer I was drinking convinced me that Cleaver, the terrible movie made by Christopher Moltisanti in the final season of The Sopranos, would've been more than a little like P:WZ. In the context of the movie, West's performance works, and while I think Stephenson plays The Punisher as a sad guy who gets very, very angry when it should really be the other way around, I thought he was fine.

In fact, I feel like I had more faith in his acting than the filmmakers: although the Punisher works best as a stoic character, he says far too little in this film, and a lot of it variations on "I'm sorry," since part of the story's hook is that Frank, in taking out a gang near the beginning of the film, kills an undercover fed, tries to make it up to the surviving family (Stephanie Janusauskas, as the young daughter and Julie Benz, with her patented post-Angel gamut of angry defiant weepiness, weepy angry defiance, or defiant weepy anger, depending on what the situation calls for, as the widow), and then swears to quit being the Punisher--an idea the film takes seriously for little more than forty-five seconds. Sadly, there's next-to-nothing like the bit in the trailer where Stephenson says, "Sometimes, I think I'd like to get my hands on God," with muted anger and grief and conviction. I don't know if it's just because the filmmakers didn't have much faith in Stephenson's accent (which does indeed slide all over the place in some of his longer line readings) or couldn't be assed to cherry-pick Castle's better lines from Garth Ennis' run, but it renders this incarnation of The Punisher little more than a glum cipher.

(And as long as I've got my bitch on, I'm still baffled why every film incarnation of The Punisher insists that the character have the darkest hair possible--as if that's the character's superpower, or main visual motif--but it does Stephenson few favors: he looks very much like the older, grizzled vet Ennis' Max run makes him out to be until you notice the Reagan-colored hair on his head and then he seems silly and vain.)

But to return to my main point, which is one of general praise: rocket-launcher meets parkour jerk. Shotgun to a guy in a chair. Room of waiting bad guys introduced to a grenade launcher. A "one lives, one dies" choice where one does, in fact, die. Excellent lighting on a scene-to-scene basis, even if it doesn't hold together throughout the film. Proof of human cloning, as Doug Hutchison is a tiny, tiny replica of Frederic Forrest apparently grown from fingernail and hair clippings. Multiple beheadings. The woman behind me and Robson who laughed at every single line in the movie and also yelled helpful advice to the screen like, "Kill him!" Machine-gun pistols. Enthusiastic audio mixing, particularly when broken bones or snapped tendons are involved. The occasional Garth Ennis line. Mark Camacho, the poor man's Paul Giamatti. The scenes between Frank and the daughter.

Overall, Punisher: War Zone is executed with such craft and devotion to clearing the very low bar set for it that I can understand why Robson mistook it for a good movie, rather than a very good bad movie: it's easy enough to overlook that the movie throws in a plethora of characters to distract from the movie's go-nowhere story and lack of character arcs for all involved, that it sets up situations that make no sense even by its own logic, that it can't quite shake the tone of exhaustion from the silly stuff, and the sense of silliness from the world-weary stuff. The movie is all blown-up with nowhere to go.

Financial failure notwithstanding, Punisher: War Zone is more likely than not a snapshot of the current state of the American Action Movie, the production equivalent of Disney's It's A Small World: directed by a German, produced by an Israeli, starring three guys from the United Kingdom, and crewed by apparently the entire French-Canadian population of Quebec and Montreal. While not that a good Punisher movie--again, considering all the material Ennis has put into print about the character, it's shocking how truly far away from that goal the movie is--based on the weekend box office, Punisher: War Zone is probably going to be about as good as we're ever going to get. I give it an enthusiastic OKAY, particularly if you've got some beers in you and are looking for entertaining junk.

I don't know how to title this one!

I meant to say something last week (ugh, or was it two weeks now) when Spurgeon linked to Johanna's (we miss you!) note about the pending release of the last color BONE volume.

I volunteer at Ben's school library one day a week (what can I say... I believe in libraries!), and, man, do the comics circulate like crazy! I'm only in there one day a week, but based on looking at the shelves I think it is true for every day in there -- the comics circulate the INSTANT they get put back out on the shelves.

My responsibilities include checking in each classes books, as well as checking the kids out each week (basically, it's just retail, but it is free -- using POS to scan stuff in and out, the whole thing), and I quickly learned that the first thing I should do when I'm done checking everything in is to shelf the 741.5's. That's the Dewey Decimal System code for graphic novels. Virtually everything I shelve while the librarian is reading to the kids gets checked back out during the same shift. It is insane!

The King of 741.5? Jeff Smith's BONE.

Those always always always go back out the moment they come in (not even counting the Hold requests) -- even when the kids have to read them OUT OF ORDER, they freaking fly off the shelf. Our library has two full sets, and the Librarian is getting at least a third one in because they circulate so fast.

The only other books (at least during my shift) that circulate as fast are the Lemony Snickett "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books.. but even those aren't quite (to my eye) as consistent -- usually you can find 3 or 4 of the 13 volumes on the shelves (they also have two sets of those... I think)

I suspect that this couldn't have happened without Scholastic (as much as it pains the self-publishing lover in me), and it could not possibly have happened to a nicer guy. Jeff Smith is a sweetheart among sweethearts, and he deserves every single copy sold.

Obviously, this is just a snapshot of ONE Elementary school library, and ONE shift of that library, at that, but it is an awesome awesome thing to encounter every week, hopefully saying really good things about 21st century comics literacy and the future of the comics readership.

I love volunteering at school in general: watching the ASTONISHING gains the kids have made just blows my tiny little mind every time I think about it. It's been... 14 weeks, is that right? since Ben started Kindergarten. When he started he knew his ABC by sight, and he was pretty decent with the phonic sounds of the letters. He could JUST write his name (though oddly spaced, and nearly always with backwards "N"), but that was it.

Now he's writing (simple) sentences ("I see my _____"), and the characters are pretty correctly spaced and sized and facing. He can sound out a word and basically spell things about right.

What I find fascinating is that what we're meant to teach them isn't really how to do things exactly correctly, but for them to have the tools to do those things for themselves. In other words, my instinct when Ben asks "how do I spell...."? is to tell him how to spell it. "'Witch' is spelled 'W. I. T. C. H.', pal." But sitting in class one day a week, I've realized that what you do is actually turn it around. "How DO you spell that? What's the sound of the first letter?" "It is 'wuh', Daddy." "Right, so what is that?" "Uh...W?" "Exactly, you little rocket scientist! Good job!"

To the point where even if they're not spelling a word correctly (A "cuh" sound could be either a "K" OR a "C"), the important thing at this stage isn't that they're spelling it right or wrong (they're only five and six!), but that they're developing the tools to FIGURE OUT how to spell it. The actual spelling correctly part comes later -- confidence is the skill to install right now.

As far as I can tell, nearly EVERY kid in the class is making AMAZING progress... and thanks to their awesome awesome teacher, they're ENJOYING making that progress. Schoolwork isn't "work", it is FUN, which is EXACTLY the kind of attitude that I was hoping school would inculcate.

We feel hugely lucky that we got the Kinder teacher we got at the public school that we got -- for security sake I'm not going to really broadcast those details -- because we really won the lottery for the type of school environment we were hoping for where learning is something that not only every child sees has value, but that they encourage in one another as peers. I (naturally) think my kid is pretty inherently smart, but to have an environment that really works at encouraging that is something we weren't sure we were going to get from public school.

And it makes it even that much more exciting to volunteer into that kind of environment where you can help OTHER people's kids make the same kinds of leaps, too!

Kids WANT to learn, really. It's pretty awesome to watch them do so, so well.

******

A comic review? Sure why not...

SECRET INVASION #8: I'm not so bugged by the What of this, as I am of the How. I mean, no matter what, you've got to give the Marvel universe some props for changing up the status quo every few years, and doing so in FAIRLY organic ways. By this I mean, by and large, the things that have changed have largely flowed from character, rather than being imposed from above. Sure there's been a few mis-steps (most of them involving Spidey), but overall, the generalities of the Marvel U have been reasonably logical and satisfying.

YMMV, naturally.

While I might dun Secret Invasion for misreading the post-'08 Election environment (the ending feels a lot more suited for a McCain/Palin administration), you have to give it points for setting up what will POTENTIALLY be a story-rich new Status Quo. That doesn't mean that writers WILL be able to draw that potential out... but it is there.

But I'm more convinced than ever that Bendis just shouldn't be writing this kind of a story -- he's just not very good at it.

As a conclusion, SI #8 is marred off the bat by its structure: you WANT to see the Big Fight Scene at the end. We've had seven previous issues that were basically nothing than unimportant fights, and when we finally get to the Title Bout (as it were), Bendis decided that it's best to mostly cut away from it, or to handle it perfunctorily and via narration (!)

It opens with a completely pointless death -- one that isn't really relevant to the 150-ish pages that proceed it -- and one that can be retconned faster than Bendis drops to talking heads: Thor just sent her someplace that she'll end up getting saved. She'll be back faster than Mockingbird was, bet on it.

But even if it wasn't so trivially reversed, what sucks the most about it is that it was a punk death, where none of the characters involved were even remotely heroic. I have no problem with death (or even "death") in comics, but I do very much want for it to invoke heroism and sacrifice for the greater good. If the character who died did so by stopping the Skrull doppelganger she was most associated with by using a weapon based upon their technology, that might be one thing, but instead the character died from plothammer and fiat, where it wasn't even explained WHAT was happening, or really how it was resolved. Yuck, that's just awful storytelling, lacking any thematic resonance, IMO.

I also have to say that one of the few genuinely human relationships in recent comics has been Luke & Jessica's. I truly like those characters as "people", so for us to have a "The Dingos ate mah baby!" scene... and without ANY payoff; and with that being on top of what now appears to be a complete red herring of that "glowing eyes" thing... well, most of my goodwill is just utterly pissed away.

I'm also upset that the well-toted idea that the Skrulls had this religion, and that this was actually meaningful from a story perspective, and to have it all basically come to nothing in the end... sheer anti-climax. They had a real opportunity to make the Skrull newly significant in the Marvel U, and it all feels pissed away to me.

As for the "Illumi-naughty", I really am not buying it. Oh, it's a clever enough conceit, but not those characters in that way. I mean, really, do you think Doom and Namor and Loki are going to give 10 seconds consideration to Mr. Crazier-than-a-shit-sandwich, and the jumped up thug? Really? Emma doesn't make any sense to me either, in the post-San Francisco world. Gah, plus that coloring -- I thought Namor was a Skrull, at first...

So, yeah, I didn't like this as a comic. It was pretty stupendously EH, and your Big Finish to your Big Event needs to be a lot more than that.

What did YOU think?

-B

Nothing is More Dangerous Than a Comics Artist: Jog knew the truth on 12/4

Criminal Vol. 2 #7

And so another tale from Ed Brubaker (writin'), Sean Phillips (drawin') & Val Staples (colorin') crashes to its close, as does another run of Criminal itself. It's going on hiatus until May 2009 or so, while the team works on the creator-owned supervillain-in-witness-protection series Incognito, although it won't relaunch or anything once it's back (so, next issue will be vol. 2 #8). In case you're getting tripped up by the pamphlets/trades numbering, vol. 1 of the Criminal pamphlet series covered the first two trade paperbacks (Coward and Lawless), while the newish The Dead and the Dying trade hits issues #1-3 of the second pamphlet series.

I like the pamphlets, myself; if you're gonna charge $3.50, it helps to be 36 pages, ad-free and stocked with little bonus essays on the crime genre, on top of being rather nicely designed. These things look nice sitting around in a pile, which is usually how I've got them arranged, since I rarely read them as they come out. I guess that's a little irony there - a series I like having as individual comic books that I wind up reading in big, 'collected' chunks anyway.

But that's how I've found they work best, now that we're up to the fourth storyline - it's all structured nicely enough as chapters, but the real big impact demands at least an all-at-once re-read, and even then maybe a quick skim of past storylines, since Brubaker isn't even limiting himself to individual trades. No, this is a huge, sprawling intergenerational saga at heart, with the big, beating theme of family -- both a driving force and a font of poison -- keeping steady time from its center.

Anyway, this issue ends the sad saga of Jacob Kurtz, that very troubled author of the series' surreal daily newpaper detective comic, Frank Kafka, P.I. The strip first popped up in issue #1 of vol. 1, so little connections have been present for a while - Jacob is a former counterfeiter, and old friends with Tracy Lawless (of Lawless), whose thoroughly awful father (of The Dead and the Dying) used to pal around with Jacob's own dad.

Jacob also used to be married to the niece of local syndicate head Sebastian Hyde, which got him into all sorts of trouble after the woman vanished without a trace, and Jacob got branded her murderer by the law and the media. He was abused by the police and crippled by Hyde's men, although after his wife's body was found and the death deemed an accident the boss did offer Jacob a lifetime job drawing his Frank Kafka comic, thus evoking the old tale of Krazy Kat's endurance at the behest of William Randolph Hearst, except with severe beatings. Drawing comics is hard, as the insomniac Jacob knows, but he's pretty close to his character, by which I mean he literally sees him standing around and urging him to take tough-guy action when he really shouldn't.

Laying it out this way makes it seem obvious that Jacob, also the story's narrator, might not have the most trustworthy point of view. The beauty of this storyline is that Brubaker has let this implication lay low, allowing his story to proceed for much of its length like a typical Criminal storyline -- it involves a forged FBI badge, a heap of Chinese triad money, a femme fatale, her boorish thug boyfriend and a police detective who still can't let go of Jacob's presumed guilt, particularly since the artist has been totally busting his balls in his comic -- then suddenly kicking the whole thing into a mess of subjectivity that not only messes with the plot but gently pokes at the kind of plots this comic has been working with so far.

This issue's the one that kicks, and it puts some weight behind it. Even the structure of the storyline gets knocked around, as Brubaker basically stops the plot at two points to back up and present scenes from the point of view of the detective and the femme fatale, with an omniscient narrator suddenly provided to free them from Jacob's skewed perspective. In less assured hands it could have come off as a clanking mechanism for filling out the backstory, but Brubaker seizes the opportunity to present these characters as slightly more complicated than the simple archetypes Jacob (who hears the voice of a fictional noir detective in his head, remember) has fit them into via the plot that is his life. Too much time alone drawing crime funnies, I think!

Eventually the truth is revealed, and earlier sequences take on new connotations. The comic drifts a little over the top. Criminal does that sometimes, but while Coward launched itself into guns-blazing one man army nonsense, to its detriment, Bad Night is strippers-in-the-mental-ward good, a real nightmare party of ruinous perception, with a nice crack-up scene and the best atmosphere of doom the series has yet managed. I'm not mentioning much about Phillips & Staples here, since they're mostly working from the same level of quality as before (although Jacob's tortured body language deserves note), but be assured that they compliment Brubaker's writing as nicely as expected.

I'm glad I read this all in one shot; it's even worth reading again after that, since there's a subtlety to Brubaker's characterizations that only comes out once everyone's motives and desires are at hand. This bolsters the story's affirmation of its primary cast as error-prone people, longing for affection (since the 'family' here is most emphatically that of romantic partners) or pursuing a kind of virtue, if generally in the worst ways. It also empowers the onrushing horror of the tale's conclusion, with one person demanding emotional truths from another, and the reader getting the sinking impression that there's no way of knowing what's authentic anymore, not in a story told like this, and just when it's most important. VERY GOOD.

I'M FINISHED! Abhay Is Never Going to Write about SECRET INVASION Ever Again After #8.

So, with the eighth and final issue of SECRET INVASION now in hand, we’ve come finally to my favorite part. Not the ending of SECRET INVASION. The endings of crossovers are always lousy. The end of CIVIL WAR? Terrible ending. WORLD WAR HULK— I have no memory whatsoever of how that ended, and that’s a series I liked. INFINITE CRISIS— I still don't understand the end of that series. RETURN OF THE JEDI— the Jedi wake up next to Bob Newhart from the THE BOB NEWHART SHOW...?

No, my favorite part is spoiler-dodgin'.

Marvel asks readers for, what, $32 (if not far more) for a crossover, by repeatedly promising them an ending that changes things… forever. But if you give them your money, they do everything in their power to spoil the ending of the story for you. So then the fun part is: will you get any shred of your money’s worth or will they manage to spoil every single possible thing for you before that happens?

Certain parts, there’s no avoiding. If you’re a comic fan, there was really no avoiding the fact this series ends with the “Dark Reign” starting. Which means— look: it more likely than not means the bad guys win in some fashion or another at the end of SECRET INVASION #8. But we don’t know the precise mechanism by which they win— well, except that it very heavily involves Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin. They spoiled that in THUNDERBOLTS back in November. But— okay— but the precise mechanism by which Norman Osborn is the conduit for evil winning? That’s kind-of sort-of still a mystery, right?

See, that’s the fun part. Marvel tries to spoil that, too! It’s only a mystery unless you read the New York Times. Because they put an article in the New York Times the day the issue was released, to make sure the ending got spoiled. The New York Times doesn’t cover just anything— Marvel had publicity personnel work very hard to have that story placed. Worked hard to have it placed on Wednesday, and not on a Thursday when none of us would be spoiled. After all: by Thursday, the nonsensical events transpiring in an imaginary universe to fake people would no longer be “breaking news.”

So really: the most suspenseful— strike that, the only suspenseful part of SECRET INVASION for me was this last week: Would all of #8 get spoiled or just most of it? Fun!

Let’s give Marvel some credit, though: Marvel’s only able to spoil the end of SECRET INVASION because they can understand it. DC would have loved to spoil the end of BATMAN RIP, but they’d have to understand what happened at the end. And as far as I can tell, nobody does. The issue after Batman is killed by Satan / his Father / some actor (?) / a helicopter that he punched too hard (!)(!)(!), he’s trapped in a machine by alien gods from the god dimension and forced to relive For the Man Who Has Everything outtakes.

What? What in the fuck? How do you conceivably spoil that?? DC has no idea! They don’t understand it anymore than anyone else.

***

Let’s just get this over with. I wish I could tell you I had anything big and elaborate planned for this final installment, but: I really just want this to be over. I just want this to be over. It’s my most sincere desire for this to be over. This? Over? Yes, please.

*************************************

The status quo prior to SECRET INVASION: a force for evil had infiltrated the very heart of the Marvel universe, and were threatening to bring down the Marvel heroes from the inside. Who can the Marvel heroes trust?

The status quo after SECRET INVASION: oh my god, guys! A force for evil has infiltrated the very heart of the Marvel universe! It’s threatening to bring down the Marvel heroes from the inside! Who can the Marvel heroes trust?

Just tell me who to hand my money to. $4 an issue in a deflationary economy? Sold! No Whammies No Whammies No Whammies!

***

The best line in this entire damn series belongs to Joe Quesada in his afterword: “The surprises in store lie in every corner of the Marvel Universe during DARK REIGN. Who are the DARK AVENGERS? … [H]ow far down can these villains actually get when given greater power? … How will Hank Pym deal with the loss of his beloved ex-wife?”

SECRET INVASION literally did not get more entertaining than that sentence during its entire run.

***

The first half of this comic is just…

The issue starts with the Wasp increasing in size, thereby causing black dots to erupt onto the other characters. The black dots cause pain. There’s a narrator during this scene, but even the narrator can’t come up with any explanation whatsoever as to what’s going on in this scene. Then, we’re told “There was Only One Way to Stop It.” What was that one way? Seriously: I don’t know. What was that one way? Can anyone even understand what’s happening in this scene? I can’t. Did Thor kill her to save everyone else? That would have been a cool thing to happen— is that what happened? I can’t even make out what was happening.

Blah blah blah: so, the Wasp is dead. Which— at least something has finally happened in this series!! I'll take what I can get.

Then, Spider-Skrull-Woman-Queen wakes up from having been killed in the last issue, so that the greatest heroes in the Marvel universe can unite to kill her again. However, while last issue she was shot in the head by an arrow, this issue she’s shot in the head with a ray gun. The guy who shoots her with a ray gun is a hero to the entire world and gets a Cabinet-level position with the government, while the guy who shot her in the head with the arrow is promptly ignored by the public.

Kids thus learn a valuable lesson about heroism: nobody think it’s heroic to shoot a woman in the head with a bow & arrow; they only think it’s heroic to shoot a woman in the head with a ray gun. (This is all really incredibly bizarre material politically, and the only thing that makes me comfortable with this series is my deep and abiding belief that comic creators, publishers, and fans are so divorced from the real world around them that they literally have no clue that what they’re creating, publishing and/or reading is completely and totally batshit fucking crazy. I don’t even want to talk about it. No joke, it makes me genuinely uncomfortable.)

***

The rest of the issue? Nothing much happens. Last issue’s cliffhanger involving the Jarvis Skrull threatening a baby, like every cliffhanger in the series, leads absolutely nowhere. Didn't the Jarvis Skrull get exploded by Maria Hill in issue #5? Don't sweat the details.

Various characters come back from the dead, including my favorite character of the series— the LED lights from issue #1. Finally, Barack Obama (?) puts the Green Goblin in charge of the Government, and Dark Reign starts on the last double-page spread. "Dark Reign" is just a plain old Masters-of-Evil story. They JLA-ized the Masters of Evil. It's an idea, I guess— I'm not continuity-savvy enough to tell you whether it's been done to death before or not.

There are six Masters of Evil. I was able to identify four of them: Emma Frost, Doctor Doom, Norman Osborn, and Loki. There’s also Namor and the Hood who I didn’t recognize because they’re colored red for… some reason…?

***

So, the big game-changer, the big change in status quo for the Marvel Universe: before SECRET INVASION, there were eight incarnations of the Masters of Evil in the Marvel Universe, and now after SECRET INVASION, there are now nine incarnations.

Truly, the Marvel Universe will never be the same.

Kids today are lucky. In my day, we didn’t have nine incarnations of Masters of Evil. We could only fantasize what a ninth incarnation would look like, with only the prior eight incarnations and the North star to guide us. Kids today don’t know how good they have it.

***

Points to Leinil Yu and Mark Morales, though, for including Elvis on the Skrull ship, in the distant background. I'm an easy mark on a "Elvis isn't dead" joke.

Nice work on the series from those two— especially, on the double page spreads. Personally, I thought they nailed a whole heck a lot of those. We can say that they handled some moments better than others— e.g. I personally was never too taken by their outer space stuff. But like I tried to mention last time: they delivered a quality product on a timely basis. It’d be a damn foolish thing not to have some appreciation for that, in this day and age. Marvel fans should be hoisting these guys on their shoulders anytime they leave their house.

I gave it a sort of re-read. Skimming through the entire series beginning to end, issue 1 to issue 8. It only took about 5 minutes to skim through it.

Conclusions: It’ll be okay enough for trade readers, I suppose, who will pay less and not have to read the series over an 8 month period. Parts of the story won’t work at the trade level, either, though. Anything involving Captain Marvel and Marvel Boy should have been left to spin-offs as those parts went especially nowhere. The trade will work fine as a shallow character-free action comic.

I just don’t know how to judge that or what to make of it. Does it mean anything to you that the trade will be okay? It doesn’t endear me to the work any more that it succeeds at that level, but it’s at least worth acknowledging, I suppose.

I think the key issue has been the timing. For an 8-9 month event, each issue has been shallow and slow. If they could have found a way to squeeze all of this into 4 months, maybe this would have worked out pretty well despite all of its narrative problems. It’d have still been flawed, but the flaws would have come fast enough and often enough that the reader might have stopped caring. 8 months is just too damn long to live with this many flaws and this little substance, though. I guess sales have been good, and fans are happy, but to me... to me, 8 months is a very long time. I don't see how you can expect anyone to sustain their enthusiasm for 8 months. But I have commitment issues, maybe, so...

***

So: what are the “story possibilities” that the new Masters of Evil generate exactly?

Maybe I’m not understanding but isn’t it really just a question of when and how the Masters of Evil’s existence gets revealed? Once somebody goes “Hey, the Masters of Evil are in charge of everything,” isn’t the story over? Which- how long does it take for that to happen if two of the Masters of Evil are good guys? How evil can they get without Namor or Emma Frost stamping down on the brakes?

Or- I'm confused how much damage Norman Osborn is supposed to be able to do just because he runs ... whatever it is that he runs. Is Captain America going to start eating babies because Norman Osborn says so? Would Captain America eat a baby from the feet towards the head, or do you think he'd start from the baby head and eat towards the feet? If Norman Osborn made us all eat babies, I think most of us would eat from the feet towards the head because we'd want to put off realizing that we were eating a baby until the last possible moment. I know I certainly wouldn't start at the head, like some kind of fucking pervert. But Captain America? He fought in the War and probably ate all sorts of crazy stuff while he was wandering around World War 2 era Europe during the winter. I'm thinking Captain America would want to just get it over with because all the time spent playing with his food? Hey, brother, that's time that he could spend fighting for his country. I think he would start at the head and goes towards the feet, but in his case, not because he's some kind of weirdo, but because he's a fucking hero. (Bucky or Steve Rogers Cap; I don't think there would be any difference between the two when it comes to baby-eating).

It seems like they’re angling towards putting together an espionage/conspiracy thriller for the Marvel universe, some kind of "chess match"-y type thing. That could work, I suppose, but… I'm having a hard time seeing how they're not going to tread dangerously close to Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot territory every step of the way, based upon the characters they've chosen.

Am I misreading the situation? Is there any series that people are looking forward to coming out of this? Are people excited?

***

I am so happy this series is done. I am so happy this series is done. But look: it’s not completely the series’ fault. You’re not supposed to read series like how I read this one, with the essays or the hooplah or the thinking about it or the hoping it’d be any good or the expecting anything to happen—anything at all! I’m like the boyfriend who’s “suffocating.” Me and the Marvel Universe just need some space. A lot of space. So much space. The more space, the better.

What happens next for me? I’m going to clean up my apartment, wash my hair, and then get started writing reviews of the new issue of HUSTLER MAGAZINE. I’ve decided that from now on, I’m going to only write reviews of hard-core pornography magazines for this blog.

HOLY SHIT: LAST-MINUTE TWIST ENDING! Comics used to be a passion before SECRET INVASION, but as you can see that didn’t really work out. But luckily, I have a passion for vaginas.

Here’s a taste of what you can look forward to in 2009:

HUSTLER’S ASIAN FEVER #1: while the cover of ASIAN FEVER (NSFW) promises a “Penetrating Premiere Issue”, it turns out this is a gross overstatement. In terms of insight into either the topic of Asians or the topic of Fevers, very little is offered that would qualify as "penetrating." Why, I hate to say it but this magazine is barely even literate! Instead, Mr. Flynt seems to have intended “penetrating” to be a mere double entendre for sexual penetration involving an erect “penis.” Come on, Mr. Flynt: aren’t we a little old for that sort of low-brow humor? I wish ASIAN FEVER would expect more of its readers. On the other hand, boobies. Very good. THE SAVAGE CRITIC WEBSITE WILL NEVER, EVER, NEVER NEVER BE THE SAME, NEVER. Except it still won’t update very often. We’re sticking with that.

Here is the reason for the season: Jog on the Holiday Gifts of 12/4

Drop your cocks and grab your socks, irregardless of anatomy! I'm taking you on an old-fashioned sleigh ride through today's seasonal Marvel comics, just like Grandma used to do back in the '60s, when she posted comic book reviews on the internet via heroic doses of hallucinogenic substances. Those were some good comics, or good hallucinogenics.

Moon Knight: Silent Knight #1:

One thing I've gotta say: I do like that Laurence Campbell & Lee Loughridge art, and there's 32 pages of it in here (for $3.99, mind you), so that's something. They're also the current artist-colorist duo on The Punisher MAX, where some fun stuff is going on with heavy, angry blacks and hot & cold colors - there's a thing at the end of #63 where the Punisher is literally vanishing into a bush, just scraps of face and white skull, and it does an awful lot to bolster the mood for writer Gregg Hurwitz, who's mostly working from a stock 'Punisher agrees to help folk in need; encounters awful villain' scenario.

Their work isn't quite as vivid here, since the action is mainly kept to chilly city exteriors, but I appreciated how snowflakes are used as a sort of static, really aggravating the action into worse violence, and even giving peaceable scenes some visual overload. There's some kitchen interiors too, which Loughridge washes over with a sick green tone, which adds an extra queasiness to the rather plain 'superhero love interest is upset' caption monologue writer Peter Milligan has going.

Yes, Milligan! That's why I always read the solicitation copy for these one-shots - you never know who might pop up! Unfortunately, the best that can be said of this comic's writing is that it's sturdily adequate in its workmanlike approach. The story sees Moon Knight hunting killers for the holidays, with Khonshu (I think; I don't read the ongoing) acting as demonic comic relief a la Ryuk from Death Note (just the first example that pops to mind). It's pretty tough being a superhero -- innocents die because Moon Knight just wasn't fast enough -- but it's also a bother being a superhero's longtime lover, as a subplot with Marlene indicates from its lack of shared turkey and wine.

A tiny little beam of light shines through on occasion, like a fantasy panel with a monster leaping out of Marc Spector's skin, or Khonshu commenting on the racial dynamics of Moon Knight's hunt. But this is mostly dead-typical costumed angst, with no more compelling narrative drive than its lust to remind us how being a Marvel superhero is the apparently the most difficult thing ever, and really bad when it's a holiday. And while those visuals make it crueler than usual, in a good way, they're not the type to overcome a story like this on their own merits. 'Tis the greatest EH of all.

The Punisher MAX X-Mas Special #1:

This, on the other hand, climaxes with a blood-drenched shootout in a manger at the birth of a boy, so it pretty much has the contest won right there.

I might have expected that. The writer's Jason Aaron, who's proven to be pretty good at these one-off issues (this one's 34 pages of story for your $3.99), and here he strives to present an extra-special Christmas wonder: the beloved story of the birth of the Christ, as a Frank Castle adventure in mob slaughter.

Really! A dreaded boss sends a horde of gun-toting thugs into a hospital to shoot every baby in the nursery to death with large automatic weapons (one guy's pretty unsure about the whole thing!), but they miss the also-evil Mary and Joseph characters from a rival gang. There's little the Punisher can do to miss a good birth (cue 'Nam flashback!), so he winds up protecting the trio from three kings of the East... kings of murder, that is!! There's even a street thug named Shepherd who wants to find the baby for the purposes of ransom. He and a cohort:

"You know how much smack a million dollars would buy?"

"A lot, I bet."

Anyway, the Punisher kills the bad people for the baby's sake, because there's nothing good around save for the fragility of innocence; the only savior around him is potential, and even that counts as a holiday miracle.

The focus isn't quite on all that, however - Aaron is more interested in having a wise man enter the nativity scene with a blazing gun, only to get kicked in the head by a nearby animal. It's all deeply silly -- almost proud in how obvious it all is -- and probably would collapse into rubbish with an even slightly more ponderous approach (or something more blatantly slapsticky, in the Garth Ennis Marvel Knights manner), but the right aesthetic of total scriptural irreverence and nonstop movement is thankfully struck.

I haven't seen artist Roland Boschi's work with Aaron on Ghost Rider, but I like how Daniel Brown is coloring him in a very similar manner to Goran Parlov's work (especially on similarly comedic The Punisher Presents: Barracuda), almost as a form of visual continuity. If I'm gonna compare, Boschi isn't as strong an artist - there's a strange distortion to some of his character work, like faces are bending a little, which I find more distracting than evocative. But he serves up the gory enthusiasm with just enough of a straight face to keep the script on the level, which is most crucial. GOOD all around.

It is 2006 again! (or maybe 1993)

Something reasonably rare happened this week: SUPERMAN, BATMAN, and WONDER WOMAN all shipped in the same week.

SUPERMAN #682: I'm just not feeling this "New Krypton" storyline -- maybe because I agree with the idea that Superman works better when he's the "Last Son of Krypton". I can just barely accept Supergirl, too, but when there are Kryptonians everywhere (including, we're told, new versions of Superwoman, and Nightwing & Flamebird; not to mention Zod, etc.) I start not to care.

Superman is a hard guy to write, I get that, and not everyone is suited to him. I really like James Robinson as a writer, but Superman doesn't play to what I would consider his strengths as a writer (same with Greg Rucka, of the newly announced Superman-less ACTION)

There's nothing at all wrong with any of this -- in fact the story as presented is fairly solid. The Kryptonians decide to "clean up" Superman's problems, which leads to more strife, fair enough -- but I just don't have any affection for Kandor or Kandorians, except in some abstract pathos-driven view ("Oh, how sad they're trapped in a bottle, as one of Kal's greatest failures") -- one that put the "man" in "Superman", look HE can fail, too. I also like Kandor as a silver-agey plot device, as a way to show that Superman is still heroic, even without his "super" bits. But those are both based on KAL, not on Kandor itself, of any of its specific inhabitants.

This is somewhat similar to my Problems With Atlantis, if you think about it.

Like I said, the issue itself is competent -- I'd give it a high OK -- but at the end of the day I don't like the setup, and all I'm thinking is "how fast can we get them back in that bottle"?

Sounds like that ISN'T happening, however -- we're told that Kal goes off into space, and he won't be seen on Earth for some period of time. In fact, he's losing the starring berth in the title that started it all: ACTION. I just don't see how that's going to lead to compelling stories, in and of itself. I'm old enough to recall the last time he set off to space for an extended period, and thinking "Man, when is he going to get back to Earth?" in every issue.

WONDER WOMAN #26: This is probably going to be a bit unfair, but my first thought upon finishing this was "Women in Refrigerators!" -- the helpless civilians all sadistically slaughtered are all women, and we end up with Diana hung looking crucified. Ew.

There's some potentially interesting other stuff here, with the Old Gods returning (From where? And what the HELL are they wearing?!?!), and sounding like they're going to quit, which is presumably how we'll get the "manazons" we've been told about, which will lead to, we assume, the Wonder Not-Woman who will be "Olympian"?

We'll see how this all plays out, but I did think this comic was unnecessarily cruel, and not really focused on anything that I much like about Wonder Woman. OK.

BATMAN #681: I don't think the world needs another BATMAN #681 review, really, so let me just note that I felt like all of the reveals were undercut pretty much right away. Is he Thomas Wayne? The dialogue immediately afterwards would seem to indicate not. Did Bruce blow up in that helicopter? Considering the entire issue repeats again and again that Batman is the master of the contingency plan, let's call that one "unlikely".

Fuck, the local news, I guess having read it on Drudge, called me Friday night and wanted to shoot a story in the store. I'm not one to turn down free publicity, but I felt really awful on this one -- I don't want a bunch of civies coming in thinking this is Batman's "death" like they descended for Cap's. I said something like "It's more of a psychological death, than a physical one", but there I am on the channel 5 news report anyway. Ha!

Plus, since Morrison has directly said that this takes place before FINAL CRISIS, it would seem safe to assume that he DIDN'T "die", as such. Making both "what next?" and "why?!?!" to be extremely confusing questions for this reader.

I thought the issue itself was (again) competent, and things were certainly clearer on a single read-through than the earlier chapters, so, again, OK.

This week also brought us TRINITY #26, the half-way point of the series, a series we were told was ABOUT the "Big Three", but has since become about them NOT being around. Week-to-week, I'm enjoying it decently as a tale, but it doesn't feel like what it was billed at, and, beleive it or not, we're actually selling fewer copies than we were of COUNTDOWN at this same point. It, too, is OK.

I was reading some interview or feature in the last few weeks where someone, maybe Didio, maybe Johns, maybe Giffen said something along the lines of "The DC universe works if Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are working"

On the face of that, I'm not really certain that statement is true, but let's pretend that it is, without objection.

My question is: ARE they "working"? I, for one, really don't think so. In fact, what I see is playing a VERY familiar hand out over again.

Cast your mind back to the dark distant days of 2006. In those dim and hazy days, DC declared there would be a weekly mini-series exploring a year in the DCU, without Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman. While we didn't SEE most of that missing year for those three, the idea was the characters weren't the characters.

Right now, of course, we have a weekly mini-series that is showing the world as it would have been without Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman. There will be a "battle for Batman's cowl", Wonder Woman is going to be "replaced by manazons", and Superman is no longer unique, and is going off into space to not star in his own books.

Does current DC management only have ONE idea for how to make this all work?

And of course, this is all echoes of 1993 when Superman was dead and replaced by a bunch of like-a-looks, there was a battle for Batman's cowl, and Bat-rael took over and (well, a little later in 1994) Wonder Woman was replaced by the darker more vicious Artemis. Only real difference is they didn't have weekly comic books back then...

DC is in deep deep kimshee right now. Our BATMAN sales have dropped precipitously, and, trust me, Tony Daniel isn't going to bring them back. ACTION spiked up for Johns/Frank, but that never played into SUPERMAN, and that's all going to piss itself away right now, and WONDER WOMAN is back into decline again. Meanwhile anything b-list on the schedule is dying fast, and c-list stuff like REIGN IN HELL or RANN/THANAGAR WAR has dropped to, and I'm not kidding, where I'm now lucky to be selling a SINGLE not-preordered rack copy.

This is comics, and in comics reinvention is King, and every month a new issue comes out again that holds the potential to erase every sour thought... but DC needs to do something serious, and something fast because they're headed in absolutely the wrong direction right now.

What do YOU think?

-B

Speaking of Turkeys, Here's Abhay's FOURTH Blue Beetle Essay.

I. Starting in April 2008, the SAVAGE CRITIC website began to bring you a five-part series on the cancellation of BLUE BEETLE. It “technically” hadn’t “happened” yet. “Technically”, BLUE BEETLE was only canceled on November 12th, but...

It wasn't exactly difficult to predict.

And suddenly, last week: our little corner of the internet spasmed. Suddenly: I’m not alone. All sorts of people were asking themselves: “Why didn’t BLUE BEETLE succeed?” And their answers involved things being shoved into asses! I’m not alone, universe! I’m not alone!

So... This one’s going to be extra ramble-y. Sorry.

II.

Before the blog post which received some attention last week, the book’s author, John Rogers posted an earlier statement to his (actually, otherwise quite entertaining) blog, a sort of recap of his intent as the writer of BLUE BEETLE:

We wanted to establish a new superhero for younger readers, and add a different viewpoint to the DCU. Something you could give your 12 year old nephew to read without first forcing him to complete a degree in DC Continuity. A lot of people hated us, then some of them liked us, and then some of them loved us ... while a lot of people still hated us. Those people can go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers.

Let’s begin by seeing if we should go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers. Let’s pound out a single issue of the series, issue #16 of the BLUE BEETLE series. Just so we’re all on the same page as to what it was exactly that got cancelled.

Issue #16 is very near the end of the series (if not the technical final issue of publication). The series’ story concludes in issue 25; it just kept getting published past that point.

So: a rock crawled up young Jamie Reyes’s ass and turned him into the Blue Beetle. In issue #13, Blue Beetle learns that the rock was a device from an alien empire named The Reach. At first, the Reach pretend to be “good guys”, but the book abandons this idea within that issue and reveals that they’re evil immediately, rather than create or maintain any sort of suspense. However, the rest of the world is unaware that the Reach is evil, as the Reach has approached the governments of Earth promising aid & assistance.

A reader might expect this to be a source of tension & conflict in future issues. Nope, not at all: that reader should go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers! Aliens invading Earth-- what’s the logical next thing to happen?

Eclipso opens us up. To the wonders of interpretive dance. FAME, I’M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER-- LIGHT UP THE SKY WITH MY NAME-- FAME! So, for the 12 year old nephews: who is Eclipso?

Dear Joss Whedon, Please go back in time and prevent your own existence, perhaps by seducing your own mother at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Very truly yours, Me After Having Read BLUE BEETLE. P.s. Would Willow make out with me even though she turned all gay at the end? I hope so. XOXOXO.

Say: Who’s that talking and explaining all of this? It’s Blue Beetle’s brand-new romantic interest, Traci 13, introduced to BLUE BEETLE readers for the first time in issue #16.

Things I Don’t Know To This Day: (a) who this character is, (b) who created this character, (c) if this character is featured in any other DC comic, (d) what other characters she hangs out with, (e) who the “Croato—Uh, some detectives” are, and (f) what love feels like.

The issue begins with Eclipso fighting Traci 13, who is wielding the “stolen Staff of Arion”, a reference to a supporting character debuting in 1982 in the series WARLORD. This will be exciting for your 12-year old nephew, provided that your 12-year old nephew was born in 1970.

To help in the fight, Traci 13 recruits Blue Beetle. Together, they discover that Eclipso has strung up members of the Posse like the victims of the aliens in Aliens, using some kind of sadness-goo. Blue Beetle uses his powers to free them from the sadness-goo that’s holding them.

Blue Beetle, Traci 13 and Blue Beetle’s friend Paco then confront Eclipso. Paco saves the baby, and Traci 13 defeats Eclipso. The issue ends with Traci 13 and Blue Beetle holding each other, presumably to start making out once the comic fades to black. Despite the fact that Blue Beetle mentioned vomiting earlier in the issue. As soon as this comic is over, Traci 13 is going to shove her tongue into Blue Beetle’s vomit mouth, and taste the flavor of his upchuck. I think this will be a huge turn-on for your 12 year old nephew, in so far as he’s probably into some pretty weird-ass kinky shit that I’m not even hip to. You know: like, stuff involving boners, basically.

***

What was the story told by issue #16?

You could argue that the story of this issue is “Blue Beetle gets a girlfriend by being heroic.” But the problem with that interpretation: Blue Beetle never acts heroically once in the issue. Not once. The only thing he does the entire issue is defeat some sadness-goo. Which— hell-naw, if wiping away sadness-goo was enough to get you laid, I got a tube sock that’s Wilt Chamberlain. Furthermore, that interpretation ignores page 21. Page 21 needs to be shown in whole…

So, your 12 year old nephew is now supposed to understand that:

1) This is a reference to the DC character, the Elongated Man, a former Justice League member who dates back to 1960.

2) Traci 13 was apparently raised by the Elongated Man and his wife Sue Dibny.

3) Sue Dibny was murdered by Jean Loring, the Silver Age ex-wife of the Atom.

4) Jean Loring became Eclipso in some issue of something sometime, for some reason. I don’t know when or why myself, but that apparently happened.

This issue is all about the character of Traci 13 and her revenge on Jean Loring / Eclipso for the events of 2004’s IDENTITY CRISIS (which your 12 year old nephew would love since it’s wall-to-wall rape and dead pregnant women). HOW DID THIS COMIC EVER GET CANCELED???

***

Allow me to head off a counter-argument: I didn’t pick a bad issue from the run on purpose, to make my point. I picked an issue involving two ladies having a sexy catfight. I didn’t pick an issue to make BLUE BEETLE look bad-- this was the part of the B-movie montage where Kato Kaelin starts up a bonfire in the background, and Trishelle from Real World: Las Vegas takes off her top, and George Perez and I high-five. It’s all fucking downhill from #16.

***

Here’s the bigger problem--

Two words are never mentioned in the issue: THE REACH.

The bad guys for the entire series.

They’re never mentioned once. Three issues after their introduction.

In any competent work, The Reach would become the focus of what follows. The stakes would escalate, getting the audience to hate The Reach more and more until the book reached its emotional and thematic climax.

Instead:

Issue #15 is a fill-in issue involving a team-up between Blue Beetle and Superman.

Issue #17 involves Blue Beetle fighting Typhoon, the “Soul of the Storm”.

Issue #18 involves the Blue Beetle teaming up with the Teen Titans to fight Lobo.

Issue #19 minimally advances the La Dama subplot.

Issue #20 is a SINESTRO WARS cross-over that features The Reach, but only while it crosses over to another multi-title crossover I haven’t read, and have no intention of reading.

Issue #21 involves the Blue Beetle meeting the Spectre.

The book ignores its own bad guy until the finale, at which point we’re supposed to care about them again. The bad guys don’t spend the second act … being bad guys, doing evil things, antagonizing the hero, any of that.

They flat-out don’t even appear in the comic.

Dude!

III. The conclusion I draw from the foregoing:

BLUE BEETLE tried to be a simple story about a young boy learning to be a man and to find his place in the world by heroically facing insurmountable odds with the help of his friends and family.

But that isn’t the story they told. The story they told was: a new DC character introduces himself to other DC characters, and finds his place in the DCU.

The audience for that isn’t 12 year old nephews; it’s DC fans, for whom that story served no pressing need or desire or want. And also: BLUE BEETLE?

Look, it’s sort-of a rip-off of INVINCIBLE.

INVINCIBLE is a creator owned series created by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker that launched in 2003, and is currently published by Image Comics. It’s about an optimistic teenager who gets superpowers and tries to juggle his exciting new life as a superhero, his teenage friends, and family, without losing his upbeat attitude. BLUE BEETLE, on the other hand, is about…

I was at a bookstore the other day; saw this quote by Stephen King in his book ON WRITING (haven’t read the book, but I thought it was a good quote): “People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light-years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

This was a series that didn’t offer anything to people that they couldn’t already get elsewhere, from a product with more acclaim, less baggage, easier to jump onto, more fun to jump onto, with more issues in the can, and … shit: how about a *twist*…? BLUE BEETLE doesn’t have anything resembling a twist anywhere in it; my theory is that a twist would be too upsetting, and the fanboy definition of The “Fun” Comic usually equates to nothing more than hyper-bland inoffensiveness, but… that’s a separate debate perhaps.

Even if you’re not willing to join me on the phrase “rip-off” – look, would you at least agree that BLUE BEETLE was second place? You don’t get points for being second place; comics don’t have a silver medal. Remember any vampire series in comics after 30 DAYS OF NIGHT? How many worthwhile crime comics have had to live in the shitty shadow of shitty-ass SIN CITY? How many other series about cat-people in wheelchairs fucking and sucking can you name besides OMAHA THE CAT DANCER?

The fact the 15,000 people who stuck with it liked it enough to say so on the Internet doesn't make a series "critically acclaimed." Bart Beaty isn't exactly working on a monograph, as far as I know. It just means 15,000 people live near a public library.

They didn’t have anything new to offer. That’s the sadness of comics. The cancellation is just gravity.

IV.

The cancellation isn’t the mystery here. The mystery is this: DC launches failed title after failed title. Off the top of my head, just in 90’s and 00’s: Young Heroes in Love, Damage, Power Company, Chase, Hawk & Dove, Suicide Squad, Major Bummer, Xero, Breach, Bloodhound, Manhunter, Doom Patrol, Primal Force, Lab Rats, Stars and STRIPE, Vext, Aztek, All-New Atom, Harley Quinn, Hourman, Martian Manhunter, and probably many more I don’t remember. Just for the DCU alone.

None of them ever, ever work.

There’s an Einstein quote President-Elect Obama (yay!) is fond of: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

The mystery is this: Why do they keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work, over and over again? The pertinent question isn’t why was Blue Beetle canceled. The pertinent question is: why did they publish it to begin with? What did they think would happen, in spite of the overwhelming weight of history and experience? Did they think they were doing anything differently from what had failed countless times before? Why would this cancellation be surprising to anyone anywhere?

Does it even look like a publishing scheme to you, or some kind of elaborate sleight-of-hand so Time-Warner-Keebler executives don't ask too many questions? When the executives come to check on how things are going, do you think there's someone at DC whose job it is to yell "They're coming! They're coming! Pretend you're working!"? It looks like an embezzling scheme.

With respect to the cancellation, as has been widely reported, author John Rogers angrily pointed the finger at DC’s publishing strategy, DC’s confused self-identity, “creepy” specialty shops, DC’s offices in Manhattan, DC’s gender confusion, the time DC fondled his balls at summer camp, DC’s gut-flopping fetish, etc. (And don’t forget the rest of us, still busy pounding our sand and collecting our Final Crisis variant covers.)

The standard Comic Creator “It’s Us vs. Them” finger-pointing... uhm: usually, it’s from people who work in comics, talking about series they still write…? Petty-Me found the whole thing extraordinarily strange: an author who didn’t actually write a comic anymore, angry that DC couldn’t find a way to continue to exploit the creative energies of young writers and artists in order to keep his abandoned creation alive, angry despite the fact sales straight-up cratered during his tenure on the title. The fact people quoted that without comment or question? A little strange.

“How dare DC not continue to suck the creativity of young talent to keep a series I created alive after I didn’t want to do anything with it? P.S. I was completely not in any way at fault for simply having written a comic that shed 35,000+ in sales while I was writing it. It’s time to go rogue on the Internet, maverick-style!”

And by young talent, Petty-Me is referring to folks who didn’t get handed their own DC ongoing series on near-zero comic-writing experience, just based on screenwriting credentials, a comic culture obsessed with Hollywood star-fucking, and well-connected friends, and then completely fail to deliver sales. The disinterest in nurturing native talent in favor of fly-by-night screenwriters is not something that’s wrong with comics at all!

But… But that’s all Petty-Me, and Petty-Me's a bit of an idiot sometimes, so... Let's try to find the deeper issues. V. I suppose it’s worth noting here the obvious truth that BLUE BEETLE succeeded by the only criteria that matters. It generated a parcel of IP that DC/Time-Warner-Keebler was able to exploit in a cross-media property. On a balance sheet, the rest—you, me, Grandma Midge-- we’re all minutiae.

Some fans question canceling the series once the character won the IP lottery. But: they have books they can sell curious Blue Beetle fans. They have four volumes of BLUE BEETLE trades that they can sell to all the new BLUE BEETLE fans of the world. All that argument amounts to is “they could have had five or six volumes instead of four.” Oh. Oh, well.

And what lucky new fans! Getting to read SINESTRO WAR or IDENTITY CRISIS tie-ins-- fun! Maybe the error wasn’t canceling the book; maybe the error was not insuring that those four books would be able to stand alone. I’ve heard the argument that you can understand the issues without knowing the specifics of the SINESTRO WAR crossover—but I personally think there’s a distance between comprehension and entertainment that argument doesn’t account for. For me, that SINESTRO issue especially was a huge turn off; you could perhaps understand the What of what happened, but not the Why. Reasonable minds could differ on that point, though.

VI.

My eyes glaze over anytime I hear the phrase “mid-list” though. I guess because I always flash on the same image anytime I hear it, the double-page splash from CRISIS OF INFINITE EARTHS #5:

In my head, I always hear “Why are you reading about Batman? Why aren’t you reading about that one speck instead? The little half-doodle George Perez made in the upper left-hand corner is a really great character. You should really read about the red speck next to the blue-green speck on the left hand cluster of specks. You have beautiful hair.”

It drives me a little crazy when people say “Fans don’t want new superheroes.” Because usually the people saying that? That’s not what they’re selling—— they’re just selling new specks. It’s less than surprising that there’s a ceiling on that enterprise.

But a mainstream comic market that’s as harsh as this one to new series. It’s … well, Jesus, it’s something, isn’t it?

Though: to an extent, it doesn’t make me entirely sad. You know, because I read good comics, too, and those are doing pretty decent lately…? I’ve got BERLIN 2: CITIZENS ON PATROL on the coffee table, waiting to be read. I finished the BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON recently—— pleasant book. I’ll end the year reading POPEYE, maybe. It’s often hard not to look at comics and think that the good guys are winning. And if Marvel and DC can’t get their acts together, and end up with failure after failure, well: there is a part of me that takes a certain pleasure in that. I might be very slightly bummed that I don’t get to read THE ORDER anymore, but if Marvel never sustains a new series again? Well: isn’t that satisfying to the part of you that believes in karma? Marvel, DC, these aren’t companies that deserve any love. These were never people to root for.

But…

But the water’s edge isn’t BLUE BEETLE. It’s Image series, Vertigo series, alternative monthlies. It’s the serial format, paper-and-staples comic. It’s a whole era of comics which, however misbegotten, is the one I was raised with, have affection for, want to continue with, etc. Plus: people I hope good things for still work in that system. For a certain kind of creator, whose work falls outside the narrow confines of what’s considered “artistic”, for genre creators, that’s still an important industry for any number of reasons.

I don’t suppose I’m interested in offering any great solutions to the problem here; having no real-world expertise, doesn’t that become absurd quickly? It’s just too premature to say how digital delivery systems are going to play out, and beyond that, any fancy prognostication becomes silly quickly. Until… until you’re the weird guy in the comment section yelling “Why don’t they sell Batman in an anthology like SHONEN JUMP?? They can sell them like they sell SHONEN JUMP in Japan, at newsstands next to stops for the bullet train. Because this country is also riddled with newsstands and bullet trains. The Japanese have the right idea—they like art, they’re fond of underage girls and they hate pubic hair. Me, the Japanese and John Ruskin, we’re all on the same page. Join us on Team Ruskin, DC.” Which—you know, I shouldn’t speak ill of Team Ruskin: I have my own silly little predilections (stand-alone maxi-series, one-shots, CBZ files, ass-to-mouth, etc). But…

But let’s ask: when people talk about a book like BLUE BEETLE failing, isn’t that an inherently different conversation, just by virtue of being a DCU title? Is the BLUE BEETLE conversation nothing more than-- “Why won’t the guy who buys BATMAN, SUPERMAN, X-MEN, SPIDERMAN, etc. also buy this other book? Why aren’t the people we squeeze and squeeze and squeeze for money—why can’t we squeeze some out of them, for this other book instead?” Isn’t that a question with its answer built into it?

There’s an implied belief in all of this that the important metric in the comic transaction should be the quality of the product, instead of the purchaser’s affection for the characters. That superhero fans should read the best superhero comic instead of the one featuring the best superhero. Which—— it's probably a belief I subscribe to myself, or want to, but…

But look where that line of thinking leads: after 22 issues, I can’t tell you what Blue Beetle’s powers were. At all. I can’t tell you what he had to do with beetles. Holy shit, dude: I can’t even tell you why he calls himself THE BLUE BEETLE. The part where he gets his name? They didn’t fucking show it in the comic. Holy shit, y’all!

...?

If you think a superhero comic should have great writing, those decisions don’t seem like the end of the world. But if you think a superhero comic should have a great superhero in it, then I don’t think that decision and many, many others can be justified.

Blue Beetle? He’s just some lame dude in a suit of arbitrariness. Sure. I remember being a kid and tying a blanket around my neck, and saying “this blanket can do various arbitrary things as the situation and context demands; I look forward to getting beat up in grade school.” Sure, sure.

After Alan Moore and SWAMP THING, we say to ourselves, “There are no bad characters; all those characters are just waiting for the right team.” But comics aren’t long on Alan Moore’s, so maybe we should revise that to "There are oodles of bad characters, but sometimes one-in-a-million creators write those characters for the short period of time that they manage to get work done without DC pissing them off enough to quit the company forever.”

(Tangent: I’m loving the part of WATCHING THE WATCHMEN where Dave Gibbons says “Fortunately, there was a greater pressure on us—that of keeping to the publishing schedule. We had given our own timeline to DC (which incidentally, we met), but they had advanced the publication dates for, no doubt, sound business reasons.” Love that part! Neat book.)

VII.

Recent Tradition demands that anyone writing about BLUE BEETLE conclude by demanding that you, the reader, insert things into your own asshole. This is a tradition that I whole-heartedly support.

I recommend inserting the Tristan 2.

The Tristan 2 is waterproof and made of a silicone material, which it’s heat-resistant, nonstick, and easy to clean. According to the Tristan 2 literature, the Tristan 2 was “inspired by fans” who wanted a plug that was bigger, longer and thicker than the paltry Tristan 1. Much like the Wu-Tang, the Tristan 1 is for the babies. You’ll notice that it indeed has a longer neck than the typical teardrop-shaped plug; that means greater staying power.

However, I should note that the Tristan 2 website has the following warning: “This is obviously not a plug for butt beginners.” This is obviously a warning that should be heeded by all of you butt beginners out there. Leave the Tristan 2 to the butt journeymen. There’s no official butt-ocracy that will tell you when you can advance from butt acolyte to butt made-man, but… pretty soon, you too can butt paraphrase Darth “Lord” Vader, and say “Now, the butt student has become the butt master.” Very good.

And the chorus goes bang: Douglas briefly surfaces to gasp for air

Yes, I've been gone for a bit--working on some stuff that's top secret, yet boring! FIGHT OR RUN: SHADOW OF THE CHOPPER: This might be my favorite comics pamphlet of the year so far; it's on this week's Diamond list, and if your local store doesn't carry it it's available from Buenaventura Press. It's a trifle of a thing, but so perfectly executed that I keep coming back to it with renewed pleasure. A bunch of "Fight or Run" shorts have appeared in Kevin Huizenga's other comics over the last few years, although I don't think this duplicates any of those. The premise couldn't be simpler (Huizenga describes it as "an open source comics game"): two characters (from a stable of several dozen, each with its own set of loosely defined abilities) appear on panel, and either they fight, in which case one of them wins, or one runs from the other, in which case the winner is the one who either escapes or captures the other. The battles sometimes proceed by videogame logic and sometimes go someplace totally unexpected--a page involving a hypercompetent character called McSkulls winning eight contests in a row through sheer girliness cracks me up every time I look at it. Actually, almost everything about this project cracks me up: the characters' names and designs (Pronouncement is an eye-in-the-pyramid with wings, Birther has a little Anders Nilsen scribble for a head), the terrain of horizontal dashes that functions just as well as any oh-what-the-hell videogame background, the "Rabbit Vs. Duck" fights that turn into abstract reinterpretations of the entire concept. EXCELLENT, and really not like anything else.

The last time I praised one of Huizenga's comics here, it appeared next to a joke about a (nonexistent) new Steve Ditko comic. This time, there actually is a new Steve Ditko comic: DITKO, ETC..., published by the artist and Robin Snyder. As Ditko gets older, there's something about his style that gets purer. He's not even pretending to carry stories any more--everything has been reduced to images of purity half-corrupted and sequences of thugs and snickering namby-pambies getting their comeuppance. About half of the issue is single-page pieces with titles like "Who Is Safe in a World of Non-Anti-A?"; there's also a sequence devoted to a new entity-with-a-costume called H the Hero, whose distinguishing characteristic seems to be that he's... a hero. After a few full-page pinups of H stomping out a formless mass of Ditko squiggles that's labeled "Anti-A Violence Crime Force Hatred Corruption" (and so on), we finally get a couple of pages of continuity, or something like it--really just H beating up some thugs while leaping around Spider-Man-style, as if to reassure us that Ditko can still play something like the old tune. Rather EH, on the whole, but jeez, it's new Ditko; I can imagine the gradual simplification of his artwork continuing for another few decades until everything he draws is just a straight line on the left side of the page and a squiggly line on the right, and it will be a perfect squiggly line.

And speaking of Spider-Man, I picked up last Wednesday's AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #578 on the strength of Mark Waid's byline, and I'm glad I did: it's the first issue of the post-Brand New Day incarnation I've sampled that's made me want to see what happens next. This issue is one long, nearly continuous scene, which works for an episode of a weekly serial in a way that it might not for a monthly serial. There's not much in the way of plot here, but what there is is paced awfully effectively: a panel that reads at first as the climax of a joke turns out to be the moment where the story pivots from light farce to disaster-horror, and the cliffhanger ending is topped with a very clever second, character-based bit of suspense. Really nice artwork from Marcos Martin, too--it's got a buoyancy and flair that's always welcome in Spider-Man stories, and he conveys so much of the story visually that Waid gets to make most of his dialogue bouncy rather than expository. (Which also means it sometimes seems unnecessary, but even so there's something pleasantly Stan Lee-like about that effect.) Plus: the reliably entertaining image of Spider-Man about to be crushed under a big heavy thing. GOOD enough that I'm coming back for more.

Sometimes coming up with titles is the hardest part

Just a couple quickie reviews so I don't feel bad...!

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #577: I quite liked this issue as a done-in-one Spidey/Punisher team-up. Zeb Wells turns in an amusing script, and the art by Paolo Rivera is a really nice style seldom seen in mainstream comics -- kind of a bit like Paul Pope, really. I especially like his hand-drawn sound effects: check those "thwip"s on the cover! All in all a solid GOOD issue.

ASM is in such a weird place right now, generally, though: it's not that it isn't basically decent readable comics (it is!), but with the rush of publication and the rotating creative teams, it doesn't feel like it has the "throughline" that an ongoing title should have. If anything, it feels more like TANGLED WEB OF SPIDER-MAN (if you remember that book) than AMAZING. For us, at least, sales are bouncing all over depending on creative team, which means they've largely broke the HABIT of consumption for a big chunk of its audience. That's not smart for an ongoing title. Especially one produced so frequently.

BATMAN CACOPHONY #1: Unlike many of the critics, I thought this was amusing enough: basically how I would EXPECT a Kevin Smith penned Batman comic book to read (which wasn't the case with, say, GREEN ARROW or DAREDEVIL). I can fully understand why people might not want dick jokes and gay panic in a Batman comic, but I tittered a few times, and didn't feel like my time had been wasted. I thought the art was pretty mediocre, though, and I kind of doubt that Flanagan would be drawing a book like this without Smith at his back. All in all, I thought it was highly OK.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: KINGDOM COME SPECIAL: SUPERMAN: For a long time I've wondered just what "non-painted" Alex Ross would look like, and now we know: pretty darn good if you like his photo-realistic style to begin with (which, sure, some people don't). I quite enjoyed both looking at this comic, as well as seeing the process in the back section (this felt more "worthy" to me than, say, the scripts from ASTX: Ghost Boxes). In terms of story, this was more filler than I would have expected: basically not a story, but an incident, and I want more than incident for $4, even if I really enjoy the art. Ross' writing is perfectly fine, and, as I said, I enjoyed seeing his art without the paint on top, so if working this way gets more pages out of him in a year, I'd be very happy to see him continuing to work this way. For the final grade, I'm going to go with a VERY high OK.

As always, what did YOU think?

-B

The Funk of Forty Thousand Years: Diana is Back, 11/12

Obligatory 'splanation for my month-long imitation of Susan Richards: I'm writing my graduate thesis, which means less Ed Brubaker on my desk and more Jack Kerouac. And while there's probably some merit to comparing ON THE ROAD to SECRET INVASION/FINAL CRISIS, I'd much rather keep my studies and my fun-time separate. Anyway, I finally clawed my way out of Limbo, though it seems I may have accidentally unleashed a great evil back into the world:

So, you know, sorry about that.

And before I get to reviewing: House to Astonish. Why? Because Paul O'Brien and Alistair Kennedy, that's why. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Katz.

Comics time! There's really no way I can talk about BATMAN: CACOPHONY #1 with anything even approaching a straight face, so without further ado:

Oh my GOD. Becky, look at that dialogue. It is so BAD. It sounds like one of those Millar books. But, you know, who understands those Millar books? They only buy it because the women look like total prostitutes, 'kay? I mean, his dialogue is just so BAD. I can't believe it's so dumb, it's like, OUT THERE. I mean, gross! Look! It's just so... CRAP!

Do us all a favor, Mr. Smith: get thee to a nunnery. Or at the very least go back to film so we can press the mute button and not have to watch Batman channel G.I. Rabbi. Honestly, I know it's fashionable to dislike Kevin Smith these days, and the last thing I want to do is look like I'm jumping on the Hate Wagon just because I feel like it, but this comic... ye Gods, this comic. It's tired, it's cliched, it's downright horrific (because there are some things in this life I never want to see, and the Joker getting bummed by another supervillain is way up near the top of that list). It's the sort of thing that makes you stop and wonder: how the hell did this reach publication? Did no one, at any point in the long and complex process of creating a comic, stop to think that charging four dollars for this piece of dreck is not going to help DC or the comics industry?

And I realize this reaction may be a bit over-the-top for a book that isn't Frank Miller-bad or Chuck-Austen bad, but dammit, we've allowed the mainstream to reach a point where quality and price aren't just detached from one another, they're inversely proportionate. $3.99 for mediocre tripe? Why?

This comic made me think of Kevin Smith as the pushing-40 dad asking today's kids "what's hip". And unfortunately, these kids are precisely the type of idiot that thinks Mark Millar is a pinnacle of talent. So that's exactly what we get: shallow "shock"-oriented scenes like Zsasz's Final Frontier of Self-Mutilation, and dialogue that's completely realistic if you happen to live next-door to a playground for psychotic toddlers.

My only consolation is that the Vegas odds have the rest of this comic disappearing into the night before Smith really gets his groove on. But in the meantime, Brian, I suggest you keep this comic far away from ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER. Together they could tear another hole in the universe, and next time it'll be the Backstreet Boys making a comeback...