Weekly Haul: February 10

Amazing Spider-Man #620 (Marvel Comics) And so ends another Dan Slott/Marcos Martin Spider-Man story arc (this time with Javier Pulido splitting up art duties with Martin), and, for the third time in a row, I don’t have much of anything to say about it. It’s gorgeous looking again, Slott’s scripting is solid and everything you’d want out of a Spider-Man comic, even if it’s not reinventing the media or likely to change the life of the reader in anyway.

If this were the regular creative team and ASM were a monthly, I’m sure this would be on my pull-list. As an almost-but-not-quite-weekly with rotating creative teams though, this creative team is more a matter of stars aligning occasionally, and I’m always glad to see them do so.


Batman and Robin #8 (DC Comics) Part two of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s three-part “Blackest Knight” story arc, a pretty nice demonstration that Morrison + A Great Artist + Superheroes = Good Reading. Given the title of this storyline and what most of the characters have been up to lately, the book moves in a very unexpected direction, and man is it great to be surprised by a superhero comic in 2010. Pity about another little screw-up with dialogue bubble attribution on page 11, after the same type of mistake in the previous issue.

By the way, this issue contains a four-issue preview of some First Wave comic or another, featuring artwork by Rags Morales, and, I may be biased on account of loving Rags Morales so deeply, but it looks really, really nice. It’s in black and white, and given how good it looks, it seems like coloring it would be a damn shame.


Super Friends #24 (DC) This is a perfect example of a comic you can judge completely by its cover. Regular cover artist J. Bone even does the interiors this issue, and it’s the story of pretty much every DC mad scientist you can think of (and probably a bunch you didn’t even know existed, or forgot existed) vs. the Super Friends.

Specifically, a hotel on Oolong Island is hosting a conference for the group W.O.R.M.S. (The World Organization for Research in Mad Science). Host Lex Luthor has gathered them all here for a mad science contest, in which the will unveil their most deadly inventions.

I only read this title sporadically (usually depending on who’s drawing it, what the premise for the issue is and what the cover looks like), but of those I’ve read, this is by far my favorite, and not just because writer Sholly Fisch gives so much play to favorite characters like Mr. Mind and Dr. Sivana. Almost every single panel includes a gag or reference of some kind, be it a little elbow in the ribs to some obscure bit of DC continuity or character name-drop, or a fairly opaque pop culture reference (like Professor Bravo introducing his plastic robots to Green Lantern).

I know this is a kid’s comic, but I swear I actually laughed out loud once while reading it—the last panel on page 13-to-first panel of page 14 transition—and I think if you have any love of the sillier side of the DC Universe (or the more neglected corners of their extensive character catalog) you’ll dig this issue.

And if you happen to be a fan of Bone’s artwork, be sure to check out Blog@ tomorrow morning.


Uncanny X-Men: First Class #8 (Marvel) This is my first issue of this comic, and I think the reason I picked it up despite not having read the last seven issues or even really liking the X-Men all that much is probably pretty clear from Cameron Stewart’s cover: This is a comic book about irritating Irish stereotype superhero Banshee fighting a pack of leprechauns.

The story inside isn’t quite as exciting or silly as the one the cover suggest, unfortunately. This is probably something that all dedicated, reading-since-Claremont X-Men fans already know, but apparently leprechauns aren’t really all that big a deal or even at all unusual in the Marvel Universe. They just sort of live and work side by side with the human staff at Cassidy Keep, Banshee’s ancestral home in Ireland. Here, a leprechaun is as plain and prosaic a thing as, I don’t know, a Wakandian or an Atlantean or Latverian…a humdrum population that exists in the Marvel Universe.

That fact doesn’t take all that much away from the story, mind you, it was just somewhat disappointing to me to see leprechauns running around and no one reacting like, “Holy shit! There are leprechauns everywhere!” (The closest anyone comes to even remarking upon out-of-ordinariness of leprechauns is Wolverine commenting “This is the dumbest fight I’ve ever been in,” while being swarmed with tiny little mind-controlled fairy folk.

Writer Scott Gray (Yeah, I know marvel.com says Jeff Parker, but it’s really Scott Gray) has Banshee and his plainclothes pals Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler accompany him to Cassidy Keep, where his leprechaun tutor was just found dead of an apparent suicide. They investigate it mystery novel/police procedural style, and, during the climactic drawing room scene, the murderer summons a mess of fairies for a big fight scene, since this is a superhero comic.

It’s pretty good genre comics writing, and Blanco’s art is pretty great (and a fair bit greater than many of the artwork you’ll see in many of Marvel’s more popular and “important” books, to be honest).

It’s just not as awesome as the cover. Also, Banshee and the other foreign-born X-Men don’t talk in their crazy phonetic accents that Claremont used to give them, and while they may be an improvement, it sure makes reading their dialogue out loud a lot less fun.

Weekly "Haul": February 3rd

Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #3 (DC Comics) Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott wrap-up their three-part miniseries chronicling Wonder Woman’s involvement in the first two-thirds of Blackest Night in this issue (All these three-issue Blackest Night minis are going to make for teensy, 66-page trades, aren’t they?), which, like the previous issue, seems set entirely between the panels of Blackest Night #6.

Wonder Woman is now wearing a Star Sapphire love-powered ring (and awful fuchsia latex costume), and she flies around Coast City for awhile, chatting with Star Sapphire Carol Ferris, re-defeating Black Lantern Max Lord and re-fighting Red Lantern Mera.

At the climax of the Wondy/Mera re-match, she lassos Aquaman’s ex, and the pair each learn something dramatic about one another, but after reading the sequence three or four times now, I can’t for the life of me figure out what it was they learned, exactly. Am I missing a page?

It has something to do with something Mera didn’t tell Aquaman, I guess…whatever she’s thinking in the image of her staring down at a sleeping A-man. (Unless it’s just that she never even wanted to have kids, which I thought was just the sort of thing a mother who has replaced her heart with a rage-powered alien artifact might scream while vomiting napalm-like hate-blood on the resurrected zombie corpse of her dead infant. The fact that it’s a plot point at the climax of a tie-in a Wonder Woman tie-in series, and that its not made explicit here anyway, is somehow infinitely weirder).

Scott’s pencil art is, as always, top notch, although I could have done without the photographic sky and sea dropped into the background of the panels behind some of her figure drawing (I assume that was the colorist?) You know, drawing a horizon line, some clouds and waves isn’t really all that hard…if you can draw Wonder Woman, you can handle that stuff easy).

The scene where the ladies learn secrets* about one another, but Rucka and Scott keep too coy about, is my favorite part, as it shows all the things Wonder Woman and Mera have in common: They both wear tiaras, they’ve both smooched Justice Leaguers, they’ve both seen younger loved ones brutalized, and they both occasionally handle phallic ancient weapons. Why, they’re practically sisters!


The Question #37 (DC) This week’s back-from-cancellation, Blackest Night tie-in/revival reunites original Question creators Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan with current Question II writer Greg Rucka (and current Question II artist Cully Hamner even handles the cover).

The two writers work together remarkably well. The credits don’t make the division of labor explicit, and they simply share credit rather than each writing a different section…as far as I can tell. The narration, particularly during the re-cap the back-from-cancellation one-issue revival formula demands, sounds like O’Neil, as does much of the non-Montoya dialogue, while Montoya sounds like a Rucka character.

It’s really quite seamless, as is the art team of Denys Cowan inked by Bill Sienkiewicz and John Stanisci—I honestly can’t tell where one artist’s work ends and the other’s begins.

As for the storyline, it’s simply The Questions plugged into the now overly familiar formula of Dead Character History Recap, Dead Character Appears and Tries to Elicit Emotional Response from Intended Victim, Fight, Hero Wins. In this case, Vic Sage comes after Montoya, and finds his old supporting characters there as well.

Given that O’Neil and Rucka are working with interesting supporting characters, however, it’s a rather engaging read, at least in as much as Aristotle Rodor and Lady Shiva both see unique opportunities in the dead rising premise of Blackest Night and attempt to seize them. (Also, points for finding a different end to the conflict than simply destroying the Black Lantern through light as in most of the tie-ins). It’s almost too bad this one’s only one issue, but then, it does end with the new Question vowing to hunt down and stop the old one, so maybe this will continue in the TEC back-ups or somewhere.


Leave it to PET Vol. 3 (Viz Media/Viz Kids) This is my I’m only going to read two singles this week? Should I spend the change from the twenty dollar bill on something else? purchase of the week. Exactly how long can I continue to find amusement from Kenji Sonishi’s short gag strips about an ever-growing legion of super-robots created from recyclable materials bound to help the masters who recycled them in the first place, mostly with such tasks as retrieving a fallen mechanical pencil refill or skinned knee? Well, after finishing this volume, I’m at about 540 pages of it, and I’m still really enjoying it.



*I guess Wonder Woman’s is maybe that she loved Batman and never told him before he “died”…?

Weekly Haul: January 27th

Amazing Spider-Man #619 (Marvel Comics) I’m really only reading this for the art, but it’s worth noting that Dan Slott’s scripting remains highly accessible, and contains a clever idea (Mysterio’s behind-the-scenes mob takeover) or intriguing hook (For example, what’s gotten into Aunt May?!) or two. I imagine it’s even more appealing for long-time Spidey fans, for whom names and faces like Captain Stacy, The Big Man, Hammerhead and Silvermane mean something. For me, the greatest pleasure is simply marveling at the way artis Marcos Martin draws a punch, or a facial expression or the hunch of Spider-Man’s shoulders. If ASM looked this good each week, and was written at least this good, I’d happily read it regularly.


The Atom and Hawkman #46 (DC Comics) This is another of those Blackest Night tie-ins that are themselves back from the dead, and it’s one of the tie-ins that seems more likely to be relevant to the overall storyline, given that it’s written by Geoff Johns.

I suppose there is a relevant moment or two, as it focuses on the newly Indigo Lantern-ized Ray Palmer trying to hold off Black Lanterns while the original Indigo Lantern sends out an SOS to the various Lantern Corps, but the majority of the issue is merely a recap of Ray Palmer’s history, specifically as it pertains to his ex-wife Jean Loring, and a reenactment of the nonsensical murder scene from the start of Identity Crisis.

Ryan Sook is the artist whose name is on the cover, and in the solicitation, but Sook merely contributes the cover and, I’m going to guess, maybe the first 10 or 12 pages of the book, while the not very Sook-like Fernando Pasarin finishes the rest of the book. (Please see this post at Funnybook Babylon for a good—if depressing—accounting of just how often these creative team changes happened in Big Two super-comics this month. Yeesh).

So if you’re buying this just for its relevancy to the Blackest Night storyline, you can probably just read the last three pages in the shop. And if you’re buying it mainly because you like Sook’s art, well, be advised there’s much less of it than originally advertised.


Batman and Robin #7 (DC) Oh hey, here’s a novel idea! Why not put an artist who is capable of drawing comics pages on one of the most-read books in the direct market?

After a three-issue, nigh unintelligible run by Philp Tan, in which the script had to fight through the art to get to the reader, writer Grant Morrison is joined by an on-again off-again collaborator, Cameron Stewart, who has calibrated his style just enough to make his art look slightly more serious and realistic than in some of his other books.

Morrison does what I appreciate most about his superhero work, creating things at a breathless clip. Dick Grayson has teamed up with The Knight and Squire (Oh what I’d give for a Morrison/Stewart miniseries featuring that pair!), somewhat accidentally, Batwoman, to fight some crime in England and do what you’d expect people who know about Lazarus Pit’s to do when a loved one dies.

Along the way, Morrison introduces at least a half-dozen British rogues—most of them simply by name, but still—and London’s answer to Arkham, which is where a Beefeater (The Beefeater?!) currently serves as a guard.

It’s pretty much perfect super-comics, and, like the first three issues of Batman and Robin, tainted only by the knowledge that this artist won’t be sticking around for long either. (Well, there are some misplaced dialogue balloons on page 19, but otherwise…)(UPDATE: Here's a scan of the panel at Comics212.net)


Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam #12 (DC) You know, I’m pretty sure “the wisdom of Solomon” and “the ability to calculate the timing of the electrons and atoms in solid matter so that you can pass through it” are two entirely different powers…


Green Lantern #50 (DC) First and most importantly, this issue features an appearance of another Black Lantern character I had specifically requested seeing, so whether it was merely a coincidence or if writer Geoff Johns is an avid reader of EDILW and is constantly trying to make me happy, thanks for Black Lantern Aquababy!
Second, congratulations to Geoff Johns for sticking with the Green Lantern title for fifty issues. It’s almost impossible to overstate what a rare achievement that is for Big Two super-comics in this day in age; I think Brian Michael Bendis’ run on Ultimate Spider-Man/Ultimate Comics Spider-Man is the only current Big Two superhero run in that ballpark*.

I give Johns a lot of shit on this site, but I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that he’s dedicated himself to long-term storytelling like this—and that DC has allowed him to do so—is really worth applauding, and that commitment is (in large part) why the Blackest Night story/event is doing as well as it is. It took Johns being willing to commit five years of his life (well, however long it takes him to write a monthly comic script every month over the course of five years, anyway) and DC being willing to let a writer do what that writer wanted for such a long period of time to get to Blackest Night, which is working out exceedingly well for both Johns and DC. (And I hope the folks at DC have noticed).

Now, as for this particular issue, it is—thankfully—a return to form after last month’s hodgepodge GL #49, which was by far the worst issue of this series.

Pencil artist Doug Mahnke is back on art, and he draws all 29 pages of it himself, even though four other artists help with his inking (This issue’s oversized and costs $3.99, although it’s worth noting that there are three double-page splash panels and a single full-page splash panel, so it doesn’t necessarily “read” oversized). As Mahnke has proved again and again on this title, he’s exceptional at drawing horror and monster motifs, possessing an all-too-rare ability to marry a great deal of detail with slightly loose superhero design work. There isn’t really a bad page or bum panel in this whole book, and, when you consider what #49 looked like, that is an accomplishment.

As for the story side of things, well you see the above sequence, right? The one where an undead Aquaman presents his wife, who has vomited out her heart and all of her blood and had the replaced with hate-blood, with their undead zombie baby, and she vomits acid hate-blood on them both?

This is another of those issues where Johns is pirouetting on the razor’s edge between awesome and stupid, and he’s just cold doing a whole ballet routine this month. The New Guardians (the rainbow corps Hal Jordan assembled) and the New New Guardians (the seconds that Ganthet recruited in the last issue of Blackest Night) team-up, and devote most of this issue to fighting the Black Lantern Spectre.

For reasons not entirely clear to me**, they can’t defeat it, so Hal remembers back to Green Lantern: Rebirth and decides the only way to beat the Spectre is to allow Parallax to take possession of him again, which happens in a neat little panel of the giant space bug climbing into Hal’s mouth (Damn, I shoulda scanned that one too, actually).

The cover gives away this month’s “Holy shit!” cliffhanger ending, but then, this storyline has been all about giving fans exactly what they want rather than surprising them, so I doubt anyone’s going to hold that against the book.


Justice League of America #41 (DC) Well, this is sort of awkward. James Robinson and Mark Bagley start their run on the title for real now, people! with their fourth issue on the book, and yet the issue is set after Blackest Night (concluding in March) and after Justice League: Cry For Justice (concluding next month, if it keeps its current schedule).

Our narrator Donna Troy (ugh) tells us that they “survived” Blackest Night… "Prometheus too…some of us anyway.” And that’s where we start, after the conclusion of Cry (which is pretty well-spoiled here, so not sure why anyone is actually going to buy #7 next month) and Blackest Night, and, while there probably wasn’t too much suspense about it, it turns out Donna, Wonder Woman, Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen all get de-Black Lanternized and are still alive and not wearing any unusual rings at the end of the crossover.

This is an oversized, $3.99 issue (and one fortunate to have one of the few pencillers who could manage to draw 30 pages a month as its regular artist), seemingly devoted to putting together a new League.

Wonder Woman asks Donna and some Titans to join Dr. Light on a new Justice League, Dr. Light asks her friends from Metropolis (The Guardian and Mon- “I hope he gets a codename soon” El) and of course Hal Jordan and Ollie Queen.

Robinson spends some time on some of the characters’ motivations—particularly Donna’s—and the writing’s decent enough, although perhaps because of the publisher’s scheduling difficulties, question marks kept cropping up in the team assemblage (Like, why can’t Wonder Woman join the team, for example). He also sets a weird scene back in 1777, featuring frontier hero Tomahawk, Lady Liberty and other characters of the era.

How that will fit in with what’s going on isn’t made explicit yet, but it is intriguing and, for the first time in a long time, I’m kind of excited about the next issue of JLoA.

On the downside, this issue was unfortunately Congorilla-free (cover appearance aside), and, while I don’t mind it if it’s only temporary (as I have to assume it is), I really, really don’t care for Starfire and, especially, Donna Troy, and hope the line-up will continue to get tweaked as additional characters become available again.



*Um, except for like a half-dozen other writers and titles I didn't think of as I typed that sentence, but my commenters did when they read it. Please see the comments for several other examples, perhaps the most salient to the Long, Well Planned Runs Leading To Successful Sales and Big Story/Events probably being Bendis on New Avengers and Ed Brubaker on Captain America.


**Okay, forgive the tangent about science and physics in the DC Universe here. As I understand The Spectre, it is a vaguely anthropomorphized aspect of element of God, an angel-esque being that is usually bonded to the spirit of a dead human being to give it something of a consciousness. As I understand the Black Lantern rings, they aren’t really bringing the dead back to life, but are animating their corpses, running advanced programs to imitate the personalities of the deceases, as well as their powers.

In the case of the Black Lantern Spectre, though, there is no body to bond with. In a previous issue of Blackest Night, a ring took possession of the Spectre’s current host, Crispus Allen. But Allen is himself a ghost, and doesn’t have a body either.

If The Spectre is entirely immaterial, I guess I don’t understand how a ring can possess it, let alone acess all the divine powers. For example, we’ve also seen Black Lantern rings posess Deadman, but basically one took his body and made a Black Lantern Deadman, while the ghost/spirit version of Deadman remained unaffected. What makes the rules different for the two dead characters?

So far, the Black Lantern Spectre has just been growing and shape-chaning and suchlike, so it’s possible the ring is just possessing, like, a bunch of ectoplasm or something, and hasn’t accessed the Spectre Force itself, but I don’t really know. They might have explained all this in last week’s Phantom Stranger #42, which had a Black Lantern Spectre on the cover, but I didn’t read that.

Weekly Haul: January 20th

Amazing Spider-Man #618 (Marvel Comics) This is a Marcos Martin issue, so you’re probably going to want to just go ahead and buy it.

The Avengers Vs. Atlas #1 (Marvel) The Jeff Parker-written team of quirky heroes may not be able to hold down their own title, but they sure are ubiquitous these days. In addition to their appearance in a back-up strip in this week’s Incredible Hercules, they’re also front and center here, the first issue of a four-part series in which they cross paths once again with Marvel’s A-list hero team.

Parker and Gabriel Hardman handle the creative duties, and the story is straightforward without being tediously so. The Agents are trying to put down one of the many evil operations that make up the criminal empire they’ve inherited, while some sort of weird timestream hinkiness is causing obscure Avengers adversaries to appear here and there. The Agents team-up with the New Avengers to take on one of these, but the New Avengers turn into the Old Avengers when the hinkiness touches them, leaving us with a cliffhanger ending.

Justifying the $4 price tag is an eight-page back-up story spotlighting Namora. It’s a satisfyingly complete story, particularly so given how short it is. It too is by Parker, with art by EDIW favorite Takeshi Miyazawa.

If I were to complain about any aspect of the comic, it would probably be Humberto Ramos’ pretty generic three random characters posing randomly cover, in which none of the characters really even look all that much like themselves. If this weren’t in my pull-list, meaning an employee at my local comic shop handed it to me with the rest of my comics, I don’t think I would have even noticed it on the new comics rack this week.


Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13 (DC Comics) Sholly Fisch, Robert Pope and Scott McRae turned out what was hands-down my favorite comic of the week. Our man Batman breaks his leg during an adventure with Angel and The Ape, which leaves him reluctantly nursing his injury in the Batcave, while every criminal in Gotham City seizes the opportunity to run wild.

Who can possibly stop The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Deadshot, Killer Croc and Bane? Perhaps Green Arrow, Aquaman, Plastic Man and Captain Marvel, all dressed in not-very-convincing Batman costumes? (For example, GA still wears a belt with a green G-shaped belt buckle; Aquaman’s blonde beard flows from the front of his cowl, and so on).

I don’t want really want to spoil the climax here, but suffice it to say that if the two paragraphs above sound exciting to you, you’re going to love the last two pages of this.


Blackest Night: The Flash #2 (DC) You know, I think the Blackest Night event would be a ton more fun if Geoff Johns were writing all of the tie-ins. This is one of the rare ones that seems to fit in perfectly with what’s going on in the main series and Green Lantern, in terms of tone and approach. Even though much of it seems to take place far away from the main storyline in terms of relevance—that is, it’s more about what this particular group of characters is doing while the important shit’s going down in BN and GL than any of the important shit itself—it fits in perfectly organically.

That’s to be expected, given that it’s written by Geoff Johns, the event’s mastermind, but it’s worth pointing out if anyone in the reading audience has a limited budget/interest level for the event, and wants to stick with the more relevant/entertaining bits of the ever-expanding crossover event series thing.

As the cover indicates, this issue is mostly devoted to The Rogues versus The Black Lantern Rogues, which is awfully fun, as far as comically grim-and-grittied up Silver Age goofball villains trying to brutally murder one another can be.

The middle section is devoted to the now Blue Lantern-ized Barry Allen in Coast City, apparently detailing what happened between the panels of the previous issue of Blackest Night (after he got the ring, but before he posed for the two-page splash alongside the rest of the deputy New Guardians).

And hell, Johns even manages to get a pretty intriguing cliffhanger ending in at the last few panels here.

Scott Kolins is still handling the art, and it’s really great stuff. The resurrected Rogues feature some seriously boss designs, particularly the Black Lantern Top, whose horizontal stripes look better in black and white than green and gold, and whose head and arms seem to be on backwards.

Kolins also gets in some incredible speed effects, like that little swirl emanating from the lightning in The Top’s right on the cover, or Wally West’s vibrating, sliding punch on page 14.


Incredible Hercules #140 (Marvel) I would complain about the cover of this month’s issue, which prominently features both Spider-Man and Wolverine, despite the fact that neither of them make any appearance whatsoever in this issue (not even getting a one-panel cameo like USAgent), but the sound effect in the first panel on page 10 was so funny, I just couldn’t stay mad at this comic. Hercules and Amadeus’ solution to Hesphaestus’ diabolical “prisoner’s dilemma”-inspired death trap was amusingly clever as well.


Joe The Barbarian #1 (Vertigo/DC) This first issue of a new eight-part miniseries written by Grant Morrison is specially priced at just $1, and the price is right. There’s very little going on in this issue—in fact, so little that if you’ve read the solicitation for the issue you’ve pretty much read the comic book—but at least Vertigo’s not asking for more than the reading experience is worth.

Morrison introduces us to our title character, giving him a checklist of clichéd signifiers that Joe is a special adolescent, a dreamer and an outsider with talents not apparent to those around him...perhaps even including himself. Then, on page 19, he finds himself magically transported to a world where Optimus Prime, Talking Snake-Eyes and some less specific toys communicate with him.

Given the slow start, Morrison’s contributions seem negligible in this outing, and artist Sean Murphy is the real star. His work is incredible, and he’s able to infuse long, silent stretches—like a sequence in which Joe walks off the school bus, through his house and up to his bedroom—with a surprising amount of tension and drama.

I imagine it’s Morrison’s name that will get a lot of folks to pick up #1, but it’s Murphy’s work that will get most of them to pick up #2.


Power Girl #8 (DC) Hmm, are Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray pulling supervillains off my blog to use in Power Girl, or is it merely a happy coincidence that the previous issue featured a super-obscure Golden Age Wonder Woman villain I love, and this issue ends with a climactic cliffhanger reveal of my very favorite-est DC villain of all?

This is the second half of the Power Girl vs. Vartox storyline, in which the pair rather quickly dispatch with the unstoppable monsters and proceed to spend the bulk of the book on a date of sorts.

Thanks as much to Amanda Conner’s fun, highly expressive artwork and the subtle but detailed “acting” she does through her characters, this issue was incredibly funny. Even when a joke isn’t all that funny by itself, Conner can make it so with the degree of skill with which she tells it (The scene in which Vartox shows off his formal dinner wear for example, or the one where he accidentally burns down his head-ships kitchen, likely wouldn’t have worked out nearly as well if almost anyone other than Conner were drawing them).

I wasn’t planning on sticking around after this issue, but I guess I’ll try at least one more if You Know Who’s going to be in it (Although I’m not terribly fond of Conner’s redesign for him; I wouldn’t have even known he was who he is if the next issue blurb didn’t include his name).


Rasl #6 (Cartoon Books) It’s been so long since I read #5 that I don’t remember precisely what’s going on in this series, but I always enjoy each issue on its own terms. This one spends most of its time on the story of Nikolai Tesla, as drawn by Jeff Smith. Given that the story takes place in different dimensions, it was especially fun reading, as I wasn’t always sure which facts about Tesla were true in our dimension, which bits of information were divergences for the sake of the story and how far they might have diverged.

As long as this is published at its current pace, I’m probably going to be complete crap at reviewing it, but I’ll hopefully be better able to do so once it’s finished and I can re-read it all at once. In the meantime, I’m happy to buy whatever Smith feels inclined to write, draw and publish.


Starman #81 (DC) Have you read one Blackest Night tie-in? You have? Well congratulations, you’ve read them all. This one-issue revival of the dead/canceled Starman series has the formula down pat: Quick re-cap of a dead character’s history presented as a download of information to a Black Lantern ring, a dead character returns to wreak havoc and attempt to kill and/or just annoy the book’s hero, the book’s hero fairly easily destroys the Black Lantern.

This issue may be of greater interest than some of the other revivals, as it’s to a critically-acclaimed and fan-favorite series, and it’s written by that series’ original writer, James Robinson.

The Starman isn’t either of the ones Robinson spent the most attention on during his 80-issue run, but on David Knight, Jack’s older brother. He comes back as a Black Lantern, and it’s up to the few remaining heroes in Opal City to stop him—The Shade and the O’Dare family.

It’s among the best writing Robinson’s done for DC in the past few years, although I suppose that may sound a bit like feint praise, given the relative quality of so much of his work for DC in these past few years.

It might have been fun if DC could have reunited Robinson with artist Peter Snejbjerg for this issue, but the team of Fernando Dagnino and Bill Sienkiewicz do a fine job, Sienkiewicz’s finishes given many of the images an appropriately nervous energy. And hey, they did get Tony Harris back for the cover, so that’s cool.


Tiny Titans #24 (DC) The Ant’s uncle, Uncle Ant, has one of the weirdest and most specific superpowers I’ve ever heard of.

Weekly Haul: January 6th

Batman Confidential #40 (DC Comics) There’s something tremendously exciting about any Batman comic in which the publisher lets someone draw Commissioner Gordon like this:

That someone is, of course, Maxx creator Sam Kieth, who has certainly earned whatever leeway he gets, and the Batman comic he happens to be writing and drawing is Batman Confidential, the publisher’s “Who gives a fuck?”, anything goes, it’s-not-like-anyone-reads/cares/pays attention-to-it-anyway one.

I’m not sure when Kieth first drew the Dark Knight, but the first time I saw his Batman was in 1989’s Secret Origins Special #1, wherein he leant his then highly stylized but still well within the the accepted range of regular superhero art skills to The Penguin segment of the story.

In the 20 years since, Kieth’s work hs only gotten more extreme and more loose—it’s no longer exaggerated so much as expressionistic, an no longer cartoony so much as cartooning. I’m sure it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and he certainly wouldn’t be the ideal choice to draw someone else’s Batman script, but this one, a four-part arc entitled “Ghosts,” is all Kieth—he writes, he draws and he co-colors with Jose Villarrubia.

It’s…unusual.

It’s winter in Gotham and someone or something is killing homeless people (a starting point for Batman stories so familiar that I would conservatively estimate that this is the one billionth time I’ve read about a someone or smeothing killing homeless people in Gotham City). The only clues are the copious amounts of sulphur around the chewed up bodies.

Batman is on the case, and encounters a…something. A ghost or demon or entity of some kinds—a sentient, malignant doodle, as Kieth draws it—that seems to know more about Batman’s origin story than most people inside Batman comics should know.

Also involved is a blind social worker who was similarly a victim to gun violence as a child and who also happens to be a beautiful young woman, giving Kieth the opportunity to focus on one of his favorite subjects for the space of a few panels.

Kieth’s art—his lay-outs, his designs, his staging, his colors—are all so dramatic and, more importantly, particular that the what isn’t nearly as important as the how. At this early stage, it’s difficult to assess the exact story he’s telling, but for now I think it’s worthwhile if for no other reason than the way he’s choosing to tell it.



Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #2 (DC) Writer Greg Rucka is taking an extremely strange tack with this three-part tie-in to Blackest Night, which functions a bit like bonus scenes of a Blackest Night movie, cut from the final version of the story due to their relative unimportance, but available here for hardcore Wonder Woman fans an obsessives who want to know exactly what Wonder Woman was doing when she wasn’t on-panel during in Blackest Night.

The first issue was set before she joined the main narrative in the main series, and followed her as she dealt with a Black Lantern incursion in her home town. This second issue jumps ahead to page 12 of last week’s Blackest Night #6, when Mera has escaped a Black Lantern ring and finds herself facing a Black Lanternized Wonder Woman.

I suppose it’s unlikely that anyone’s reading BL:WW and not also reading Blackest Night—I sure hope not, for those hypothetical readers’ sakes, as Wonder Woman landing in Coast City and being turned into a Black Lantern by Nekron happens between issues and isn’t mentioned or explained at all.

But Rucka’s skipping around isn’t even the weirdest part of this issue. He inserts an extremely brutal fight between Mera and Wonder Woman that apparently took place between panels of the eight pages or between the time the pair of women do battle and the time their fight is broken up by magic rings, a fight that takes up the first half of the book.

The second half of the book has Black Lantern Wonder Woman brutally slaughtering Wonder Girl, Black Lantern Troia and her own mother, making out with Current Batman Dick Grayson, being visited by Aphrodite, The Goddess of Love, and then getting her love-powered Star Sapphire ring and costume.

How come the dead Wonder Girl doesn’t get a black ring and get resurrected as a zombie like all the other fallen superheroes? Why does Wonder Woman’s “love” in Blackest Night #6 seem to be for the Earth itself, whereas here that love is more like lust for Bruce Wayne? Don’t worry about it—it’s all a dream sequence. Explains Aphrodite:

You have done nothing Diana. Nothing. They, like this place, only a figment. A place I made where your possession could run free and without harm…to save you from yourself.

This raises a weird question about the conflict in Blackest Night regarding the Olympians and why they decided to save exactly one person and ignore everything else and how they relate to Nekron, but, more pressingly, it raises a distasteful existential question regarding the whole comic.

A majority of it never “really” “happened,” it was all simply a fantasy creation from someone who wanted to allow the dark, decadent, destructive urges of the forces of entropy a way to vent and kill some time. Aphrodite had Wonder Woman imagine ripping Wonder Girls heart out and battle axing her family to distract the ring, and Rucka wrote it and DC published it to entertain us while we wait for the plot beats in Blackest Night to be struck.

That’s kind of clever, I suppose, but damn that’s cynical. Well, I say it’s clever, because I want to give Rucka the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not sure he deserves it—there is some incredibly poor writing on display here, perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the “argument” between Wonder Womans’ narration box and the Black Lantern ring, which puts a yellow box of a random pleading word next to black circle of one of the five or six words the ring knows at the top of almost every panel.

Unlike the first issue, this one doesn’t even have terribly strong art. Pencil artist Nicola Scott and inker Jonathan Glapion apparently fell a bit behind schedule, as a second art team consisting of Eduardo Pansica and Eber Ferreira are called upon to help fill out the the book, and the two teams don’t mesh well at all. For Scott’s part, the work she does provide here is very strong, but it doesn’t seem like she’s drawing the same events we saw last week in Blackest Night.

Wonder Woman and Mera are supposedly in a Coast City grave yard, surrounded by millions of zombies and a small group of superheroes, but here they’re on the docks and almost completely alone—there’s one panel in which Black Lantern Troia and Black Lantern Ice fight Cyborg and Fire in the background, and that’s it as far as connecting the events and settings.

The art Scott does provide kept this issue from being a complete waste of time—it’s not as ugly as some of Rucka’s previous, snuffier works like that issue of Action where Flamebird who ever just got the shit kicked out of her for 20 pages—but if you’re not into supergirl-on-supergirl violence and puzzling out the ponderous “rules” of the Black Lantern rings, this is a pretty skippable black skies tie-in to the event.


Orc Stain #1 (Image Comics) James Stokoe turns from manga-style, black-and-white digest collections to a more traditional comic book format with this new Image ongoing. The Wonton Soup creator is still working in a sci-fi/fantasy vein and he’s still an incredibly gifted artist, his flair for design making him an ideal world-builder, but this full-color comic book gets his work and his readers’ eyeballs a lot closer together.

The title refers to the mark the orcs have left on their world. A brief, four-paragraph prose prologue explains that the world has “cracked and convulsed under the indomitable mob of the orc” for “a million millenia,” and after centuries an orc known as “the Orctzar” has managed the previously impossible—uniting the world’s orcs from warring factions into a single empire.

The Tzar is after a particular weapon, and he’s told the key to finding it is a one-eyed orc…we then cut to a one-eyed orc, who's is a little bit different than other orcs. All orcs like hitting things,we learn, but this orc likes to hit things for a purpose—not simply to break them, but to open them.

Stokoe’s first issue is a gradual introduction to this strange world, which, despite the word orc and the general negative aspects assigned to them from Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons, isn’t like the stereotypical fantasy setting.

Stokoe builds huge, bright buildings that look like living organs made of stone. His orcs are brightly colored, dressed in garments that seem at once sci-fi and also ancient South American (and seem to have a lot of living or once-living things on them), and the mountains they travel through evoke European adventure comics, video games and maybe a touch of manga.

I can’t say I’ve never seen anything like it, as Wonton Soup is pretty similar, and aspects of the book reminded me of the work of Brandon Graham (particularly King City) and Paul Pope, maybe a little Corey S. Lewis here and there, and definitely Kazimir Strzepek’s Mourning Star, but the things I’ve seen that are kinda like it are just that—kinda like it. Stokoe puts them all together into a package that is excitingly original.

In the first issue, we’re mostly just being given the lay of the land—and what a weird, exciting, fascinating land it is—and it is perhaps too early to make any judgments about where Stokoe is going with the story, what he intends to do with this world he’s building. But I am excited to find out.

Oh hey, check this out:

That’s a safe. The thing in the middle of it’s torso is a door with a locking mechanism. One of the orcs refers to ist as a “bear safe,” but the one-eyed orc says it’s not a bear, but a gurpa. Whatever. That’s the kind of thing you find in Orc Stain.

And by the way, this book is only $2.99 for 32 full-color, ad-free pages (save for one on the inside back cover). That’s a hell of a value in today’s direct market, so you should totally buy the hell out of this.


Weird Western Tales #71 (DC) I had high hopes for this issue—that is, I bought it despite reservations about the writer and unfamiliarity with the artist—that were dashed before I’d even finished the first page.

The reason for those high hopes? Well, this is one of those neat one-issue revivals associated with DC’s Blackest Night event, in which the publisher brought a “dead” (i.e. canceled) book back to tell a story about the dead rising from the grave. This one also promised to feature some of DC’s old western characters, whom I was rather eager to see Black Lanternized.

The reason they were dashed? Well, look at the first page (You can download the first five here, if you like). A cowboy rides his horse into an Old West-y grave yard, to visit the grave of his ancestor, whose name sounds vaguely familiar, although I don’t recognize it. In the first panel, the grave has solid, smooth rounded sides. In the next panel, a big chunk of one of those sides is missing, taking pieces of the name with it. In the third panel, the grave is back to looking like it did in the first panel.

Am I nitpicking? Yeah, but isn’t the very first scene of the book a little early for art mistakes? It’s kind of hard to lose yourself in a story that starts out warning you that it’s no damn good.

“No damn good” is the default state of the book, actually. Artist Renato Arlem’s character designs leave a lot to be desired—save for two pretty incredible Black Lantern designs, which I’ll get to later—and they mostly float over backgrounds that seem to be photos ran through filters.

The story is by Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Dan DiDio, who seems like an odd choice to write anything for the company (if only because he’s such a controversial name among fans), but is doubly odd for a Western-meets-Blackest Night book (A more Hex-centric story by Jonah Hex writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray being the most obvious choice).

So: A cowboy who looks like Wolverine gets a phone call and rides his horse into his old west Ghost town, in which a high-tech facility is built inside a saloon. There he meets Metamorpho supporting character Simon Stagg (who doesn’t look anything like Simon Stagg save for his hair is kinda pointy on the sides) and a line-less Java. They’ve helped Wolverine—Joshua Turbnbull—build this facility for energy research. With the help of light-powered hero The Ray (the DC hero whose power is the ability to create light and even turn his entire body into light, making him an invincible source of Black Lantern destruction, who really oughta be in Coast City killing those things left and right instead of doing freelance work for Stagg), they’ve managed to capture a Black Lantern ring, and want to research it.

Then an army of Black Lanternized Western heroes invade and try to kill everyone in an attempt to get the ring back for some reason, which is never made clear. This is, of course, a one-shot which didn’t start anywhere else and won’t finish anywhere else, so DiDio doesn’t even get the, “Well, maybe it will make sense eventually” benefit of the doubt.

There were probably a couple dozen different ways to tie Old West heroes into the event, but DiDio ultimately decided to go with one in which a bunch of random characters who don’t seem to have anything to do with one another randomly bounce around for unclear motivations for 22 pages, raising questions about whagt Nekron and the Black Lanterns’ whole deal even is, as these Lanterns seem to be working and behaving a bit differently.

Oh, and he also writes homage #586 to Alan Moore’s “Burn” sequence from “For The Man Who Has Everything."

In the plus column, Arlem’s designs for Black Lantern Bat Lash and Black Lantern Jonah Hex are awesome. Probably not worth buying the whole issue just for two panels or so, but those are some pretty cool-looking zombie cowboys.

Weekly Haul: December 30th

Or should that be “Weekly Handful”…? (Or does that sound too dirty?) As you no doubt already know, there was only one new book available in direct market comic shops this week, plus a freebie Marvel gave away. I picked up both, as well as a couple of older trades, and I’ll review ‘em all below.

I don’t usually do “spoiler warnings,” because these are reviews and not previews (and also, I don’t personally care about “spoilers,” being more interested in how a comic is executed than what occurs within it), but I’ll go ahead and say it this time, since Blackest Night has a completely predictable-but-still-somehow-surprising twist, which accounts for the only really fun to be had in the reading experience.

So, for any crybabies in the reading audience, SPOILER WARNING, okay? Read on only after you’ve already read Blackest Night #6 and/or if you don’t give a shit that Hal Jordan and Barry Allen end up making love atop a pile of Teen Titans corpses on page 22…


Blackest Night #6 (DC Comics) First off, I’d like to congratulate and thank DC for working with Diamond to get this issue in comics shops in time to be available for sale today, despite the usual holiday delays and the unusual week off that the direct market’s (almost-)only distributor decided to take this year.

I’ve heard retailers say that they would appreciate getting comics early like this more often to make their jobs easier, and the argument against shops getting their books early is the concern of spoilers leaking and, more seriously for retailers, some unscrupulous types ignoring street dates and embargoes and selling the books as soon as they get them, in order to get a jump up on the scrupulous ones.

As a person who hates it every time a holiday bumps a New Comic Book Day from a Wednesday to a Thursday, I would love it if Diamond, retailers and publishers could figure out a way to do something like this more often, if not every single week. However, I’ve heard that some retailers did break the embargo on this issue, so perhaps that won’t ever become a reality after all.

Ah well.

So, that’s the good thing about DC’s Blackest Night #6. Here’s the horrible thing: DC’s been less than forthcoming about the contents of these issues, and somewhat sneaky—I’d go so far as to say Marvel-esque—in their pricing of the issues of this series. It started with a 40-page #1 priced at $3.99, and the next five issues kept that $3.99 price, while the page counts were drastically reduced for the next four issues—26 story pages at the most, 24 at the least.

This issue features the least amount of story pages thus far—just 23 (four of those are spent on two two-page splashes). That’s pretty much the definition of “not cool.” Visit dccomics.com and you’ll see that it says Blackest Night #6 is 40 pages long. And it is, but only if you count the ads.

Your average DC comic book is 22-pages for $2.99, but dccomics.com lists those at 32-page comics, as they count the ads. So a reader would always reasonably factor in 10 pages of ads and, seeing this solicitation, might have assumed it was a 30-page book with ten pages of ads because, Jesus, why else would DC charge an $1? It’s not like they’re highwaymen like Marvel, right?

But a reader would be wrong, because this comic features far fewer story pages, and far more ads. That extra $1 is to pay for the price of the ads which, in this particular issue, includes eight full-page house ads for future Blackest Night tie-ins (although I guess DC could chuckle nervously and say, “What? It’s a cover gallery!”), a full-page house ad/check list of the next few months’ worth of Blackest Night tie-ins.

In other words, DC would like you to pay $1 for the privilege of being exposed to some ads for things they would like to sell you.

So while yes, great, I’m glad I could read a new super-comic this Wednesday, holy shit this one was pretty evil.

Basically one thing happens in this issue, and it’s another one of those great awesome/stupid moments that Geoff Johns pulls off so well. I found this one particularly satisfying, because it was something that seemed so obvious for months now, something that I’ve heard blogosphere pundits wondering after before and something that we’ve already seen happen in a tie-in, and it’s something that Johns has been foreshadowing so heavily that any word with “shadow” on the base seems too insubstantial a word for it, and yet it still came as a surprise, on account of the fact that it hadn’t already happened yet, and the somewhat random way in which it occurs here.

And so here’s the spoiler, ready? Ganthet makes himself a Green Lantern ring and joins the Green Lantern Corps, while explaining that all of the folks on the cover of this issue have the ability to duplicate their rings and temporarily deputize someone nearby to their ranks.

Which means various DC super-characters get various colored rings, making for Red Lantern Mera and Sinestro Corps Scarecrow and Orange Lantern Luthor and so on.

I thought that was a pretty cool development, for the very same reason that seeing Batman’s Green Lantern costume back in 2006’s Green Lantern #9 or the appearances of any of the various otherly-colored Lanterns right on up until the Black Lanterns started appearing was pretty cool. So many of these characters and their designs—and let’s face it, characters like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were never characters as much as they were designs until recently anyway—are so familiar, that seeing them not only tweaked a bit, but radically tweaked is sort of exciting. Sure, the change is only cosmetic, but the cosmetic change is still a radical one.

Unfortunately, most of these designs are terrible. Orange Lantern Luthor is simply wearing a glow-y orange version of his stupid green and purple Super Powers armor. Indigo Tribesman Ray Palmer looks like a shirtless Sword of The Atom Atom with body paint. The Scarecrow just changed coats. And Star Sapphire Wonder Woman, well, Yeesh. Still, it’s something different, and in the world of super-comics, different is good.

Red Lantern Mera and Blue Lantern Flash offer the most promise of exciting looks, but I guess I’ll need to see more of them before I make up my mind. These New New Guardians or whatever they are only appear in a single splash and on a check-list in the back, and The Flash’s costume is sort of obscured by his pose. Given that the character is so associated with red though, I kinda like the idea of a Blue Flash.

And that’s this issue’s big Holy shit! moment and, in fact, pretty much its only development. Hal and Barry escape their Black Lanternized friends (Not sure why Black Lantern Superman didn’t just murder the fuck out of them both in like one second flat—he is still almost Flash-fast while wearing evil jewelry, right?) and evade the rings that were seeking out their fingers, then Ganthet throws some rings in the direction of various DC characters, the end.

Just two more issues to go! Or, if you read all the tie-ins too, then just 26 more issues left to go, I guess.


Marvel Adventures Spider-Man Vol. 14 (Marvel Comics) As plenty of folks noticed, Marvel’s solicitations for March included the final issues of their last two remaining Marvel Adventures books, MA Spider-Man and MA Super-Heroes, which has become the de facto MA Avengers book.

The timing was extremely odd, given that both of the books had just recently been given new, rather different directions, including continuing storylines (over the previous always done-in-one stories), regular artists and new, regular cover artists giving each a distinctive and consistent look. Each book also got a bump in the sales charts seemingly resulting from these changes.

It seems highly unlikely that Marvel would have gone to the trouble of relaunching the books like that only to pull the plug a few months later, so chances are Marvel Adventures will return sooner rather than later, and in a different form or format (I’ve seen it mentioned in a comments thread somewhere that this may have something to do with the Disney deal too, since these books were among Marvel’s few all-ages efforts).

The unfortunate part of all this is that Marvel Adventures Spider-Man is better than it’s ever been, and, as this volume suggests, was apparently being refocused to be a bit more like Ultimate Spider-Man.

This volume has a great title (along with Nightcrawler: Bamf!, Spider-Man: Thwip! was a title I’ve been anticipating since Wolverine: Snikt! was announced), and collects MA Spider-Man #53-#56.

Writer Paul Tobin does an excellent job of coming up with something that reads and feels new and original and fresh, while still maintaining enough of old school Spider-Man to feel right.

Peter Parker is still a high school student living with his Aunt May and all that but, in the first issue, two mutants visit his school—psychic Emma Frost and new character Chat, who can talk to animals. They discover his secret identity (and learn his origin for, you know, a good jumping on point) and the latter has enough of a crush on him to enroll in school. Also new to the school is Gwen Stacy, the daughter of a police captain who also discovers Spidey’s secret identity.

A bit of a love triangle—or like triangle, I guess, given hos chaste these kids all are—forms between Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Chat and Gwen, adding teen melodrama to the mix of normal Spider-Man problems like bad PR, keeping his identity secret and fighting villains and other heroes after misunderstandings.

Matteo Lolli provided most of the art, save for one issue, which was drawn by Jacopo Camagni. Lolli’s work is pretty amazing, and a great pleasure to read. Camagni’s? Even better. With Skottie Young’s inventive, slightly sketchy covers, this comic was all around great looking and, as soon as I finished it, I couldn’t wait to read the next one—although I guess there’s only going to be one more collection.

By the time the final issue ships in March, there will only be five more issues after the last one collected here. I suppose that’s enough time for Tobin to wrap this up, but it’s still kinda disappointing. It seems like Marvel finally really got this book just right, and now it’s being changed (if not completely canceled). I sure hope its next iteration is at least this good.


Origins of Siege #1 (Marvel) This is the much-appreciated ad for for Brian Michael Bendis and Oliveir Coipel’s upcoming event miniseries Siege, an ad that is the size, shape and basic form of a comic book, which Marvel thoughtfully made available for this stupid New Comic Book Day With Like One New Comic Book skip week concept of Diamond’s. It’s straight advertainment, and as such, isn’t worth spending any money on, so the fact that Marvel gave it away for free is pretty fitting.

It opens with an eight-page story written by Brian Michael Bendis, and drawn (Illustrated? Ginned up?) by artist Lucio Parrillo in what looks like skillfully applied airbrushing. It opens with Norman Osborn sipping wine in front of a gigantic Avengers poster by Mike Deodato (I think), ignoring the view outside his window, which is an aerial photograph of a city run through some sort of filter. Suddenly, Loki appears, startling Osborn (“NUUHH--LOKI!”).

Osborn tells Loki he doesn’t understand what Asgard is, and Loki tells him over the course of two two-page spreads, the first of which looks ripped from Ivan Reis drawn spread in DC's DC Universe 0. Then the two characters agree that they are going to appear in a big event miniseries entitled Siege.

That’s followed by the six-page preview of Siege #1 that everyone who reads Marvel comics has already read, and then that is followed by the most interesting bit of the book, a series of 12 one-page origin stories written by Fred Van Lente and drawn by artists associated with the characters.

These are all very basic, and are designed more for people who have no idea who Captain America or Norman Osborn are instead of explaining what those characters have been up to recently—they’re origin stories, not summaries of recent events.

These are kind of interesting in that they are essentially the same sorts of things DC was doing in the back of 52 and Countdown, but only half the size, and thus even though Van Lente does a decent enough job of explaining the basics of who these people are and how they came to be, the origins are never complete stories like the better DC origin stories were.

If you’re wondering who will be “major players” in Siege, I suppose these pages will answer that: Both Captains America, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, Norman Osborn, Loki, The Sentry, Wolverine, Doctor Doom, Ares and The Hood. I plan on sitting this one out, on account of having never read a Bendis-written superhero story I enjoyed that didn’t have the words “Ultimate Spider-Man” somewhere in the title, and this didn’t do anything to change those plans.

Still, it was nice of Marvel to give me something to read on this otherwise pretty barren New Comic Book Day…I do appreciate that.


Spider Man J: Japanese Knights (Marvel) I was torn between Thwip! and this other all-ages Marvel digest featuring a Spider-Man, so I ended up just getting them both—I guess that’s one advantage to a week in which only one new book ships.

It collects the manga stories by Yamanaka Akira that were previously published in Spider-Man Family and, before that, presumably in Japan somewhere. I would have liked a little introduction or something to explain these comics’ existence a little better—all I’ve got to go on are the “Originally published only overseas” on the back cover, and this odd sentence that ran across the top of each new chapter: “Each corner of the globe has its own unique take on the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN! Direct from Japan, Marvel is proud to present…”

That’s about all I know about these comics, although they were apparently flipped (they read right to left, and the “J” on Spider-Man J’s spider-symbol is always backward).

They’re awfully fun though, in large part because of how different they are. Spider-Man J is still Peter, and he still lives with his Aunt May (a much younger looking aunt). His best friends are Harold and Jane-Marie, and the only one who knows his secret identity is police detective Flynn. He battles a variety of animal-themed villains, although they’re not manga versions of the animal-themed US versions.

Instead, there’s General Wasperus, Dragonfly, The Spotted Cat (a species of Beetle, apparently) and “B-Warrior Tough Goraias.” Oh, and a female ninja named Elektra shows up in one story, but she’s more heroine than villain.

There’s a loose, rough zaniness to the proceedings, with most of the villains being fairly over-the-top, and Akira finds plenty of imaginative, unusual uses for Spidey’s webbing and for the defeat of his various foes. They often seem to die at the end of the encounters, but the light-hearted, cartoony nature of the book makes it hard to tell if they die like Wile E. Coyote or, say, Gwen Stacy. For example, Dragonfly meets his end by flying “SPLATTT!” into the spinning blades of a helicopter propeller (his cartoon eyes flying out among the debris, ghost monster style) and is never seen again, while Goraias has the spire of a skyscraper fall point first onto him…but later appears with two bandages over his ass.

I can’t imagine Spider-Man J being to too many Spidey fans’ tastes, but I enjoyed it a heck of a lot, and certainly much more than the various manga-style Spidey stories Marvel had produced in-house in the past.

Weekly Haul: December 23rd

Amazing Spider-Man #616 (Marvel Comics) This is the second half of Fred Van Lente and Javier Pulido’s Sandman story that I was raving about last week. The script is still smart, exciting, funny and even a bit unpredicatable, and Pulido’s art is still incredible. The story itself is big of a bummer—not only is there an element of tragedy about the villain, but Spidey’s essentially an ineffectual jerk whose only real skill is hurting supervillains, and his intervention merely makes things worse for the innocent victim. So it’s a bit of a downer, but it’s a well written, gorgeously illustratd bummer, and really, isn’t that the very best kind of bummer?


Batman: The Brave and the Bold #12 (DC Comics) Think you know the true meaning of Christmas? At least, the secular Christmas with the Santa Claus and the sled and the chimney and the Christmas tree and lights and ornaments and all that business? Would you believe we owe it all to Batman?

This is probably Landry and Walker’s best issue of the series so far, offering a perfect balance of all-ages action and knowing but effective humor for grown-ups.

It’s called “Final Christmas,” and it’s about the time Adam and Alanna Strange zeta beam Batman to Rann just seconds before the Earth is destroyed in an attempt to save the entire universe from annihilation. The villain of the piece is actually a generic DC alien type (A nameless Psion, I believe) rather than the guy on the cover, who is my second favorite Bat-villain to draw (coming in right behnd The Scarecrow). Calendar Man still gets about four wonderful pages though (“Your rampage of irritating misdemeanors ends now, Calendar Man!”).


Green Lantern #49 (DC) Oh hey wow, I’ve read forty-eight consecutive issues of this title, making it the single serial comic book I’m still reading that I’ve read the longest. I came very, very, very, very close to not reading this one, though, when I saw the name “Ed Benes” was attached to it.

Flipping thorugh it in the shop, though, I saw he was actually only one of three pencil artist to draw the issue, so I ended up bringing it home.

This is one of the many things I think is bad about Benes (althought it’s actually good for me personally, since I dislike his art so). Why does DC keep giving the guy work when he can’t keep up with it? This is only a 22-page comic book, and yet all he contributes is 11 or 12 pages of a 16-page lead story (the final page is a longshot splash of the planet Xanshi orbiting the planet Earth, with a bright green light between the two talking, and it seems like the colorist and letter might have drawn the whole page).

The division of labor is parceled out pretty organically though. Marcos Marz and Luciana del Negro apparently handle the pages of the lead story that Benes doesn’t, but they’re flashbacks, so the dramatic shift from one style to another’s not quite so drastic. The book ends with an entirely sepearate six-page story in which Black Lantern Jean Loring explains the nature of the universe to her captives Mera and Ray “The Atom” Palmer, and it’s drawn by Jerry Ordway (and is, thus, gorgeous).

Benes fares much better here than I would have expected, given some of the truly awful work of his I’ve seen recently in catching up with JLoA trades. Perhaps it helps that he’s inking himself? It certainly helps that he only has one or two non-skeletal humanoid characters to draw (so it hardly matters that he does such a poor job of differentiating characters), and there’s only one woman to draw, so the content of the panels are never re-written by the artist to actually be about butts and/or boobs. If DC’s going to continue to give Benes high-profile work, maybe they’re better off giving him easier, one-character work like this then books with sprawling casts.

Johns’ story is kind of dumb, and not the kinda awesome kind of dumb he’s often written on the title, but a more prosaic sort of dumb—it’s not aggressively, overly insulting kind of dumb though, so it’s certainly readable.

The focus is on Green Lantern John Stewart and how his retconned military background is reflected in his current role in the so-called “War of Lights.” So concerned with his time in the marines that this story is entitled “Semper Fi,” has John ring-genearted a marine uniform and guns for himself to use (instead of, you know, just wearing a force-field and shooting beams) and, at one point, he generates a whole platoon of G.I. Joes to help him fight the Black Lanterns of Xanshi.


Hellboy: The Bride of Hell (Dark Horse Comics) I was rather amused by the letter colum in the back of this issue. Editor Scott Allie was responding to a letter calling him out for some statements he made about how difficult it was to just plain enjoy modern superhero comics these days, given the degree to which they are based on past continuity or sprawl their various stories out among dozens of titles over the course of several years.

“I recently got excited about a couple of their books again, but realized I couldn’t follow the stories without figuring Civil War out—which I wasn’t interested in doing,” he wrote.

Thre reason I found it amusing was that I’ve always had difficult with the Hellboy franchise for that precise reason—I wasn’t there for the beginning, and there seems to be so much back story in so many different miniseries that I feel a little frustrated with and put-off by the whole franchise.

Which isn’t to say I’ve never read any Hellboy of course…over the last ten years I’ve probably read most of the books with the world Hellboy right there in the title, but I read the same ones over and over when the trade dress changes, and I read them out of order, and there are all these side projects I find daunting.

My point is just that any serial comic you’ve missed a whole lot of can seem extremely new reader unfriendly. Thr problem with the Hellboy-iverse, I think, comes down to the way that it’s been published—as a series of miniseries, so that I couldn’t just find a back issue box somewhere and start working on Hellboy the monthly with issue #1.

On the other hand, Hellboy is a hell of a lot easier to understand than something like, say, Secret Invasion or Infinite Crisis. There’s this big monster guy, he works for the demon and monster-fighting version of the FBI, and he fights demons and monsters. The basic premise isn’t exactly hard to wrap ones head around, even if I tend to forget the names of characters or details of Hellboy’s past and origins in the years between a trade or one-shot.

I don’t bring this up to argue Allie’s point. In fact, I’m glad he finds super-comics so hard to get into today, because that is apparently what inspired Dark Horse’s “One-Shot Wonders” program of special, easy-to-read, perfect jumping-on-point one-shot comics, of which this is one (How serious are they about keeping these things self-contained? They’re not even labeled or logo-ed as part of the “One-Shot Wonders” initiative, save for on an ad on the back cover).

This is only the second of ‘em I’ve personally bought and read, but it’s a good one, and another good example of how easy to “get” Hellboy is.

Your $3.50 gets you an ad-free 24-page story written by Mike Mignola and drawn by Richard Corben. In it, some Satanic cultist types have seemingly abducted a girl which they plan on offering up to a monster that turns out to be a big-time demon. Hellboy goes to rescue her, and along the way he and we learn a lot of interesting Biblical and medieval back story (This issue in particular made me sort of wish there was a section of notes or at least bibliography in the back of Hellboy comics; there are enough real names and real history in here that it all felt pretty genuine, whether it was or not. It was the sort of comic that made me want to read some books about the subject matter after finishing it).

Corben’s art was a bit of a revelation to me, particularly in how well it worked with Mignola’s scripting and characters. The people looked extremely Corben-esque, but rather than filter the title character through his own style, his Hellboy looked an awful lot like Mignola’s—in certain panels, he actually looks like a slightly more textured version of a Mignola drawing.

And damn, the demon he draws? When it appears at night, it’s just a black shape with eyes and teeth—it its flashback, it regains a shape, and, when we see it in the light, it’s broken and aged. That’s some accomplished, evocative art work that can so thoroughly transform the same character while keeping the interpretations firmly rooted in a base version. It’s cartoonish art that treats the subject like it was “real,” and that’s pretty exciting.

There’s also a two-page letter column and a six-page preview of Guy Davis’ gorgeous looking Marquis: Inferno graphic novel, so, all told, this has gotta be one of the better values on the racks this week.


Incredible Hercules #139 (Marvel) In the never-ending war of Marvel vs. DC, there are a million little battles, and each one has a different victor. In the Battle of the Back-Up Features, though, DC does an infinitely better job of advertising the presence of a back-up and how and where to find it. Look at the above coer design—not only is it a mess, but it hardly encourages an Agents of Atlas fan to pick it up, does it? Additional, the Agents seem to be sort of wandering around from book to book, so it’s difficult to know when they’re going to be where in any given month unless you pay very close attention (In March, for example, instead of a new ish of Inc Herc, there will be the first-part of a two-issue miniseries entitled Hercules: Fall of an Avengers, and the AoA back-up will be there. Seems to me like it would be far easier to ingor the Agents’ appearance in comics, and just wait for the trades).

Anyway, in this issue Herc and his handful of allies (Spider-Man and –Woman, USAgent, Quicksilver, Hank Pym and Wolverine) fight Hera and her allies, and the full extent of her plot is revealed. Then in the beautifully illustrated back-up, the Agents fight some mythological types while wearing neat-o disguises. It’s all pretty decent, but perhaps not remarkably so.



Power Girl #7 (DC) This actually came out last week, but I left it sitting on the shelf, despite significant temptations—it’s always hard not to buy Amanda Conner art, and shirt-less, pant-less, mustachioed manly man Vartox of Valeron on the cover was practically demanding I purchase it.

Of course, that was before Michael Hoskin pointed out in the comments section of last week’s column that it featured Golden Age Wonder Woman villain The Blue Snowman (Whose appearance in the modern DCU I’ve specifically asked for before).

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the entire issue, actually. I gave Power Girl a couple issues, but I decided to drop it around #2 or #3, as it seemed just as concerened with ickiness and retroactive continuity as all of the other DCU comics I don’t enjoy reading (albeit with much more fun, distinctive art).

But this issue was much more full-on comedy in a cape, and thus made better use of Conner’s particular gifts when it comes to design, detail and facial expressions. It’s pretty silly, containing words like “contraception bomb” and “seduction musk rifle” (which is so penis-shaped I’m kinda surprised DC even allowed it to appear) and using a gender-flipped version of the Maxima/Superman plot as a springboard for character comedy and monster-fighting.

Poor Blue Snowman doesn’t seem to survive the issue, but she’s swallowed whole by the monster, and is wearing a metal suit, so she shouldn’t be too hard to resurrect when Gail Simone or whoever decides it’s time to knock off all the mythology business and revisit Wonder Woman’s golden age for inspiration.

The metallic battle-suit and snow-shooting pipe and top hat on Ms. Byrna Brilyant aren’t really what I was expecting design-wise, but I think it turned out pretty cool. (Ha ha! Cool! The Blue Snowman design was cool!).

The rest of the issue was pretty cool too, and I’ll be back to check out #8 next month. That means, DC Comics, you owe Hoskin for the sales of two comic books.


Tiny Titans #23 (DC) I’m so happy that there exists a comic book in which the line, “There! All the bunnies are dressed like Batman!” is a perfectly natural one. This issue, which I believed shipped most places last week but just hit my shop today, is an all Bat-related one, featuring Robin, Batgirl, Bat-Mite, Alfred, the various animals that have taken up residence in Wayne Manor over the course of the past 22 issues and even the big guy himself. Oh, and younger kids Tim and Jason are introduced as well, so there are several panels of Art Baltazar and Fraco’s story that evoke the premise of the fun Batman and Sons webcomic.



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And that's this week's haul discussed. Tonight's Christmas Eve Eve, and I'm not entirely sure of what my posting schedule will look like here or at Blog@ over the course of the next few days.

I have some half-written posts and a stack of books I've read but haven't reviewed yet, and I think there was even an announcement or two this week that I may have opinions about, but holiday-celebrating—paired with the fact that no one's going to be looking at the Internet for a few days anyway—may make posting light and/or lamer than usual between tomorrow and Sunday. I'll probably still try to get something up every day, but, whatever ends up happening, rest assured both EDILW and my contributions to Blog@ will be back to normal by Monday.

If you celebrate Christmas, then I hope you have a happy and safe one, and, if you don't, then I hope you have a happy and safe Friday.