Marvel's November previews reviewed

And now it's Marvel's turn. As always, you can read the full solicits, and look at all the pictures, here. But you can only read me talking about those same solicits and pictures here, where you already are.

Ready?


AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #648
Written by DAN SLOTT
Pencils and Cover by HUMBERTO RAMOS
Blank Cover Variant Also Available
Variant Cover by STEFANO CASELLI
Spider-Girl Variant Cover by J. SCOTT CAMPBELL
Wraparound Variant Cover by MARCOS MARTIN
BIG TIME BEGINS!
Big changes are happening for the Amazing Spider-Man: Bigger threats, bigger guest-stars, and a big opportunity that could turn Peter Parker’s life around! Which cast members are staying and who’s saying goodbye? Find out as we’re introduced to new characters and reintroduced to a number of Spidey villains as they make the triumphant return to the book! Plus: New developments for Mayor J. Jonah Jameson, the staff at Front Line, and The Sinister Six! The next chapter in Spider-Man history starts here! Guest starring THE AVENGERS and THE FANTASTIC FOUR in a giant-sized, 39 page lead feature! PLUS! An All-New Adventure featuring the All-New SPIDER-GIRL! PAUL TOBIN & CLAYTON HENRY bring a tale of action & intrigue, and make a strong argument for why you can sometimes send a Spider-GIRL to do a Spider-MAN’s job…
56 pages/All-New Content/Rated A …$3.99

Now that the big ASM story arc named after an old Whitney Houston song is over, it's time for the next big ASM story arc to begin—and this one is going to be named after an old Peter Gabriel song.

When I first read the above solicitation, I misread “Mayor J. Jonah Jameson” as “Mary J. Jonah Jameson,” and for a fraction of a second imagined that the new-new Spider-marriage status quo was that Mary Jane had somehow ended up to J.J.J. and, for that fraction of a second, got really excited about a Spider-Man comic.


ASTONISHING THOR #1 (of 5)
Written by ROB RODI
Penciled by MIKE CHOI
Cover by ESAD RIBIC
Foilogram Variant by TBD
“Waves are but water, wind but air. And though lightning be fire… IT MUST ANSWER THUNDER’S CALL.” The God of Thunder finds himself battling a mysterious surge of natural catastrophes— hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes. At first, the Son of Odin suspects Zephyr, immortal mistress of the winds, but soon he finds that the climactic upheaval must be attributed to a much larger force… EGO, THE LIVING PLANET! From ROBERT RODI and MIKE CHOI! Spinning out of the destruction of Asgard, ASTONISHING THOR is an out-of-this-world adventure—where the entire universe hangs in the balance!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

Call me a cynic, but with Thor and Thor: The Mighty Avenger ongoings, in addition to miniseries Thor: First Thunder, Ultimate Comics Thor, Iron Man/Thor, Loki, Warriors Three and Thunderstrike, plus the various Avengers books featuring Thor on their covers (two), Astonishing Thor seems…well, let’s just say less than necessary. (Especially since the Astonishing, Ultimate and Might Avenger flavors all seem to share the same mission statement).
Oh well, I guess they’ll have plenty of trade collections of recent Thor material to sell when the movie gets closer to release.


AVENGERS #7
Written by BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS
Pencils and Cover by MIKE DEODATO JR.
Blank Cover Variant Also Available
Gatefold Variant Cover by MARKO DJURDJEVIC
Variant Cover by ED McGUINNESS
Tron Variant Cover by TBD
I AM AN AVENGER!
Plus: another chapter in the oral history of the Avengers!
32 PGS./Rated A …$3.99

Oops! There are so many variant covers for this issue they ran out of room to write any solicitation text!

I wonder what a “Tron Variant” is…will there be drawings of the Marvels in glowy Tron costumes?


AVENGERS: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES #1 (of 4)
Written by CHRISTOPHER YOST
Pencils by SCOTT WEGENER & PATRICK SCHERBERGER
Based on the AMAZING new animated series! What do you do when the world’s evilest villains attack? Call Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to save the day! In our first tale, CAPTAIN AMERICA and THOR face a threat bigger than BOTH of them!
And in tale two, following the exploits of everyone’s favorite arrow-flinger: HAWKEYE! Brought to you by superstar writer CHRISTOPHER YOST (X-FORCE) and incredible artists SCOTT WEGENER (Atomic Robo) and PATRICK SCHERBERGER (WORLD WAR HULKS)!
40 PGS./All Ages …$3.99

Okay, yes, obviously “another Avenger comic” probably isn’t the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind when they stop and consider what it is Marvel or the direct market or Comics needs right now (This is but one of the ten books with the word “Avengers” in the title being released in November).

But I thought the particular line-up shown on that cover worth noting. The show’s producers apparently went with a somewhat classic line-up, featuring mostly old-school, long-time Avengers, rather than taking cues from the more current New Avengers line-up (that is, no Spidey or Wolive or Cage or Spiderwoman) or the Marvel Adventures Avengers line-up (No Storm, no Spidey, no Wolvie).

Oh! And "arrow-flinger?" Doesn't Hawkeye shoot his arrows using a bow...?


AVENGERS VS. PET AVENGERS #2 (of 4)
Written by CHRIS ELIOPOULOS
Pencils & Cover by IG GUARA
Variant Cover by TBD
THE AGE OF DRAGONS HAS BEGUN. Are the Pet Avengers too late to save the world, and will Lockheed band with them…or join his dragon brethren? Eisner-nominee CHRIS ELIOPOULOS and IG GUARA continue their epic saga of Earth’s Mightiest Animals!!!!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

Hmm, Lockheed vs. a dragon? Yes, that looks like an exciting comic book I want to read.

Hey, speaking of Marvelous dragons fighting, has no one ever written a Lockheed vs. Fin Fang Foom comic before? Because that seems like the sort of thing I should have read by now.


I AM AN AVENGER #3 (of 5)
Written by DAN ABNETT, ANDY LANNING, SEAN McKEEVER, MARC SUMERAK & LUCY KNISLEY
Penciled by TODD NAUCK, MIKE MAYHEW, ANTONIO FUSO & LUCY KNISLEY
Cover by PHIL NOTO
Cosmically charged super scribes Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning take Nova for a spin, planet-side! Now a full-fledged Avenger, the Human Rocket teams up with the Amazing Spider-Man to thwart…a bank robbery? Exes Firestar and Justice discover they have unfinished business to contend with--not only with each other, but with the Avengers, too! Stingray learns that the new Heroic Age doesn't mean a perfect world... even in paradise! And Tony Stark learns not to mess with teenaged angst, especially when its “Stature”-esque in scale!

Wait, Lucy Knisley…? Really? Neat-o.


IRON MAN: THE RAPTURE #1 & #2 (of 4)
Written by ALEXANDER IRVINE
Penciled by LAN MEDINA
Covers by TIM BRADSTREET
4-issue Marvel Knights limited series! A pulse-pounding cyberpunk thriller by Alexander Irvine (The Narrows) and Lan Medina (Deathlok: The Demolisher). The future belongs to Tony Stark. So when a violent heart attack pushes the billionaire playboy and visionary inventor to the brink of death, he’s not about to go down quietly. Enter Stark 2.0 – a fusion of man and machine unlike anything the world has seen before, an entity that will push its host past the brink of sanity as it attempts to recreate the world in its own image. With Stark Industries in lockdown, it’s up to Starks’s associates Pepper Potts and Jim Rhodes to stem a technological virus that might well contaminate the entire world. But to save the day, they’ll need Tony’s help – if, indeed, there is anything left of him.
32 PGS. (each)/Parental Advisory …$3.99 (each)

This does not at all sound like the plot of a book entitled Iron Man: The Rapture. At least, not at all like the plot of a book entitled Iron Man: The Rapture that I imagine when I hear that title.


Two things. First, how is it that Marvel has nothing better for Arthur Adams to do (when he's not drawing issues of Jeph Loeb's Ultimate X-Men title) than to draw covers for an out-of-continuity X-Men spin-off)? Second, that is a pretty awesome belt.




OZMA OF OZ #1 (of 8)
Written by Eric Shanower
Pencils & Cover by Skottie Young
Variant Cover by JAE LEE
Variant Cover by ERIC SHANOWER
Dorothy Gale plunges into adventure again, this time with a talking chicken named Billina. Dorothy and Billina are washed off their sailing ship to face drowning, starvation, and screaming Wheelers, strange men with wheels instead of hands and feet. The multiple Eisner Award-winning and New York Times bestselling team of Shanower and Young returns to Oz with this comics adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s third Oz book.
32 PGS./All Ages …$3.99

I read a collection of the first Shanower/Young Oz book Marvel put out, and it was okay. It put the prose into the comics medium well, and Young’s art was quite accomplished…I had fun seeing his take on various Oz characters. But something about seeing yet another Oz book from this team—the third or fourth, I believe—kind of bums me out.

Don’t get me wrong, these are fine comics and if that’s what they both want to be doing more than anything else then hooray for them, but, I don’t know, I’d like to see Young do something else with his considerable talent in the future as well, and I hope he doesn’t make a whole career out of just doing Oz adaptations from Marvel (Unless he wants to make a whole career out of it; it’s his career…I just think he has an interesting way of communicating in his comics, so if he has anything to say, I’d rather hear him say it, then simply working to translate L. Frank Baum book’s into a different medium).


SECRET AVENGERS #7
Written by ED BRUBAKER
Penciled by MIKE DEODATO JR.
Cover by MIKE DEODATO JR.
Tron Variant Cover by TBD
Dark forces are at work in Hong Kong to reincarnate a great evil...but the Secret Avengers and that great evil's son -- SHANG CHI -- are also on these dark streets! As is a new secret member of Marvel's hottest covert Avengers team! By the all-star team-up of Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

“ A great evil”…? You mean Youknowho Manchu?



SPIDER-GIRL #1
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by CLAYTON HENRY
Cover by BARRY KITSON
Variant Cover by JAE LEE
Women of Marvel Variant by JELENA KEVIC-DJURDJEVIC
Spinning from the GRIM HUNT in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!
Not every fight can get resolved by punching someone in the face…but Spider-Girl’s gonna punch somebody anyway, just to make sure. Follow the swinging adventures of Anya Corazon, the Splendiferous Spider-Girl, as she balances the daily grind of teenage life with the bumps and bruises brought by banging ‘bows with bad guys! Guest-starring the FANTASTIC FOUR and a villain that our hero could NEVER, EVER, EVER defeat. Paul Tobin (SPIDER-MAN, SUPER HEROES) and Clayton Henry (UNCANNY X-MEN) present an all-new hero for an all-new era!
40 pages/8 Page All-New Backup/Rated A …$3.99

Is this Arana’s new codename and costume…? I thought I heard somewhere that she was going to become the new Spider-Girl. If so, it looks like she also grew here hair out t, so as to better resemble the last female Spider-lady who wore a costume similar to that. I think I liked her old hair better. Arana’s old costume wasn’t a very good one, but I think this one might be worse. Yeah, the black Spider-Man costume was something of a classic, but I think it’s been worn by so many different folks by now—including Venom—that it’s lost his sense of the special.

Also, that thing on her costume doesn’t look so much like a spider as some kind of insect, given how long and skinny its body is.


I have nothing to add beyond "Hey, look at this!"


So here's an image of Thor fighting Fin Fang Foom before the rainbow bridge to Asgard.


ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #150
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by DAVID LAFUENTE, SKOTTIE YOUNG, SARA PICHELLI, JAMIE MCKELVIE & more!
Cover by David Lafuente
Variant Cover by J. SCOTT CAMPBELL
Wraparound Variant Cover by Mark Bagley
Not only is this officially the Ultimate Spider-Man 150th issue anniversary, but it is also the 10 year anniversary of the birth of the Ultimate Marvel universe!! Can you believe it?? We can't either! To celebrate, Eisner award-winning series writer Brian Michael Bendis has created this triple size extravaganza and gathered together a stellar lineup of amazing artists!! A reunion of the greatest artists of not only this historic book but of the the entire line of Ultimate Comics. Poor Peter Parker has made such a mess of his life as Spider-Man that the other super heroes are forced to gather together and decide once and for all what to do with the young wall crawler. Guest starring the New Ultimates, the Storm Siblings, Ben Grimm, Iceman, Kitty Pryde and a slew of surprise stars! Also includes reprinting of Ultimate Spider-Man Super Special #1 featuring an all-star artist line-up!
104 pages/54 pages of reprinted material/Rated T+ …$5.99

I guess we can add Switching Back To The Original Numbering After Attempting To Goose Sales With An Arbitrary New #1 to the list of things that the Ultimate Spider-Man book has done in the last few years that the Ultimate Spider-Man book was specifically created to never have to do, like Participating In Intracompany, Multi-book Crossover Events and Rebooting With A New #1.


I'm usually a big fan of Adams' work, but something about this Young Allies variant cover just looks off. I'm not sure what it is, as in most respects it's a typical Arthur Adams piece. I don't know...maybe the mouth finally crept over to the wrong side of the too-tiny line or something...?

DC's November previews reviewed

Is it that time of the month again already? Wow. Time sure flies when you're...well, time sure flies. As always, you can read the complete solicits for DC's titles scheduled to ship in November of 2010 here.

Well, let's dive in, shall we?


BATMAN #704
Written by TONY DANIEL
Art and cover by TONY DANIEL
Welcome back Tony Daniel as regular writer/artist on BATMAN!
When an aging but wealthy technology developer comes to Gotham with his beautiful daughter, it turns out he’s in search of a joint project with WayneTech. DNA tracking is the name of his game, and there are others interested in his proposal. But when the developer goes missing, Batman finds that his tracks stop in the city’s violent Chinatown neighborhood, where a new deadly Triad gang has taken root. Guest-starring I-Ching!
On sale NOVEMBER 17 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

Based on the cover image alone, it looks like Batman will continue to feature the adventures of Dick Grayson-as-Batman, since that’s his version of the Bat-costume instead of the new, Ultimatized, two-Bat-symbols costume (That I hate. So far).

Batman and Robin likewise seems to feature Dick as Batman and Damian as Robin, while Detective’s cover is inconclusive, and the solicit mentions Batman but not a secret identity.


BATMAN/CATWOMAN: FOLLOW THE MONEY #1
Written by HOWARD CHAYKIN
Art and cover by HOWARD CHAYKIN
The Cavalier – that’s the Z-lister with the swords, right? So how’d he manage to frame Catwoman for a run of burglaries? And how on Earth did he manage the more spectacular crime of cleaning out the Wayne Enterprises pension fund and framing Bruce Wayne for the deed? However impressive he may appear to be, The Cavalier will quickly learn that frame-ups like that cut both ways, as both Batman and Catwoman begin tracking the Gotham City villain in this stand-alone one-shot from comics legend Howard Chaykin!
ONE-SHOT • On sale NOVEMBER 3 • 56 pg, FC, $4.99 US

This looks and sounds fun, and it looks like it will offer a traditional, old-school Batman adventure for anyone who doesn’t like the new direction all that much. I'm not really sure why it's not appearing in Batman: Classified though.


BATMAN, INC. #1
Written by GRANT MORRISON
Art and cover by YANICK PAQUETTE
1:25 Variant cover by ANDY KUBERT
1:200 Sketch variant cover by YANICK PAQUETTE
Grant Morrison continues his earth-shattering run on the Batman titles with this exciting, new ongoing series! Featuring art by the remarkable Yanick Paquette (SEVEN SOLDIERS: BULLETEER), BATMAN, INC. marks the next stage of evolution for The Dark Knight. This can’t-miss series will star not just Bruce Wayne as Batman, but also a huge number of guest-stars! Don’t miss out on this all-new start to a stunning direction for Batman!
Retailers please note: This issue ships with three covers. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale NOVEMBER 3 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US

BATWOMAN #0
Written by J.H. WILLIAMS III & W. HADEN BLACKMAN
Art by J.H. WILLIAMS III and AMY REEDER with RICHARD FRIEND
Cover by J.H. WILLIAMS III
1:10 Variant cover by AMY REEDER

“I suspect that Batwoman is socialite Kate Kane. I intend to prove it beyond a shadow. I need to know if she can be trusted, what her motivations are. I’m going undercover.” – Batman: Mission Log Entry 2756

Featuring a unique story composition that combines the art of Eisner Award-winner J.H. Williams III (DETECTIVE COMICS, PROMETHEA) and Amy Reeder (MADAME XANADU), this special #0 issue acts as a new introduction into the life of Batwoman! Things pick up roughly where the BATWOMAN: ELEGY HC left off, and this issue acts as a primer for the upcoming new series featuring multiple award-winning creators!
Retailers please note: This issue ships with two covers. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale NOVEMBER 24 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US

Uh-oh. Check out the price tags on these two new Bat-books, both of which I was greatly anticipating. Like the other new ongoing Bat-book, the David Finch written and drawn Batman: The Dark Knight, they’re $4 for 32 pages.

Is DC's plan for moving towards the Marvel-established price point to keep their $3 books at $3, but launch their new series at the $4 price point? It looks like it it.

It also looks like I’ll be reading the two above books in trade as well, which means I’ll be subtracting “Morrison-written Bat-book” from my dwindling pull-list. I’m down to just eight serially-published, stapled comic book-comic books now: King City, Orc Stain, Tiny Titans, Batman: The Brave and the Bold (Which is "back" with a new title, new #1 and new creative team in November), Brightest Day (a limited series), Justice League: Generation Lost (ditto), Green Lantern and Birds of Prey (which is rather likely to get dropped after the first story arc wraps up, on account of it not being any good).


Aaaaaa! Look at Neal Adams’ Aquaman! Aaaaaa!


BATMAN: STREETS OF GOTHAM #17
Written by PAUL DINI
Co-feature written by FABIAN NICIEZA
Art by DUSTIN NGUYEN & DEREK FRIDOLFS
Co-feature art by TBD
Cover by DUSTIN NGUYEN
With Bruce Wayne soon to return to Gotham City, the secret past lives of his parents Thomas and Martha have come back to haunt the family legacy! What bizarre experience in their past is connected to the horrible plan that Tommy Elliot has set in motion? Find out here in part 2 of the 5-part sequel to the best-selling “Heart of Hush”!
Plus, don’t miss the start of a new Ragman co- feature, written by Fabian Nicieza (RED ROBIN)! This 5-part story finds Rory Regan starting a new job at the city morgue as his tenement neighborhood is threatened by the Mayor’s “renewal plan” and Firefly, an arsonist who might be on the city payroll!
On sale NOVEMBER 17 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

I honestly expected this one to be canceled, given all the new Batman books, and its dwindling sales, but I guess it’s going to be around at least until #21, in order to finish up the five-part Ragman story beginning as a back-up in this issue (I guess that explains the existence of that random Ragman one-shot I previously wondered about...?) The artist is “TBD” still...fingers crossed that it’s D-ed to be Kelley Jones or John McCrea…!

Red Robin, Batman: Confidential, Azrael and Gotham City Sirens are all “FINAL ISSUE” notation-free this month as well, so if DC was planning on culling the Bat-line to make room for all the new additions, they’ve yet to cancel the lower-selling books or ones that seem endangered by the return of Bruce Wayne.


I think I like David Finch’s art less the longer I look at it, but I love all the same-but-different costume redesign opportunities Geoff John’s colored rings stories have made possible. So White Lantern Batman? Yeah, that excites me.


DC COMICS PRESENTS: BRIGHTEST DAY #2
Written by JOHN OSTRANDER and DAN JOLLEY
Art by BRYAN HITCH, PAUL NEARY, DALE EAGLESHAM, WADE VON GRAWBADGER, JAMAL IGLE, ROB STULL, LARY STUCKER, DOUG MAHNKE and PATRICK GLEASON
Cover by IVAN REIS and OCLAIR ALBERT
Spotlighting Martian Manhunter and Firestorm – two heroes who returned after BLACKEST NIGHT as the BRIGHTEST DAY dawned in the DC Universe! First, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold guest-star in a story from MARTIAN MANHUNTER #24, while three travelers seek answers on Mars in the distant future in a tale from issue #11. Then, in an epic from FIRESTORM #11-13, Jason Rusch and Ronnie Raymond clash for the first time as they battle some of their greatest foes.
On sale NOVEMBER 10 • 96 pg, FC, $7.99 US

Like the first DC Comics Presents: Brightest Day collection solicited, this appears to be simply a collection of stories featuring a few characters from the Brightest Day cast, retroactively bearing that sub-title. I haven't read the Firestorm issues, but both of the Martian Manhunter issues included here are pretty great. One of them is a surprisingly spot-on homage to the JLI days (shame about the coda featuring Wonder Woman and Kyle Rayner though), and the other ties in to the future for J'onn that Grant Morrison established in DC One Milliona.


DC COMICS PRESENTS: THE FLASH/GREEN LANTERN: FASTER FRIENDS
Written by RON MARZ, MARK WAID and BRIAN AUGUSTYN
Art by BART SEARS, VAL SEMEIKS, RON LIM, ANDY SMITH, TOM GRINDBERG, JEFF JOHNSON and others
Cover by DAVE JOHNSON
Collecting the two-part miniseries from 1997 that brought together two Flashes and two Green Lanterns to battle the menace called Alien X in a story that begins in the 1940s and concludes in the modern era!
On sale NOVEMBER 3 • 96 pg, FC, $7.99 US

I really, really liked this prestige format miniseries. No matter who your favorite Flash and Green Lantern is, I imagine you'll dig this.


DC COMICS PRESENTS: J.H. WILLIAMS III #1
Written by D. CURTIS JOHNSON and J.H. WILLIAMS III
Art and cover by J.H. WILLIAMS III and MICK GRAY
Cameron Chase, agent of the Department of Extranormal Affairs, is introduced in the debut issue of her cult-favorite DCU series! Plus, family secrets are revealed in a tale from issue #6 – and the Dark Knight guest stars in the two-part story “Shadowing the Bat,” from issues #7-8. Featuring the spectacular art of J.H. Williams III!
On sale NOVEMBER 3 • 96 pg, FC, $7.99 US

Now here's a weird one. Despite Williams' namel this is apparently a greatest hits collection of the short-lived Chase series he illustrated. The entire series was only ten issues long, so collecting about half of the run like this seems an odd choice. Why not just collect it as Chase Vols. 1 and 2? If you throw in the issue of Batman that introduced Chase and some of the roughly ten thousand appearances Cameron Chase had in various Secret Files and Origins specials, there's easily enough material for two trades.

Labeling it with Williams' name suggest that there will be more Wiliams material collected in future DC Presents volumes. I wonder what those might be? He drew Justice Riders, I believe, and, um, some annuals...?


DC COMICS PRESENTS: YOUNG JUSTICE #2
Written by TODD DEZAGO, PETER DAVID, JOE ILLIDGE, D. CURTIS JOHNSON and CHUCK DIXON
Art by TODD NAUCK, ALE GARZA,
CRAIG ROUSSEAU, ANDY KUHN and others
Cover by SCOTT MCDANIEL and DANNY MIKI
Collecting some of YOUNG JUSTICE’s greatest hits, as previously seen in the pages of YOUNG JUSTICE SECRET FILES, YOUNG JUSTICE: THE SECRET #1 and YOUNG JUSTICE IN NO MAN’S LAND #1!
On sale NOVEMBER 24 • 96 pg, FC, $7.99 US

Huh. #1 collected the pre-Young Justice Young Justice series JLA: World Without Grown-Ups, while this collects the first pre-Young Justice book with the words "Young Justice" in the title, the Secret one-shot from DC's series of one-shots featuring lady protagonists, along with a "No Man's Land" tie-in from and a Secret Files special, from the first year of the ongoing's existence. I don't remember any of these being particularly great comics, although the Secret Files stories had some fun moments in them.


Is that Black Canary wearing Grifter’s costume on the cover of Green Arrow #6?


HITMAN VOL. 3: LOCAL HEROES TP NEW PRINTING
Written by GARTH ENNIS
Art by JOHN MCCREA, CARLOS EZQUERRA and STEVE PUGH
Cover by JOHN MCCREA
Tommy’s talents are tested as he faces off against Western outlaws and an army of zombie sea animals in these stories from HITMAN #9-14. Also included is a hilarious confrontation with Green Lantern!
On sale DECEMBER 22 • 144 pg, FC, $17.99 US

Please be advised: This is a totally awesome collection, featuring some great stories from my favorite DC comic book. The title story, from which the cover image comes, features a four-part team-up of sorts between Tommy Monaghan and Kyle Rayner, in which Monaghan shames Rayner for his inability to buy anyone a beer in a bar, on account of not having any pockets. That's followed by the two-part "Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium," in which Tommy and his hitmen friends must fight their way through the zombified residents of an aquarium (And remember, this was 1997, before everyone was doing zombie stories constantly). The credits are a little wonky here though; McCrea drew all six of the issues mentioned. Pugh drew Hitman #21, and Ezquerra did draw a story in which Tommy fights Western outlaws, but that was in Hitman Annual #1.


JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #45
Written by MARC GUGGENHEIM
Art by SCOTT KOLINS
Cover by SHANE DAVIS & SANDRA HOPE
After one of the greatest terrorist attacks on American soil, the Justice Society remains behind to help rebuild in any way they can! But in contrast to their glory days during World War II, it appears the U.S. may not want the Society's help. Luckily, that's never stopped the World's First Super Hero Team before!
On sale NOVEMBER 24 * 32 pg, FC, $2.99

Can you imagine how many millions must die to constitute “one of the greatest terrorist attacks on American soil” in the DC Universe? Prometheus recently blew up much of Star City in Justice League: Cry For Justice, and a few years back The Brotherhood of Titan-Fightin’ wiped the entire city Bludhaven off the U.S. map, a death toll that should have been somewhere in the neighborhood of the entire population of New York City (although in Batman and Robin #12, Dick Grayson puts it at "only" 100,068).

What will happen here? Will the terrorists take out a whole state?


Oh man, I swore off this title when Calafiore took over art chores from Nicola Scott, but the cover of the November issue does feature Bane riding on a dinosaur.


Wow, that’s a nice cover image by Rafael Albuquerque for the upcoming Superboy #1. Superboy actually looks like a teenager and everything. Unfortunately, that is the end of Abuquerque's contribution to the book, the interiors of which are being drawn by someone whose name is unfamiliar to me.


Titans #29
Written by ERIC WALLACE
Art and cover by FABRIZIO FIORENTINO
This is it! Deathstroke versus Batman! When a mission traps our deadly team in Arkham Asylum, they’re divided and confronted by some of Gotham City’s most notorious villains.
On sale NOVEMBER 10 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

This is it! Entire months have passed since Batman Dick Grayson fought Deathstroke the Terminator in the pages of Batman and Robin! Now they're going to fight again! The anticipation!! Can you stand the anticipation?!?!?!

Okay, it's official.

Having seen it drawn by three different artists for the covers of three different comic books now, I'm pretty sure that I hate the new Batman costume. A lot.

Batman's costume changes fairly frequently, but the changes are usually very small ones. This is probably the most drastic change since Jean-Paul Valley temporarily became Batman in the '90s and, honestly, I think I may have liked that costume better (the first one, with the Black Panther-style cowl...although I coulda done without the utility garter, which JPV has since passed on to Stephanie Brown) better than the one above.

And, just so we're all on the same page here, the JPV Batman costume? It was a terrible, terrible Batman costume.

I don't much care for the piping on the new costume, which helps make it look very costume-y. "My" Batman—the one I was reading when I started reading Batman comics—always tried to pretend to be a supernatural, creature of the night in order to frighten the cowardly and superstitious criminals. The piping really calls attention to the fact that he's a man in a suit.

Worse still is the ribbing, which you can see most clearly in the first image, which marks it as a Bryan Hitch, Ultimates-inspired look. In other words, the costume looks more like 2001 than 2011.

But the worse bit? The second Bat-symbol on the belt-buckle. That's...that's just a crime right there, calling to mind Superman's Superman Returns costume, which similarly featured an echoing symbol on the belt buckle.

Batman is, like Superman, one of the most literally iconic superheroes. Literally. Their costumes are defined by the icons on their chests. Much of the rest of it is merely detail (Well, in Superman's case; Batman is a shape or silhouette plus a chest-mounted icon). I can think of nothing more superfluous on a Batman costume than a second Bat-symbol.

Finally, is it just me, or does this costume look an awful lot like Gary Frank's design for the Earth One Batman? Or the one from the Arkham Asylum video game?

Oh well. I suppose it's possible that it will grow on me the longer I look at it. Or maybe the Bat-artists will all just draw Batman in silhouette, wrapped in his cape or from the neck up in the Batman comics I read in the near future.


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The above images are, by the way, the covers of Batman, Inc. #1 and Batman: The Dark Knight #1, and are penciled by Andy Kubert, Yanick Paquette and David Finch, respectively

Please be advised:

This upcoming NBC television series about an attractive blond U.S. government agent......is not, repeat not, based on this DC Comics series about an attractive blond U.S. government agent......despite the fact they share the exact same name.

Some rather rambling thoughts on Action Comics Weekly #601 (and Action Comics Weekly in general)

I was pretty excited to find a big stack of issues of Action Comics Weekly in a fifty-cent bin in a used bookstore.

Well, I’m pretty much always excited to find issues of anything in a fifty-cent bin, but I found this find particularly exciting because it was one of those comics I’ve long been curious about, but never had the opportunity to read (I was…11 and in the fifth grade, and still a few years away from being at all interested in comic books when these were first being published).

Part of the reason I was so curious about the book was simply that it seemed like a lot of very interesting creators, many of whom would go on to still better and bigger things, were involved with its creation.

And part of it was that it was often mentioned as DC’s only real antecedent to the weekly series 52, of which I was a huge fan, and the publisher has of late really dedicated themselves to the weekly format, a format which I think has a lot of virtues for the publisher, given how much of their focus is now on selling comics to weekly readers.

And some small part of it was simply that, as someone who observes the industry rather closely now, I’m always fascinated to see how much it’s changed over the decades.

So as far as I can tell, in 1988, just after Action Comics celebrated the release of its 600th issue, DC radically altered the format of the book. They kept the numbering, but added the word “Weekly” to the title, and then published it on a schedule that reflected the new title. Rather than being the Superman book it had been for decades, it was now an oversized anthology book, with Superman getting just two pages, in this issue at least.

There were five other features, each getting eight pages a piece…which, come to think of it, only adds up to 42 pages, while the cover boasts “48 Pages Every Week.” Huh.

Anyway, after Superman the biggest “name” feature was Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), whose book had just recently been canceled. The other characters in this initial issue were Blackhawk, Deadman, Secret Six and Wild Dog, a then only one-year-old character.

James Owsley and Gil Kane handled Green Lantern, while Roger Stern and Curt Swan did Superman, which meant the two biggest name characters in the book were being drawn by the artists perhaps most associated with them as their defining artists.

As for the other writers and artists involved, Wild Dog creators Max Collins and Terry Beatty handled that strip, Martin Pasko and Dan Spiegle did the Secret Six one, Mike Baron and Dan Jurgens (inked by Tony DeZuniga, a pretty great-looking combination) did Deadman, while the Backhawk strip was by Mike Grell, Rick Burchett and Pablo Marcos.

I’m not sure if Action Comics Weekly was ultimately regarded as a success by DC or not. It lasted some 42 issues, at which point the title returned to a shorter, monthly Superman book. That’s less than a year on the schedule, but still an awful lot of comics.

My first thought when I started reading it was whether or not such a book would be possible today. DC and Marvel’s anthology projects generally sell pretty poorly in the direct market, and neither company seems terribly gung ho about attempting such books on anything other than a short-term, limited basis.

Additionally, this was being sold for just $1.50. In 1988, that was twice the price of a regular issue of a DC super-comic, but you could get it for $2 and still have enough change left over for two games of Ms. Pac-Man. What would a 48-page weekly comic book cost now? If they simply doubled the price, we’d be looking at $5.99, although I think $4.99 would be do-able for DC. At five or six bucks a week though, that sure seems to be asking an awful lot of readers, $20-$24 a month, or somewhere in the neighborhood of $260 or $312 a year. Would that fly with today’s DC customers?

The individual features would change throughout the 42 issues, with the exception of the Superman strip and I think the Green Lantern strip, but I was struck by the fact that only three of the features in the first issue are straightforward superhero stories.

Wild Dog sort of skirts the edges of the superhero genre, but, in this first chapter anyway, seemed more like a crime thriller than anything else. Blackhawk was a war feature, although here it seems to be more of a period adventure strip than superheroics or straightforward war, and I’m not sure what to make of the Secret Six; this feature seems to be transitioning them from the war genre into something espionagey or maybe quasi-superhero…they don’t have the dumb costumes shown on the cover by the time the first story ends.

If DC did attempt a weekly like Action Comics Weekly today, I have to imagine the content would be a lot different. Maybe Superman and Green Lantern would still be around, but I can’t really imagine any of the others from this issue—certainly there wouldn’t be such a new, “young” character as Wild Dog (I can’t even think of a brand-new DCU character not derived from another character that was created in 2009, let alone one that seems primed to carry a solo strip).

Theoretically, I’d like to see DC publish something like this today because, theoretically, I would love to read 48 (or 42; whatever) pages of new DC super-comics every single week, but for the amount of money such a book would cost, it would have to be 48 really great pages, and I don’t have a lot of confidence that they could put together the exact sort of package I personally would like to read…and even if they could, would it be something that could continue to make money for 42 issues, let alone 52? Or more.

Probably not. I think there’s a possible advantage to doing so though, beyond providing me with the sort of comic I’d theoretically like to see. One way in which the market has changed since 1988 is that comics are published not only to be sold as serial comic books, but also as bound collections, so most everything DC publishes is eventually going to be sold to at least two different audiences. And what one of those audiences embraces, another might not.

So an Action Comics Weekly style anthology would provide a way to get enough material to publish trade collections of something that might sell well in trade, but wouldn’t be able to sell enough copies month-to-month to carry an ongoing. Like, imagine Magog trades were beloved by critics, and a big seller to youth library collections, but it wasn’t feasible to publish the monthly because, seriously, who wants a Magog comic book? Well, maybe Magog can’t carry a book, but he can fill eight pages of a weekly anthology long enough to generate the page count necessary for a new trade.

I thought that was the idea of some of DC’s back-ups, like Blue Beetle in Booster Gold, as I know Blue Beetle trades were popular with youth librarians (and then there was the added benefit of publishing something for Hispanic readers to identify with, or younger kids to identify with, or to keep the IP alive while DC tried to sell a live-action TV show, whatever), but the Blue Beetle back-up evaporated, so who knows.

Man, I’m really off track now, aren’t I?

Anyway, Action Comics Weekly—it looks pretty cool, and wouldn’t it be neat if DC could publish something like this today, and if they did, that it turned out awesome? (If this subject fascinates you as it does me, I’d like to hear your thoughts on what features a 2011 Action Comics Weekly should feature, and why).

I wasn’t planning on reviewing every single issue of Action Comics I bought from that fifty-cent bin, despite my habit of compulsively reviewing almost every single comic book I read on my blog, so, in lieu of that, here are some things I noticed about Action Comics Weekly #601.


SOME THINGS I NOTICED ABOUT ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #601


Blackhawk looks eerily like a tiny little Superman standing on Superman's shoulder in this cover by Dave Gibbons, doesn't he?



By 21st century DC Comics standards, the violence is shocking in how restrained it is. In the Green Lantern strip, Hal Jordan's sometimes girlfriend, sometimes evil villain Carol Ferris/Star Sapphire has come looking for Hal to do him in, but the only one home is Katma Tui, so she gets killed—"hacked to pieces," in John Stewart's words—instead.

This was a good half-dozen years or so before the murder of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend, the event from which we got the term "women in refrigerators," but this is certainly an example of a character being "fridged,' or killed to provide a little tragedy to motivate the protagonist. It's the sort of thing we've seen waaayyyy to frequently in DC super-comics over the past decade or so, but I can't imagine such a scene being presented like this today. Where's the blood? Where's the gore? Where are the torn-off clothes? The bone shards? The organs?

This is a scene in which a character gets brutally murdered, but it's as if the murder is being presented as merely a plot point to move the story forward, rather than something to provide sensational, gross-out imagery.

Weird.

Also, note how much Star Sapphire's costume has changed in the past 20 years:


I was most surprised by the Superman strip, which I didn't realize was only two pages long until I actually read an issue of the series. Not only is it very short, but it's laid out so that the two-page spread functions as a single, uninterrupted lay-out. You can't tell from the terrible, just-there-because-I-ran-images-to-illustrate-my-other-observations scan there, but there are three tiers of panels, all of which read right to left horizontally, just as the title of the strip does, ignoring the gutter.

Due to the short length and the somewhat unusual use of the space, this actually ended up reminding me quite a bit of Wednesday Comics, where each strip was give a single, huge page every week (although the number of panels varied from strip to strip, so in effect those single pages could be anywhere form one to four pages worth of "normal" comics).

I understand the Superman strip was an attempt to homage or at least replicate the feel of old Superman newspaper strips, so I guess Stern and Swan's strip here was drawing inspiration from the same place that Wednesday Comics was, but it's sort of neat to see a kind of quasi-proto-Wednesday Comics strip in a DC weekly from over 20 years ago.


Wow, look at all those words! I'm not sure exactly what Mike Gold is talking about in the ten thousand or so words of his that fill the space which will, presumably, feature letters from readers in later issues. I'm not sure, because I hate to read words that aren't in dialogue bubbles or little yellow boxes floating along the top of comic book panels.

I skimmed it though, and I believe he's talking about the new format of the book and introducing the various features and creators.

In those pre-Internet days, I guess it made sense that editors had to take advantage of such pages in comics to communicate to readers and fans, but that looks like a book's worth of words compared to what you find in the back of DC comics today (I should note that the above is the first of two-pages from Gold talking about...whatever he's talking about. Comics, probably). What's the average length of a DC Nation column, do you think? 250 words, if that? Heck, they don't even have "Next Issue" boxes in DC comics any more...


After reading one whole issue of Action Comics Weekly, my favorite features so far is the Blackhawk one, based on the smooth, clean artwork and the leisurely, not-much-like-anything-else-in-the-comic story. Also, one-eighth of it is devoted to Blackhawk being a comics critic.

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Ha ha, I used the prefix "quasi-" twice in a single post. Man, I suck...

So, those were some thoughts on ACW #601; thoughts on future issues to appear here in the future.

So you guys should probably go see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World at some point this weekend.

Today Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, director Edgar Wright's 112-minute film based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-volume, 1,200+-page action/comedy/romance/slice-of-life comics epic, was officially released. I went to see it.

Part of me sort of wishes I had never read any of O'Malley's comics, if only to have experienced the movie as a movie, but it's way too late for that. Because I've been living with O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim story in its original form for some six years or so (Well, off an on, anyway), it would be impossible (well, pretty hard) to separate the experience of the film from my experience with the comics and assess the film on its own, so I'm not going to bother trying to offer a review-review here (especially since no one's paying me to do so here).

I will say that I liked the film an awful lot, and neither my affection for the source material nor my excitement for the film lead to any form of disappointment.

I'll also note that despite how closely some of the scenes resemble those in the comics, and how much of the dialogue comes right out of the bubbles O'Malley drew over his characters' heads, it is a very, very different story than that of the comic.

Much of that is due to the hyper-compression of the plot; what covered years in the comics occurs in about a week here, and a lot of the sub-plots and character arcs involving Scott's web of friends and foes is whittled down to fit into a single, less-than-two-hour film. The tag line for the film is "an epic of epic epicness," but it's remarkably small in scope. There are fewer characters, fewer appearances by those characters, fewer conflicts, less time covered.

The story suffers somewhat because of that, or at least changes focus, so that it's a little less about growing up and thinking of others than it is a twentysomething music hipster kung fu movie (And man, it's pretty amazing to think that there's a big summer action movie in which the climax is Michael Cera kung fu-fighting Jason Schwartzman). Which is fine; I have the comics to tell the comics' story, I don't need a film version of the same thing done in the exact same way.

As a companion to the graphic novel, the film is pretty great. As a replacement? Well, there's no reason a film based on a comic needs to be considered in terms of a replacement of a comic, is there?

Added: Color, sound, movement, a ton of fighting

Missing: Mr. Chau, Joseph, Mobile, the Katayanagi Twins' robots, The Glow, "Last Song Kills Audience," Scott and company's orchestrated dance defense against Matthew Patel and his mystical powers, Ramona's handbag of holding, all reference of Ramona being a ninja, The Clash at Demonhead's drummer's bionic arm, Lisa Miller and the high school flashback (although you can see that here)

Could have used more of: Wallace Wells, Stacey Pilgrim, Envy Adams

Review-o-rama

I have a review of Drew Weing's Set To Sea in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly, and reviews of Dungeon Quest Book One, The Legacy, Market Day, Temperance and Wilson up in a catch-up review post at Blog@Newsarama. You can go read them if you like.

Review: Wisdom: Rudiments of Wisdom

This is a very strange volume, one of those strange trades one of the Big Two comics publishers occasionally release where I find myself almost as interested in the behind-the-scenes, why-this-book-is-the-way-it-is story than the events of the actual stories it contains.

Almost.

This is written by Paul Cornell, and it’s written in a rather Morrisonian, throw a bunch of crazy ideas out there, super-compressed style. It doesn’t all mesh terribly well—in large part due to the oddness I’ll get to in a moment—and functions better as a sort of first draft or “pilot” for Cornell’s later, more polished Captain Britain and MI-13 series than it does as a complete story unto itself. But there are a whole bunch of fun ideas being thrown around between these covers, and some rather interesting things being done with them.

Wisdom: Rudiments of Wisdom began as a six-issue, 2007 limited series on Marvel’s Max imprint (a part of the Marvel superhero line that’s just like all the other Marvel books, except with more swear words and fewer readers).

Every single issue shipped on time, which is generally a good thing, except this feat was accomplished by calling in a second art team to draw issues #3-#6. If the original team of Trevor Hairsine and Paul Neary couldn’t do all six issues in the necessary time frame, why not just have the second art team of Manuel Garcia and Mark Farmer draw the whole thing, rather than simply the last two-thirds of it?
(Above: Hairsine and Neary's Wisdom, followed by Garcia and Farmer's Wisdom. See, you can tell they're the same character because, um, they both wear sunglasses...?)

Did Hairsine and Neary decide against finishing the series for some reason, or did they simply fall behind schedule so badly that a new team was needed to finish it? And if the latter, why not just give them the sort of time Marvel gives, say, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., since, like Kick-Ass, this was a story happening so far away from the main Marvel Universe it didn’t really matter if it took six months or two years to wrap up?

Obviously no explanation is given, but it’s kind of annoying to see it as a reader. The finished product, collected into a trade paperback like this, looks amateurish and rushed, and rather trashy compared to the other books I have lying around the room I’m typing this post up in. These are all from Oni, Fantagraphics or First Second, and while I suppose there’s a degree of comparing apples to oranges, of all the bound comics sitting around my living room at the moment, the Marvel one is the only one that looks like it wasn’t published like this on purpose.

Neither art team is bad, mind you. I don’t think either has a style I’m necessarily crazy about, and yes, some of the art choices seem to be made in the name of style over substance (Hairsine’s Hitch-like, Ultimates/Authority “wide-screen” lay-outs, for example), but nothing about the artwork is as bad as the fact that it changes mid-way through. If this graphic novel were a movie, I suppose it would be a bit like the cast and director’s changing after the first act, if that makes sense.(Actually, on second thought, this bit by Hairsine is pretty bad. Surely there are better ways to frame a scene in which someone tells off the Fairy King Oberon, who is appearing in the form of a giant monster...)

So let’s ignore the art for a bit—which you really shouldn’t do when talking about a comic book, I know—and focus instead on Cornell’s script.

That’s pretty strong, particularly in the plotting.

The book opens with an invasion from the fairy realm, the fairies looking like more savage, hide-wearing, spear-wielding versions of the Victorian little fairies. One of them has pulled the old fairy trick of stealing a human child, only this child happens to be that of a cabinet minister. The British government turns to Pete Wisdom and his MI-13 team to invade Fairyland/The British Collective Unconscious to extract the child and, if possible, broker peace.

Wisdom is, I think, and old X-Men character, but that’s not really important here, other than explaining the fact that he can shoot energy beams out of his hands. His team consists of John The Skrull (a shape-changing Skrull alien who has taken the form and personality of John Lennon), Tink, a fairy expatriate, Captain Midlands, a British version of Captain America who isn’t quite as well preserved as Steve Rogers, and Maureen Raven, a clairsentient who it turns out is the relative of a pre-existing Marvel character.

The war with the Fairy Realm could easily have fueled an entire six-issue miniseries, but Cornell uses it as no more than the main portion of the first issue plot. The series is fairly episodic, with each issue finding the team facing a new threat, all more or less dealing with an overarching conflict between the British unconscious and the British population, while character drama involving Wisdom, the women on the team and some of his fellow British intelligence agents wind through all six.

The episodic nature of the book is, in large part, why the book “feels” kind of wrong to me; it reads like the first arc of an ongoing comic book meant to last years, rather than a miniseries (When Cornell did get to follow the series with an ongoing, the title, imprint and focus was changed, however). And while Cornell does a valiant job in introducing new characters and focusing on them as much as possible between zany threats like a legendary Welsh dragon becoming a modern gangster or an infinite army of Schrodinger’s cat-like Jack the Rippers invading London, there’s just not much space to fully realize new characters like Tink and Maureen.

I had a blast reading it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that, while fun and fairly good, there was a really rather brilliant comic in here somewhere, and rather than working to tease it out, Marvel just went ahead and rushed the thing to publication, before even they themselves were ready to do so.


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RELATED: Here's a couple panels from Wisdom #4, the issue which sees alternate versions of Jack The Ripper pouring into MI-13's reality. Tink takes on the Jack from From Hell:

No don't do it Shark the Shark you will die!!!

But then, you seem to be doing okay despite being out of water, so maybe you don't need to worry about continually moving in able to continue breathing correctly after all.


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Badly scanned image from Mo Willems' quite excellent Time to Sleep Sheep the Sheep! (HarperCollins; 2010), part of the Cat the Cat series of beginning readers books

That which you are least likely to ever find on J. Jonah Jameson's wrists:

Spider-Man Silly Bandz.

Review: X-Men: S.W.O.R.D.—No Time To Breathe

It shouldn’t have surprised anyone, least of all Marvel, when new “ongoing” series S.W.O.R.D. was canceled with its fifth issue, lasting less issues than many miniseries.

The creators were up-and-comers Kieron Gillen and Steven Sanders, and the subject matter was a space version of Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. agency. It was always going to be an uphill climb, but Marvel seemed to have made the incline all the steeper by launching it at an odd time and with their usual counterintuitive pricing strategy.

One of the stars was S.W.O.R.D. Commander Brand who, like the agency, was introduced by Joss Whedon during his popular but erratically published Astonishing X-Men, which managed 24 issues between 2004 and 2008. Brand and S.W.O.R.D. received a bit of the Marvel’s brightest limelight again during 2008 series Secret Invasion. But S.W.O.R.D. #1 didn’t launch until late 2009, well after the metaphorical iron was cooling.

The first issue, like many of Marvel’s first issues, cost $3.99. It included a back-up, so it wasn’t one of the Marvel books that cost 33% more than some other Marvel books of the same size, but it was still a somewhat bigger investment for potential new readers, the opposite strategy that’s employed when Vertigo kicks off a new series with $1 first issue.

Are those factors alone enough to explain why ongoing S.W.O.R.D. didn’t keep going?

Or does it perhaps have something to do with Marvel’s price increases among their best-sellers and their market-flooding publishing strategy leading to Marvel fans being unable or unwilling to try new Marvel series? (After all, if you’re committed to reading all those Deadpool or Hulk or Wolverine or now Avengers books, there’s a good chance you’re buying less new off-franchise series instead of simply spending more money each month on comics).

Or could the content of the book itself have had something to do with the quick death of the book? Having just read X-Men: S.W.O.R.D.—No Time To Breathe, the just awfully entitled collection of S.W.O.R.D. #1-#5, I can attest that while the book was a quite excellent almost sitcom-style comedy with rather unique artwork, it’s like almost nothing else Marvel publishes.

It’s certainly nothing like the John Cassaday covers promise—the only thing Sanders’ Beast character design has in common with Cassaday’s is that they’re both colored blue, for example. I can certainly imagine fans getting whiplash by turning the cover of the first issue, and deciding Sanders’ artwork wasn’t what they wanted.

Well, it’s not up to us to figure out what went wrong with S.W.O.R.D.—that’s Marvel’s problem (and, depending on the exact reasons, perhaps the direct market’s problem). From a reader’s perspective, absolutely nothing went wrong with S.W.O.R.D.—it’s a really great, really fun comic book, set in a super-comic universe and playing with some Marvel-owned toys, but doing such unusual things with them that the book’s Marvel-ousness seems merely a matter of surface detail.

Remarkably, the book doesn’t even feel cancelled. Gillen’s plotting is so tight that the volume ends up being a completely complete story, with no real dangling plotlines or disappointment regarding future roads not taken (With one exception—for some insane reason, the back-up from the first issue is included, between the chapters that constituted the first and second issues of the book. So after the first twenty-some pages of Gillen and Sanders’ stories, there’s an eight-page interruption beginning with the words “Enjoy this exclusive bonus story!” in the first panel, illustrated by Gillen’s Phonogram partner Jamie McKelvie. It is essentially nothing more than eight pages of explanation about why X-person Kitty Pryde hasn’t returned in this book yet…a book which has only had a single issue and one-fifth of a story at that point).

Gillen’s Brand isn’t a terribly deep or fascinating character. Instead, she’s a fairly standard comic book—modern Marvel comic book in particular—person in position of power. Bossy, angry, focused and quippy, she’s less acerbic than Warren Ellis’ version of this sort of character, and perhaps closer to Brian Michael Bendis’ or Matt Fraction’s or Ed Brubaker’s or Greg Rucka’s version of this sort of no-nonsense, all-business woman of action.

Basically, you can tell she’s not Maria Hill, but only because she has long green hair and wears sunglasses.

Brand is apparently dating the X-Men’s hair cat-man character Henry “Beast” McCoy, who is also apparently her subordinate in S.H.I.E.L.D. They never really get into why a normal-looking—if green-haired and super-heroine bodied—woman is dating a blue were-cat looking dude, but when we meet Brand’s alien brother (she’s half-alien, apparently), he appears to be covered in green fur and has a snout like Sanders’ Beast, so maybe Hank reminds her of her father?

So this is essentially the story of an extremely busy day in the life of this super-power couple in their high-pressure job at The Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Department, which is responsible for everything from stopping alien invasions of earth, space alien immigration issues and mediating conflicts involving alien races. Or, perhaps, this is just their typical day, rather than a particularly busy day, which I suppose only accents and underlines the zaniness of it.

I mentioned the sitcom-style of the set-up earlier, although I suppose that sounds like an insult—I suppose one could also compare it to classic screwball comedy, as our couple verbally spars throughout, although it’s Brand who seems the workaholic, while Beast is the playful, funnier character there to tell jokes and occasionally be referred to as a sex object by the other half of the couple.

So, what do they do on this very busy day? Well, Henry Gyrich, long-time Marvel Universe government bureaucrat a-hole (When Bendis re-positioned Norman Osborn as the leader of the Marvel Universe during “Dark Reign,” he was essentially writing Osborn as Gyrich) has been named Brand’s co-Commander, and is trying to take over the organization through governmental bureaucratic warfare. Meanwhile, extremely powerful, extremely dumb aliens are invading earth. Meanwhile, giant robot bounty hunter Death’s Head is trying to capture Brand’s alien smuggler brother, who has come to her for sanctuary and/or rescue. Meanwhile, Brand’s lisping number two man Sydren (that’s him on the cover) is forced to stall negotiations with another set of hostile aliens, who are also trying to invade earth. Meanwhile, a monstrously powerful and morally ambivalent sentient super-computer in the shape of a man is held prisoner in the basement of S.W.O.R.D. headquarters, pushing his own agenda by helping various parties.

Also, Kitty Pryde’s cute little purple dragon Lockheed is on the team, and here he’s presented as a hard-drinking, irritable bad-ass. He’s basically like Wolverine, only he’s a cute little purple dragon.

There is a lot of fighting and running around and flying in space ships, but the mode here is comedy—specifically, a situational comedy. It’s not the sort of Marvel comedy that one might find in, say, some of Jeff Parker or Fred Van Lente’s looser, zanier work, but character comedy arising from the conflicts and dialogue.

Plus the occasional sight gag, like Sydren talking about how negotiations are going while the characters he’s negotiating with are shown sharpening a knife in the background, or this frozen moment from early in the story:
I remember reading reviews of and message board comments about his series as it was being serially released, and I know Sanders’ art was something some fans took issue with. I pretty clearly remember someone referring to his Beast as looking like a donkey, which I thought was intriguing (usually, fans refer to either “cat-Beast” or “ape-Beast” to describe his two looks).

Well, his Beast actually looks more like a kangaroo to me. That is, the blunt, rectangular snout reminded me an awful lot of Booga, Tank Girl’s furry lover (although I suppose the fact that Tank Girl was another comic book starring a sexy woman and hairy anthropomorphic animal lover might have had something to do with that).
(Apologies for the poor quality of the scan. I've only been doing this for, what, four years now? I'm sure I'll get the hang of scanning panels from comic books eventually).

I liked this beast. It’s the cat version, but closer to the cat version that Frank Quitely designed for New X-Men, rather than Cassaday’s redesign of the character at the start of Astonishing X-Men. He’s got a big, cartoon lion-like face, long, mane-like hair, and his proportions aren’t human; his head’s bigger than his body, which is stocky and sometimes looks square-shaped.

Sanders explodes the alien designs a bit, so they all seem a bit more whimsical than the humans, who are all drawn more or less straight—his Gyrich is capable of some pretty cartoony facial expressions though. The result is a book where the aliens look all the more alien, and the visual tone is perfect for the verbal one. This is, after all, a comedy, albeit it one set in a serious story that takes place in a serious shared universe.

Sanders may have just gotten lucky with colorist Matt Wilson, or Wilson may have just shown a lot more care than many Marvel colorists, but the colors don’t squash or bury Sanders’ artwork as is so often the case these days.

I think this trade, despite its lame-o title and not particularly good cover—Brand looks kinda Hobbit-like there, doesn’t she?—ended up being one of the best Marvel Comics-published stories I’ve read in recent memory.

So of course the book didn’t last that long. Caviar for the masses? Eh, I don’t dig on fish eggs. But it certainly was a treat.



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Check out Lockheed's sense of decor in his quarters: A doggie bed, a single framed photo and a bottle of liquor—I believe that's what they call "spartan."

I think Mark Millar should have named his evil Batman character

"Badman" instead of "Nemesis." If you're going to do an evil Batman character and talk up how much you're pushing the envelope, why not push the envelope as far as you can, irritating DC and Warner Brothers lawyers and executives as much as possible? Badman will certainly be a better movie title than Nemesis anyway—IMDb.com has 19 exact matches for that title, and about 25 more for partial hits, video games and television shows—subversively bringing Batman to mind every time the title is spoken aloud.

Why does Atom-Smasher wear that mask?

Is it to protect his secret identity as Albert Rothstein? Is it to honor his godfather, the Golden Age Atom, who wore a similar mask?

No.

Apparently he wears it to hide the fact that he doesn't have a mouth on his face. Instead, his mouth is located somewhere along his inner left thigh, if the placement of that dialogue bubble is any indication.