I'm going to avoid jokes about things working in concert: Jog was robbed of his puns on 2/20

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite #6 (of 6):

That's not really true.

This is the last issue of writer/creator Gerald Way's and penciller/inker Gabriel Bá's (and colorist Dave Stewart's and letterer Nate Piekos') initial miniseries featuring these characters - it's even titled Finale (in the short form; there's no fucking way I'm typing out the 30-word full title, The Umbrella Academy, Featuring the Utter Destruction of Mankind in: Finale or, Brothers and Sisters, I Am An Atomic Bomb being Part Six of Six in the Story: Apocalypse Suite). But, in Mignola-approved Dark Horse fashion, we're clearly dealing with an ongoing series set up as a set of miniseries to offset the perception of delay in between storylines. And, in proper modern superhero fashion, the first storyline mainly serves to establish the extended premise and get all the main players in place for later action.

I liked this storyline, although I think its freshness has been slightly overestimated. When you really go through this comic, there's little that's original, or even particularly odd about it. You've got your fragmented 'family' of angsty superheroes -- a stolid leader, a hothead, an oddball (relatively speaking), a reluctant one with massive power, a badass with dark secrets -- pulled together by fate, a disgruntled teammate made extra-powerful but uncaring by a scheming supervillain, a global threat, some soap opera sexual tension, a supporting character's death to raise the stakes, and, finally, members of the team coming together against the odds through an uneasy mix of love and hate, some of them discovering they're greater than they'd ever realized, so as to save the day and opt to stick together for further exploits as hopeful rays of sunshine beam down to mark a fresh day. There's even a joke where someone says things aren't going like they usually do in these kinds of stories ("Is this the part where we all go home and act like a happy family?"), as often happens in stories like this!

Now, I don't think there's much inherently wrong with that, other than the lingering sense that you've read it somewhere before. The Umbrella Academy does have a lot going for it in superhero aesthetics; all of the visual elements join seamlessly, with this particular issue boasting a nice use of musical notation as a suffocating, near-magical force, something that's just not going to work if everything isn't lined up skillfully, and here it is. Better still, there's a good, complimentary balance between text and images; I liked how the image of the Televator bookends the really heavy parts of this issue's climactic fight, kind of starting and stopping the bloodiest bits like a bell in a boxing match.

There's also a certain subtext running through the series - all of the book's superheroes are without control of their lives, raised to act at the beck and call of a creator that built them into something mighty without having their best interests at heart. All of the threats they face in the present are aftershocks of old adventures, with the emotional ruin of the turncoat teammate being the worst problem of all. It's not hard to read this as anxiety of genre history, the way superheroes get brought back again and again to face often the same old threats, managed to profit but damaged in the process.

The thing is, while this storyline ends on a cute (and unequivocally triumphant) note of the past coming full circle so that everyone can move on, I don't think the book has demonstrated that anything has really changed, aside from superheroes changing a little so as to keep the adventures flowing. Like, they learn something about compassion -- or are some of them still mad?! -- and I guess they're out to live on their own terms now, but I see that as part of some pretty typical genre mechanics, and while the book is neat enough that I'm happy to read it, I don't pick up on anything all that striking. It's nice, and pretty eloquent, but I don't think it's especially interesting.

Still, you know, it's fun. The writerly decoration is peppy, there's some good jokes, and a nice grasp of archetypical characters with colorful powers. As I've said before, if more medium-burn superhero books were as slick and entertaining as this, I'd be picking up a lot more of them. GOOD stopping point, GOOD series so far. Way has an obvious talent for this thing, and I'm totally on board to see where the series goes next; I hope it develops in strange and fantastic ways.

Did I just say "Wondercon"?

Excuse me while I steal your attention for something that the San Franciscans or Wondercon-bound amongst you may feel interested in:

Saturday night at 111 Minna. Be there or hate freedom. Co-sponsored by my other gig, so go and give them some web traffic as way of thanks.

A life code: It pays to talk to no-one.

Hey, Wondercon this week! There’s a sign that there won’t be that much sleep happening anytime soon...

BOOSTER GOLD #0: Wow, this really does take me back; ignoring the guest-shot from Parallax and Extant (Just to remind you just how unusual supervillain names got in the early ‘90s. Was there ever one called Ennui, or was that a missed opportunity?), using the issue to give a recap of Booster’s secret origin before setting up the next storyline captured the tone of the Zero Hour “zero issues” far too well, right down to the fact that it left you feeling as if you should somehow find it a lot more interesting than it actually was. Despite the metatextual shenanigans, though, it’s still Good.

CAPTAIN MARVEL #3: Meanwhile, over at the House of Ideas, everybody’s Skrull-Fu Fightin’. Maybe I’m missing something, but following the reveal of the alien sleeper agent conspiracy, the individual reveals that we’ve seen have all been incredibly underwhelming. “You mean this formerly-dead character that no-one cared about is really an alien?!? Now no-one is safe!” Even the hint that Mar-Vell himself may be a little bit Skrully disappoints, and makes you feel as if this series is entirely pointless outside of leading in to the next big crossover. Did no-one learn from Millennium? Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR #554: Depressingly, pretty much exactly what I’d expected from the pre-release hype, right down to the stylized dialogue that –like a lot of Mark Millar’s work – reads not like the characters themselves, but like Millar has been told what the characters are supposed to sound like by someone else. Yeah, Johnny’s a jerk and Ben is lovable and Reed is the Big Brain, but none of them seem like themselves; they’re all the Mark Millar Unpleasantverse versions of themselves, instead. Like Doug, I was bored by the lack of new ideas and simultaneous sense that the creators thought that these were new ideas, and scenes like the schoolteacher talking about wanting to fuck a super-hero were just embarrassingly bad attempts at making the book “relevant” from someone who has their finger on the pulse of pop culture from last year. I fully expect Mark Millar’s take on Britney’s Meltdown - but she’s a superhero! – before the end of 2008. Bryan Hitch’s artwork is pretty, but also flawed; his anatomy is getting odd in the rush of the work (What happened to Sue’s arms on the cover? They seem too short), and feels very static and lifeless in all the rendering and crosshatching. It’s depressing; I really wanted to like this, for some reason, but there’s just no sense of either wonder or family there for me. Eh.

FANTASTIC FOUR: THE LOST ADVENTURE: God, for an Interesting, But Essentially Distressing rating. On one level, this is a fascinating book because of all the process stuff included – Kirby’s unfinished pencils (with margin notes), the reprint of the previous attempt to complete the story from the ‘70s – but the finished story itself is (perhaps necessarily) like listening to “Free As A Bird” for the first time; there are glimpses of what made you dig them in the first place, but it’s kind of like unintentional self parody at the same time. Okay, I guess?

GREEN LANTERN CORPS #21: On the one hand, I’m sure there’s an interesting story to be done about the dehumanizing of the Alpha-Lanterns, but on the other, this really isn’t it. There just aren’t really any sympathetic (or even reader-friendly) characters here at all, and so the whole thing is just flat. Crap, worryingly, just when I was getting into the book.

NEW AVENGERS #38: I know that Brian liked this, but it just seemed to confirm every stereotype about Bendis’ writing being meandering and driven by dialogue schtick, especially the cut-aways to the New Avengers finding a new headquarters, which were very Venture Bros for some reason. Also, if Ms. Marvel lets the unregistered super-heroes escape one more time, they might as well give up on this whole “living underground” thing anyway. Eh.

NOVA ANNUAL #1: An annual that recaps the hero’s origin while advancing the plotline of the main series? I can’t believe that that feels so much like a throwback, but still, this was an Okay primer for those who aren’t following the regular book, albeit an amusing one to someone who just finished the Essential Nova collection recently.

WONDER WOMAN #17: Goddammit, I really wanted this to be less frustrating than it was, even though I know that I’m frustrated because I got so involved with the story. The Etta Candy resolution feels like I missed something – She’s Wonder Woman’s alibi? So it is the same Etta Candy as before, and not a post-Infinite Crisis reboot? – and The Circle plot doesn’t so much resolve as get derailed by the Nazi invasion, some fighting, and then get pushed out to some later date. There’s still a lot to like here (Unlike Diana, I think it is a Good), but it doesn’t really fulfill the promise of the previous three issues.

WOLVERINE #62: Reading this and X-FORCE #1 back to back is an unusual experience. Both have essentially the same set-up – Cyclops sends Wolverine (and others) out to kill a bad guy because he just don’t done take no shit no mo’ – that I have a hard time buying because, come on, it’s fucking Cyclops. I know that Messiah Complex was supposed to change everything, but still; it’s as if writers can only ever play him in two modes: Neurotic tight-ass or Bad-ass tight-ass, and we keep swinging between the two. Anyway, getting back to the two new books – which seem to share a set-up with Young X-Men, as trailed in the back of this week’s Marvel comics; apparently “variety” is the watchword of the post-Messiah Complex X-franchise. That and “death” – the difference between the two is that, well, Wolverine is actually pretty Good, whereas X-Force is a steaming pile of Crap. Your mileage may vary, of course, but Wolverine sees an attempt to build a story onto the “Wolverine goes out to kill someone!” set-up, complete with retconning motivation in there, putting in an unexpected reversal at the end of the issue, and generally staying within character for the book’s stars, all wrapped up in some nice Ron Garney artwork. By comparison, X-Force does away with character pretty much altogether (Wolverine’s hilarious “You don’t want to do this. Bein’ a killer is tough. Your friends will look at you funny. You ain’t gonna cross this line unchanged, bub. Okay, let’s go and slaughter lots of people” monologue aside), substituting it with X-trivia (Bastion?!?) and muddy, emotionless artwork to give it the feel of being the comic read by nerds who want to feel very, very serious about their hobby. It’s humorless and kill-friendly, and the fact that it has a “Bloody Variant” cover pretty much sums the whole thing up. If you want to see X-Men want to kill someone, read Wolverine. If you’re fifteen and like the idea of lots of people dying, read X-Force.

But what did you think?

Arriving 2/20/2008

Even though it is "a holiday", it isn't one of the holiday's that affects comics shipping (the rule of thumb is: if UPS is running, it won't affect shipments), so comics ARE arriving on WEDNESDAY this week. Here's what it looks like:

ABYSS #3 (OF 4) AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #551 BND ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #4 ARCHIE #582 ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #186 AVENGERS CLASSIC #9 BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #4 BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #13 BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ORIGINS #3 BIRDS OF PREY #115 BRAVE AND THE BOLD #10 CABLE DEADPOOL #50 CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #22 CATWOMAN #76 CHECKMATE #23 CONAN #49 COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 10 DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #6 (OF 8) DRAFTED #5 EX MACHINA #34 FLASH #237 FORGOTTEN REALMS THE LEGACY #1 (OF 3) SEELEY CVR A GODLAND #21 GRENDEL BEHOLD THE DEVIL #4 (OF 8) GRIMM FAIRY TALES #21 GRIMM FAIRY TALES RETURN TO WONDERLAND #6 (OF 6) HAWAIIAN DICK #3 HULK #2 IMMORTAL IRON FIST ORSON RANDALL GREEN MIST DEATH INCREDIBLE HERCULES #114 INVINCIBLE #48 IRON MAN #26 JENNA JAMESONS SHADOW HUNTER #1 JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #18 KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #136 LOADED BIBLE 3 COMMUNION (ONE SHOT) LOCKE & KEY #1 LOVELESS #22 MADAME MIRAGE #5 MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #21 MARVEL ILLUSTRATED ILIAD #3 (OF 8) MIGHTY AVENGERS #9 NEW AVENGERS #38 SII ORDER #8 PRIMORDIA #3 (OF 3) PROGRAMME #8 (OF 12) PVP #38 RED SONJA #30 REX MUNDI DH ED #10 ROBIN #171 RUNAWAYS #29 SCOOBY DOO #129 SCREAM #4 (OF 4) SHADOWPACT #22 SHOJO BEAT MAR 08 SIMPSONS COMICS #139 SPIRIT #14 STAR WARS DARK TIMES #9 SUPERMAN BATMAN #46 SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #12 TERROR INC #5 (OF 5) ULTIMATE HUMAN #2 (OF 4) ULTIMATE X-MEN #91 ULTIMATES 3 #3 (OF 5) UMBRELLA ACADEMY APOCALYPSE SUITE #6 (OF 6) UN-MEN #7 WILDSTORM REVELATIONS #4 (OF 6) WITCHBLADE TAKERU MANGA #12 WOLVERINE ORIGINS #22 WONDER GIRL #6 (OF 6) WORLD OF WARCRAFT #4 WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH WARBOUND #3 (OF 5) YOUNGBLOOD #2 ZORRO #1

Books / Mags / Stuff ALIENS OMNIBUS TP VOL 03 ART OF GENNADIY KOUFAY TP (A) BEST EROTIC COMICS 2008 SC (A) BLACK & WHITE IMAGES FOURTH ANNUAL COLLECTION BONEYARD COLOR ED TP VOL 03 BOYS TP VOL 02 GET SOME CATWOMAN CATWOMANS DEAD TP CHERUBS PARADISE LOST GN CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED HC VOL 01 GREAT EXPECTATIONS COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1640 APRIL 2008 COMICS JOURNAL #288 DARK XENA TP DRIFTING CLASSROOM TP VOL 10 FABLEWOOD GN VOL 01 FEAR AGENT TP LAST GOODBYE FETISH (RES) (A) FLASH BLOOD WILL RUN TP NEW ED GEEK MONTHLY VOL 2 #2 GOLGO 13 GN VOL 13 GREEN LANTERN HC VOL 01 THE SINESTRO CORPS WAR HERE COME THE LOVEJOYS GN SECOND COMING (A) HUNTER KILLER TP VOL 01 ILLUSTRATORS ANNUAL OF AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION TP VOL 49 IRON MAN TP MANY ARMORS OF IRON MAN NEW PTG KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE TP VOL 06 LONERS TP SECRET LIVES OF SUPER HEROES LOU FINE READER TP VOL 02 MAAKIES WITH WRINKLED KNEES HC MAD MAGAZINE #487 MORE OLD JEWISH COMEDIANS HC NAOKI URASAWAS MONSTER TP VOL 13 NESTLER GIRLS SC VOL 01 ORDER TP VOL 01 NEXT RIGHT THING PATH OF THE ASSASSIN VOL 9 TP SAM & MAX SURFIN HIGHWAY TP SHAG A TO Z BLAB STORYBOOK HC SHATNER SHOW HC SOJOURN VOL 6 A BERSERKERS TALE TP TERMINATOR OMNIBUS VOL 01 UZUMAKI (2ND EDITION) GN VOL 03 WALT DISNEY TREASURES TP VOL 02 UNCLE SCROOGE

What looks good to YOU?

-B

I will now adopt the Diamond perspective: That's how this is 2/13

Reich #1:

Here's an increasingly rare sight in the contemporary Direct Market: a new, serious, pamphlet-format 'alternative' comic from a comparatively small publisher, determined to serialize a single, long story over an indeterminate number of issues, to be released at a regular, quarterly pace, in probable anticipation of a collected edition to follow. Truly, Sparkplug Comic Books is appreciative of the old-time aesthetic!

Ah, but we must check our viewpoint against the realities of today. First off, this is not a new comic. It's new to most comics shops because Diamond, to the best of my knowledge, has just gotten to distributing the series. There's already two further issues out from the publisher. Moreover, writer/artist Elijah J. Brubaker has been working the series subject matter at least as far back as a 1995 minicomic of the same title, and had been releasing the present series' content as a webcomic until recently. And as I guessed above, I doubt this will be the material's final form.

Anyway, Reich is a comics biography of Wilhelm Reich, the infamous Austrian-American psychiatrist/psychoanalyst best remembered today for his development of orgone theory, and eventual imprisonment for failure to comply with a court injunction mandating the destruction of orgone therapy equipment and literature. Brubaker notes in his introduction to this issue that most perspectives on Reich trade on his counterculture value or fixate on aspects of the man's science; in contrast, this comic is set to present a take on the humanity of Reich.

It's also, by Brubaker's admission, "indebted" to Chester Brown's 1999-2003 comic book biography project Louis Riel (from Drawn and Quarterly; now collected), adopting both the simplicity of Brown's visual storytelling -- not one of this comic's 24 b&w pages breaks from a six-panel grid -- and his proclivity for backmatter annotations. Unlike Brown's squat, Harold Gray-influenced artwork, however, Brubaker pursues an oddly three-dimensional arrangement of big-headed stylized characters, their enormous noses casting deep, logical shadows on their faces. Character designs typically act as shorthand for everyone's internal state, although the artist also stretches, squashes or realistically details various heads when a specific, expressive effect is desired. In this way, emotions are known as constantly pliable.

It also gives off the sense of children playing around with Big Ideas; this issue sees Reich's awakening to orgastic potency in WWI, and his caddish romantic entanglements with young Social Democrats and pretty dilettantes in Vienna, while developing a passion for sexual analysis. Brubaker's story, while occasionally darting into diagrammatic illustration, or seeing characters narrate directly to the reader, mainly focuses on conversations between people across a flowing timeline. Politics seem little more than an excuse for fooling around, though Brubaker's Reich is doubly callous for adoring his theories of sex over living, sexual beings.

I wonder how the artist's visual style might impact Reich's later life; for now, for me, it seems to gently undercut the pretensions of youth; it also occasionally tumbles into obviousness, as with a panel of The Nasty Shadows cloaking Reich's face as he suggests an abortion for a poor girl he's impregnated, with awful results. I did find it GOOD on the whole, however, and would recommend it to those piqued by the subject matter.

Two Sunday links

Go read: Tom Spurgeon's interview with Douglas Wolk. Go look: the new Indiana Jones Trailer! Looks better than I would have hoped!

(lets try the embed thing, to see if it works)

-B

Abhay Slops Out Some Reviews; Just Some Slop; Slop, Pig-Boy, Slop!

I've been sick. I've been busy. I've been sick of being busy, am I right, people? Anyways: comics. The Next Issue Project -- Fantastic Comics #24: Jog already reviewed this, but I'm feeling redundant since Jog already reviewed this, but I'm feeling redundant since Jog already reviewed this but COMEDY! This is a sort-of tribute to the public domain comics of the 1930's and 1940's, specifically a Fox Syndicate Features title, Fantastic Comics. The character lineup is an exact recreation (down to batting order) of, inter alia, 1940's Fantastic Comics #12, available online.

Sometimes it's fun; sometimes it feels like when people in their 20's wear suits and go dancing to big band music and say things like You're so money and you don't even know it or whatever.

1940's Fantastic Comics #12 was pretty different in comparison. Consider the Samson story from that issue. Apparently, Samson is a lesser Hugo Hercules figure, with a little Tarzan tossed in. Basically, a half-naked dude runs around wrecking shit.

The 1940 story opens on Samson throwing a factory through the air for no reason. Here and throughout the comic, he's accompanied by a half-naked boy companion named David. Just a young half-naked boy companion, so paging Dr. Wertham. Cut to Samson waving a pole at an ice cream salesmen. Random men tell him to put the pole down, so he puts the pole down (YEAH, LADIES, VALENTINE'S DAY CAN BE ALL YEAR LONG, THAT'S HOW WE DO IT ON THIS BLOG)(p.s. I'm 12 years old). Then a messenger is shot in front of his house.

End of page one.

Samson rips open a wall at the local newspaper, finds out from the editor of the local newspaper that "spies are trying to wreck this country". So he swims to ... somewhere, and fights those goddamn spies. He learns about the spy plot to blow up the Panama Canal. Samson races to stop them in a plane. The plane crashes because it's out of gas. Then, Samson arrives at the Panama Canal, and throws a freighter into the air before it can blow up the Canal. Then, he find outs that 70 men are being "smuggled in on the Underground Railway". So Samson steals a boat, finds a submarine, carries the submarine out of the water, then snaps the submarine in two with his hands-- FUCK YOU, SUBMARINE. Samson races to the spy secret headquarters which blows up. Samson fucks up a locomotive, then races into the "Secret Valley", busts through a wall, gets electrocuted, etc. The bad guys cut Samson's hair (robbing him of his powers!) and start to have bondage-fun with the naked-boy companion (remember him? I wish I didn't!), but luckily, Samson's hair grows back three panels later and the naked-boy companion is saved.

At which point, Samson just starts fucking wrecking shit indiscriminately.

He destroy a dam, throw a cannon at shit, finds a long-lost pyramid, wrecks that motherfucker-- FUCK YOU, PYRAMID! Finally, he finds the bad guy: oh my God, it's the editor of the local newspaper! FUCK YOU, JOURNALISM MAJORS. Finally, the last panel:

The End. That's a thirteen page story. It's funny how people claim kids today have no attention spans because of MTV, when their grandpas used to down these 13 page condensed nonsense shots. Maybe short attention spans aren't MTV's fault. Maybe it's the High-Fructose Corn Syrup. Quick, to a centrifuge!

The stories in #24 move a little slower. But: I'm glad they're not like comics from 1940 because (a) the stories in the 1940's FANTASTIC COMICS sure seem like they're mostly inane shit and (b) that Samson story made me tired.

Anyways, #24's a hang-out comic. Talented people hang out, and you get to see them have some fun. The stakes are pretty low-- if you appreciate the style, well, the battle the book seems to want to win is more than half won.

By that standard, I had a good enough time. The Ashley Wood story is pretty clever: Wood ignores the source material and makes more of an exhortation than a story, but it works, especially concluding a book with its fair share of near-misses and not-even-close-es storywise. Still, I'd say Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca's Capt. Kidd story was the most "successful" for me: a few minor visual nods to the 40's aside, Capt. Kidd feels like a Rugg-Maruca character when they're done with him. I'd read more of their Capt. Kidd.

But, hell, it's tough for the creators in this book: the distinction between appreciating the past, and fetishizing it, building a house on a shaky foundation-- well, that's a pretty thin line. I just think Rugg/Maruca avoided the latter the most successfully. If the relative merits of the stories in this first edition of the Next Issue Project indicate anything, I think it's that future creators in this format might want to consider avoiding overly fixating on the style of lousy Golden Age comics and maybe try sticking with good stories about fun characters. I think those might come back into fashion someday. I think that gum you like is going to come back into style.

Iron Man #25: I started picking up this comic a while back-- I don't know, something made me curious, maybe the movie, maybe the art, maybe how they've positioned the character in Civil War, maybe being an overgrown man-child, whatever. It's one of those books they made all serious-- it's all serious now. It's something in-between a pretty-cool espionage comic and an Ashley Judd movie. Sometimes it works; sometimes it's totally ridiculous. And it varies page-by-page because... well, because they're trying to do a serious espionage comic about Iron Man.

The creators get some mileage from the classic Marvel formula of outwardly strong, kinetic characters who are internally fucked up and full of self-pity and regret. They write Tony Stark with all these wacky mental problems -- that always seems to work. On the other hand, they try to write him as an underdog, as a minor government figure at the mercy of petty bureacrats, which is hard for me to square with the character's recent history.

I guess not everyone relies on that formula-- the Millar/Hitch FF appears to be about a group of well-adjusted, happy, rich celebrities who enjoy hot sex with beautiful people. One issue in, anyways, it's enormously self-satisfied and boring-- or as I like to call it, a Mark Millar comic! COMEDY! Maybe Millar has his own formula I haven't picked up on yet-- his stuff always seems like a bunch of loud noises to me... well: which I suppose can be fun when the noises are loud enough to drown everything out (see, e.g., Enemy of the State).

Anywho-- with Iron Man, it's amusing that even with a recap page, no one can be bothered to explain what Extremis is to me. Every other word in this goddamn comic is Extremis. I've read about four issues of the book now, and somehow I still have no idea what the shit an Extremis is. I swear, they mention Extremis on every page of this fucking comic book except the recap page. Why not just type out a link to wikipedia on the recap page? Why not just tell me about Iron Man's summer vacation? Tell me more, tell me more, did he get very far? Tell me more, tell me more like does he have a car? Et cetera.

This issue falls in the ridiculous camp more often than usual. The "detective work" in the issue ... I haven't read the book for a very long time so how Tony Stark solves the never-goddamn-ending mystery for me was a groaner. I'd have to think it'd be like getting punched in the balls if I were more invested in the comic, but who knows? At least, I think both fans and casual readers will be happy for any indication that such an extremely long and drawn-out arc might be approaching something resembling a conclusion. Most importantly, I hope Ashley Judd likes me.

Also, the Maria Hill character turns up in one panel to remind readers that the most horrible character a Marvel writer can conceivably imagine is a successful, aggressive woman; eventually they're going to kill her or rape her or kill-rape her or Skrull her or something, and the discomfort I feel pretty much every single time that character appears on a page will be gone.

Other Crime Comics: Scalped #14 has a swell 3-page stretch where the main character beats up a pickup truck. I particularly enjoyed that part, but seeing as the whole arc's based on some heavy-duty spoilers, let's leave it at that. So, yeah, SPOILER WARNING: don't get too attached to the pickup truck. '76 #2 has pretty much the exact same strengths and weaknesses of the first issue-- nothing about it seems to have much to do with the 1970's, but the Cool half is good fun exploitation sleaze while the Jackie Karma half starts to build up its street-mythology. Everyone in this comic is named Gino, though...? The Chemist #2 is dominated by a large action sequence. It all still feels a little by the numbers, but the lady sidekick abuses some prescription sleep medication halfway through the issue-- I liked that.

James Stokoe's Wonton Soup is not a crime comic, so much as a competitive-cooking-slash-space-opera hybrid. Stokoe's a contemporary of Brandon Graham and Corey Lewis, so you can expect that same kind of thing: high-energy rambling with the focus on fun drawings moreso than particularly intricate or meaningful narratives. Stokoe is maybe a little more laid back about his pacing, though. Not a lot happens slowly, but the scenery's fun enough, basically. It's definitely gentler and more focused on atmosphere than Stokoe's gonzo action webcomic, 41 Stories, which is where I think a lot of us were introduced to his work.

I was extra-happy the main characters were truckers-- I've always thought it was a shame there weren't more comics in the trucking genre (except Marvel's U.S Archer which I never read). You know: if it weren't for Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Mr. Burt Reynolds, would have been the highest grossing film of 1977. Also: I think there should be more comics about moonshiners, like Burt Reynolds in White Lightning.

Also: I think there should be a comic called Sharky's Machine, about Atlanta vice cop Tom Sharky, and his machine, and their lives and loves. Who do I write letters to?

Brian does a few capsules of 2/13 books

Well, at least you know that I AM writing about comics, what with that eleven thousand freakin' words on the latest Tilting at Windmills. I swear, I'm dancing as fast as I can!! But how about some recent funny books? In no particular order:

FANTASTIC FOUR #554: Its been a while since Mark Millar wrote a regular continuity, non-event funny book that wasn't a short-form specific storyline, and it is nice to see him handling a straight-ahead superhero narrative again. There's nothing especially earth-shattering about this first issue, but that's just fine with me -- this is the basic level of quality that one of the "main franchise" titles of the Marvel (or DC) universe should be. There's a little confusion about just WHEN this takes place (eg: that line from Wasp about Hank and the Avengers, muh wha?), but who really cares. Spiffy art by Bryan Hitch rounds this out to a nice GOOD package, and I think it is worth your three bucks.

NEW AVENGERS #38: Secret Invasion, smecret invasion, its probably better to think this as an issue of the late, lamented ALIAS, and it is a terrific one. An easy VERY GOOD.

ASTRO CITY: DARK AGE SPECIAL #2: BEAUTIE: Well, that's what my invoice calls it, at least. Nothing particularly tied to the "Dark Age" storyline, however. Maybe its because that storyline feels like its been going on forever (well, only since August of '05), its nice to have a return to what feels like "prime" AC to me -- character-driven pieces that stand alone. I thought this one worked very well, especially with Brent Anderson's art -- there's a wonderful stiffness in his depiction of Beautie, and there's a really nice beat in there where she turns to face someone, or at least her head does. A very solid VERY GOOD.

SALVATION RUN #4: Ape versus Ape is cool and all, though I really have to wonder what they're thinking in killing off those particular characters. Yes, yes, they're "silly", but that doesn't mean they couldn't have something interesting done with them. Pretty sub-EH.

TINY TITANS #1: Who the heck is this aimed at? Kids won't get the in-jokey DCU references, adults are going to think this is too far below them. I really really don't get the thinking on this one (except maybe that they're paying Cartoon Network for the Titans Go! license, and don't want to pay that any more, and figure they can replace the book more or less equivalently), but it is basically cute enough to call it EH.

Sheesh, its taken me 3 hours to write up 5 comics, between the customers today. I'll try to be back next week with something more substantial....

What did YOU think?

-B

Change Their Minds and Change The World! Diana wonders about 2/14

The last time I tackled a Gail Simone book, worlds lived, worlds died and the Savage Critics were never the same. Will lightning strike twice?

Probably not. I thought WONDER WOMAN #17 and "The Circle" were OKAY.

I'll admit that I struggled with that grade - it was either going to be a high OKAY or a low GOOD. The thing is, I liked the premise; it was an interesting twist on the story of Diana's birth, pointing to an aspect of Themysciran life that had never really been dealt with before. And, of course, Alkyone's prediction could have come true very easily, which goes a long way towards making her and the other members of the Royal Guard sympathetic. Their story was compelling... up to a point.

The major problem I had with "The Circle" had to do with pacing, and this has been a issue for me with Simone-written series going back to THE ATOM and WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY: too much happens too quickly, and there's no room for depth or real drama, not when you're fast-forwarding through the story like Dark Helmet in "Spaceballs". This, in my opinion, has plagued Simone's recent output - a failure to allocate enough attention to the varied story elements. If I were to break down "The Circle" in terms of plotlines, this is what emerges:

A) The backstory of Alkyone and the Royal Guard, coupled with their present-day escape and their targeting of Diana.

B) The Nazis invade Themyscira, get whipped by the mother-daughter team-up of Hippolyta and Diana, and are sent packing.

C) Diana befriends gorilla warriors.

D) Etta Candy may or may not be a spy for Diana's boss or something... I didn't really get that sequence (though I don't fault Simone for that - I'm guessing it's a leftover from the Heinberg or Picoult runs?).

Now, the best stories are those which form thematic parallels between the B-plot and A-plot, the better to integrate them towards the climax: we can think here of how FABLES has moved Flycatcher's long-running character arc into the greater Fabletown/Empire conflict as an example. With "The Circle", though, what we get are two separate plotlines which only intersect in the name of contrivance (ie: the Nazis free the Circle), at which point they separate and are resolved separately - the Nazi cleanup has very little to do with the Circle's attack on Diana. As a result, neither develop any real gravitas: had this been the Circle's story, Simone might have been able to flesh out the other three members of the Royal Guard, and bring their conflict with Diana to a much more potent boiling point, dramatically speaking. But there simply aren't enough pages to do that, because you have Nazis and gorillas running about, smacking each other around. And at no point during this four-issue arc does Simone ever convince me that the Nazis and gorillas were needed.

Ultimately, "The Circle" fizzles to a very unsatisfying conclusion: there's something poignant about Alkyone's final realization, but at the same time, I felt that it just wasn't enough, that more could have been done with the Circle and their complex relationships with Hippolyta and Diana. So... OKAY, because I liked the idea and I wanted to see more, but I didn't.

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

The Punisher: Force of Nature:

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

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

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

Punisher War Journal #16:

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

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

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

Tilting at Windmills v2 #9: BookScan 2007

The latest Tilting at Windmills is up on Newsarama. Yeesh, more than 11k words!! Matt decided to not post the file with the actual numbers, so foo on that.

Any commentary, feel free below.

Some actual reviews coming later this afternoon...

-B

This plastique valentine: Douglas on 2/14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saying Kaddish: The Passing of Steve Gerber.

It's been said by much smarter men than myself (Jules Feiffer and Gerard Jones being but two) that Judaism is perhaps the real secret identity at the heart of the superhero experience--one doesn't have to look much farther than Lieber and Kurtzberg, who built Marvel comics under the pen names of Lee and Kirby, to make a case for it. Of all the many things I've thought about Steve Gerber--and believe me, I've thought about him a lot since learning of his passing earlier today--what sticks with me is that Gerber was the hero without the mask, the guy brave enough to forego the secret identity. I grew up in whiter-than-white Humboldt County and even I could tell that Gerber was Jewish: his stories were always of outsiders (outsiders even by Marvel's standards) and usually focused on defiant, frequently angry, guys who viewed with both bemusement and amusement the world surrounding them. By the time I got to high school and started reading Malamud (a little), Bellow (embarrassingly less), and Roth (a whole shitload), I could see how Gerber and his work belonged as much to their tradition--that of the soulful shit-stirrer--as to Stan's patented mix of soap opera and winking carnival barker.

The term "patented" is almost more than cliched hyperbole, by the way. What makes eulogizing Gerber difficult--and it will be even more difficult when other writers of his generation pass on--is that his most substantial work was done while stylistically imitating someone else. Every writer passing through Marvel in the '70s had to write in Stan's house style and now that styles and mainstream tastes have finally progressed, I find it's a bit of tough sell to convince younger readers--and more than occasionally myself--that there's good writing buried underneath all the labored rhetoric, and the expository diatribes and the "Dear God, no!" melodramas, and those last panel captions that read, "And somewhere, in the distance, comes the gentle weeping...of a clown."

One of Gerber's achievements--and I'm not sure if someone who doesn't know the period can really appreciate what a strange achievement it is--was to develop his own voice while immersed within that of another: within the Stanisms were the Gerberisms, the things you found only in Gerber's work, that held their own spell, bdspoke their own worldview. Cults popped up regularly in Gerber's work; so did supporting characters who would get fed up and leave the story; plots would expand out and then suddenly collapse in. The rich tapesty of the multiverse would unfold but always in the periphery: in the Florida everglades, in the park on a quiet day, over the Cuyahoga River burning at midnight. And at these places, you'd find an angry but decent guy--Richard Rory or Jack Norris or Howard the Duck--aware of his relative powerlessness, frustrated and bitterly amused at that powerlessness. As I said, I recognized that guy in Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm, in Roth's Portnoy and Zuckerman. (With Wilhelm, the recognition was semi-literal: when I read Seize the Day for the first time, my mental picture of Tommy Wilhelm was Colan's interpretation of Howard the Duck as a human man.)

Another Gerberism was the keystone for the idea of superhero as Jewish myth: Superman. At Marvel, Gerber created Wundarr the Aquarian, the superhero who is rocketed to Earth from a dying planet--except Wundarr arrives on Earth full-grown, with the intelligence of a child. With Mary Skrenes, Gerber created Omega The Unknown, a character that riffs equally on Superman and Captain Marvel--Omega is a hero come to Earth with a strange bond to a boy orphan. Later, Gerber went on to do several offbeat Superman projects. My favorite was the final issue of DC Presents where Gerber packed his entire pitch for Superman into one baffling Hail Mary: an insane Mr. Mxyzptlk destroys Argo City such that Metropolis is layered with a fine mist of kryptonite, and Superman, his power reduced, must live in pain and discomfort whenever he's Clark Kent, treading over the kryptonite impacted sidewalks of the city.

In fact, at the heart of Gerber's best work is Superman and Clark Kent: the powerlessness lurking in the heart of the powerful and, equally as important, the power lurking in the heart of the powerless. (After all, it's usually Rory and Norris and Howard who are the tipping point in the battle between good and evil.) Such paradoxes transcended the two scoops of ego gratification and bathetic male self-pity served up in the work of Stan Lee and most of his successors. While far from immune to such weaknesses (Gerber's worst work is like reading Harlan Ellison at his most histrionic), the duality of power-in-powerlessness and powerlessness-in-power which Gerber returned to thematically was a genuine belief in the world, founded on the way he saw it work: cults and corporations collapsed under their own weight; the little guy, though screwed, could still wrest victory from the jaws of defeat if he just kept at it.

I could type another ten thousand words and not get at the power of these and other achievements. (I didn't even start in on that awesome Daredevil storyline where the villain is an intelligent malevolent baboon whose pheromones make every woman his slave and who slugs it out with our hero on the roof of the White House, to say nothing of Starhawk, the first transgender superhero, Angarr The Screamer, the showgirl and the ostrich, KISS, Doctor Bong, etc., etc.) But what I should say is, Steve Gerber kept at it. He kept at it after Cat Yronwode (I believe) wrote an editorial about how his work no longer moved her; he kept at it after Jim Shooter cruelly (and inelegantly) mocked him in the first issue of Secret Wars II; he kept at it after Nevada was unceremoniously dumped, after Hard Time was canceled, after Marvel published Lethem's Omega The Unknown miniseries over Gerber's initial objections. Steve Gerber kept at it six days before he died, working in the middle of the night working on his current assignment, Doctor Fate. I'd like to believe in an afterlife, and Steve Gerber is there, keeping at it, seeing his stories end the way he wanted them to, when he wanted them to. If such an afterlife exists, it would be a world Gerber never spent much time considering, a world he never made--which would bring him, I hope, both bemusement and amusement, even if it meant he was finally the angry outsider no longer. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arriving 2/13/2008

Back from Texas and the DC RRP (not that you knew I was there), and the cold etc is done. Give me a day or two to catch up and I'll write a few reviews...\

Here's what we're getting this week:

100 BULLETS #88
30 DAYS OF NIGHT BEYOND BARROW #3
AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #17
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #550 BND
AMERICAN VIRGIN #23
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #116
ASTRO CITY THE DARK AGE SPECIAL #2 BEAUTIE
ATOMIC ROBO #5 (OF 6)
BAT LASH #3 (OF 6)
BATMAN STRIKES #42
BETTY & VERONICA SPECTACULAR #81
BLACK PANTHER #34
BOOSTER GOLD #0
BPRD 1946 #2 (OF 5)
BRIT #4
CAPTAIN MARVEL #3 (OF 5)
CHEMIST #2
CORY DOCTOROWS FUTURISTIC TALES HERE AND NOW #5 (OF 6)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 11
DEAD OF NIGHT FEATURING MAN THING #1 (OF 4)
DMZ #28
DOCTOR WHO CLASSICS #3
EVIL DEAD #2 (OF 4)
FANTASTIC FOUR #554
FANTASTIC FOUR LOST ADVENTURE
FOUNDATION #2 (OF 5) (RES)
GEN 13 #17
GHOST RIDER #20
GOON #21
GOTHAM UNDERGROUND #5 (OF 9)
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #5
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #21
GUTWRENCHER #1 (OF 3)
HERO BY NIGHT ONGOING #2
HUNTER #1
IRON MAN ENTER MANDARIN #5 (OF 6)
IRON MAN POWER PACK #4 (OF 4)
JACK STAFF #14
JLA CLASSIFIED #52
JOHN WOOS SEVEN BROTHERS SERIES 2 #5
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #11
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK #8
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #36
MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS #6
NECESSARY EVIL #4
NEGATIVE BURN #17
NEW AVENGERS #38 SII
NEW EXILES #2
NEXT ISSUE PROJECT #1 (FANTASTIC COMICS #24)
NOVA ANNUAL #1
PUNISHER FORCE OF NATURE
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #16
RAMAYAN 3392 AD RELOADED #4 (RES)
SALVATION RUN #4 (OF 7)
SIMON DARK #5
SNAKED #3 (OF 5)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #185
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #7
ST TNG INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #2 (OF 5)
SUICIDE SQUAD RAISE THE FLAG #6 (OF 8)
SUPERMAN #673
SWORD #5
TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #27
TALL TALES OF VISHNU SHARMA PANCHATANTRA #2 (OF 5)
TINY TITANS #1
ULTIMATE IRON MAN II #3 (OF 4)
UNCLE SCROOGE #372
WALKING DEAD #46
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #687
WARHAMMER 40K BLOOD & THUNDER CVR B #3 (OF 5)
WOLVERINE #62 DWS
WONDER WOMAN #17
X-FACTOR #28 DWS
X-FORCE #1 DWS

Books / Mags / Stuff
4 GIRLFRIENDS GN (A)
ANITA BLAKE VH HC FIRST DEATH
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL TP VOL 18 SPARROW NET
BLUE EYES GN NEW PTG (A)
CITY OF OTHERS TP
CLANDESTINE CLASSIC PREM HC
CONNOR HAWKE DRAGONS BLOOD TP
CROSSING MIDNIGHT TP VOL 02 A MAP OF MIDNIGHT
DEAD EYES OPEN
DOMINION CONFLICT 1 NO MORE NOISE TP (NEW PTG)
DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES HC VOL 04
EXILES TP VOL 16 STARTING OVER
FALL OF CTHULHU TP VOL 01 FUGUE (RES)
HEAVY METAL MAGAZINE SPRING 2008
HELLBOY NOVEL EMERALD HELL
HEROBEAR AND THE KID TP VOL 01 INHERITANCE (NEW PTG) (O/A)
INDIANA JONES OMNIBUS TP VOL 01
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA HC VOL 02 LIGHTNING SAGA
LEES TOY REVIEW #184 FEB 2008
LITTLE NOTHINGS GN VOL 01 CURSE OF THE UMBRELLA
SHOWCASE PRESENTS ENEMY ACE TP VOL 01
SPARROW RICK BERRY
SPIDER MAN TP BACK IN BLACK
SUB-MARINER TP REVOLUTION
TIME MASTERS TP
TOYFARE TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED CVR #128
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN HC VOL 09
WITCHBLADE TP VOL 01 WITCH HUNT (DIRECT MARKET ED)
WOLVERINE ORIGINS PREM HC VOL 04 OUR WAR
WOLVERINE TP EVOLUTION

What looks good to YOU?

-B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useless Information: Graeme finishes off January's haul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arriving 2/6/2008

If I can ever shake this cold, I'll post some reviews, but it has it me in its icy grip, and it is all I can do to handle my minimal levels of work... 2000 AD #1569 2000 AD #1570 ABE SAPIEN THE DROWNING #1 (OF 5) ALL NEW ATOM #20 AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #549 BND ANITA BLAKE VH GUILTY PLEASURES #8 (OF 12) ANNIHILATION CONQUEST #4 (OF 6) ARMY OF DARKNESS #6 LONG ROAD HOME BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #12 BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ORIGINS #2 BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #158 BOYS #15 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #11 CIRCLE #3 CLANDESTINE #1 (OF 5) COUNTDOWN SPECIAL OMAC COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 12 CRAWL SPACE XXXOMBIES #3 CRICKETS #2 (NOTE PRICE) DARKNESS #2 KEOWN CVR A DETECTIVE COMICS #841 DOKTOR SLEEPLESS #5 EXTERMINATORS #26 FABLES #69 FULL CIRKLE II #1 (OF 3) (RES) HALLOWEEN NIGHTDANCE #1 SIENKIEWICZ CVR B INFINITY INC #6 JONAH HEX #28 JUNGLE GIRL PX ED #4 JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED #42 JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #12 LOOKING FOR GROUP #2 LOONEY TUNES #159 LORDS OF AVALON SWORD OF DARKNESS #1 (OF 6) MAINTENANCE #8 MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MOBY DICK #1 (OF 6) MAVIS #5 METAL MEN #6 (OF 8) MIDKNIGHT #2 MIDNIGHTER #16 MOON KNIGHT #15 MS MARVEL #24 NEW AVENGERS POSTER BOOK NIGHTWING #141 NORTHLANDERS #3 OMEGA UNKNOWN #5 (OF 10) OVERMAN #3 (OF 5) PHANTOM #21 REICH #1 SCALPED #14 SCUD THE DISPOSABLE ASSASSIN #21 SILVER SURFER IN THY NAME #4 (OF 4) SPACE DOUBLES #1 SPAWN #175 SPEED RACER CHRONICLES O/T RACER #1 STAR WARS LEGACY #19 STAR WARS REBELLION #11 SUPERGIRL #26 TEEN TITANS YEAR ONE #2 (OF 6) TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD IMAGE ED #10 TWELVE #2 (OF 12) UBU BUBU #1 UNCANNY X-MEN #495 DWS VINYL UNDERGROUND #5 WARHAMMER FORGE OF WAR CVR A #5 (OF 6) WASTELAND #14 WILDSTORM REVELATIONS #3 (OF 6) WITCHBLADE #115 SARA PEZZINI CVR A

Books / Mags / Stuff ALL STAR COMPANION VOL 3 TP BAKERS BABIES & KITTENS HC BATMAN FALSE FACES HC CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #28 MR FANTASTIC CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #58 YELLOWJACKET CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #59 LUKE CAGE CONTRABAND GN DIANA PRINCE WONDER WOMAN TP VOL 01 ESSENTIAL AVENGERS TP VOL 06 FALLEN ANGEL TP VOL 04 FIRE AWAY GN FORGOTTEN REALMS HC DARK ELF TRILOGY OMNIBUS FORTEAN TIMES #231 GEEK MONTHLY #11 GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN BESSIE COLEMAN DARING STUNT PILOT GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN BOOKER T WASHINGTON GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN HARRIET TUBMAN & UNDERGROUND RAILROAD GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN JACKIE ROBINSON GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN MARTIN LUTHER KING JR GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN NAT TURNERS SLAVE REBELLION GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN ROSA PARKS MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT GRAPHIC LIBRARY GN WILMA RUDOLPH HORRORWOOD VOL 1 TP I NEVER LIKED YOU SC NEW PTG (RES) INCOGNEGRO HC INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET GN ITS A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DONT WEAKEN TP NEW PTG (RES) JUMPER JUMPSCARS TP LOST OFFICIAL MAGAZINE SPECIAL #15 PX ED MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN TP VOL 02 DIGEST NARUTO OFFICIAL FANBOOK NICOLAS CAGES VOODOO CHILD TP VOL 01 SHADOWPLAY ONE SMALL VOICE TP RED STRING TP VOL 02 ROBIN 13 INCH COLLECTOR FIGURE RUROUNI KENSHIN VIZ BIG ED GN VOL 01 (OF 9) (PP SCALPED TP VOL 02 CASINO BOOGIE SECOND WAVE TP VOL 01 (RES) SLAINE GN WARRIORS DAWN SUPER VILLAIN TEAMUP MODOKS 11 TP SUPERMAN BATMAN SER 5 BALANCED INNER CASE ASST (NET) SUPERMAN CHRONICLES TP VOL 04 THOR VISIONARIES WALT SIMONSON TP VOL 05 ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN TP VOL 19 DEATH OF THE GOBLIN

What looks good to YOU?

-B

I can hear the grass grow: Graeme gets Green

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

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