High Moon, v. 1

Collects: High Moon Chapters 1-3 (originally available at http://zudacomics.com/)

Released: October 2009 (Zuda / DC)

Format: 192 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781401224622

What is this?: Weird Western intrigue as gunfighters meet werewolves in the Old West.

The culprits: Written by David Gallaher and art by Steve Ellis

I admit I never would have heard of High Moon, v. 1, if it hadn’t been for Valerie D’Orazio’s Occasional Superheroine blog. High Moon is the second release from DC’s Webcomic line, Zuda. The line’s first release, Bayou, passed me by without making an impression.

But High Moon did appeal to me. It was firmly in the weird Western genre, with six shooters and werewolves and other supernatural nastiness. I hadn’t heard of writer David Gallaher or artist Steve Ellis, but that wasn’t an important consideration. When it came down to it, though, buying High Moon was a whim I indulged to get free shipping.

Breaking with usual tradition, I’ll discuss Ellis’s end of the collaboration first. I like his relatively realistic humans, which contrasts with the extreme grotesqueries of the monsters. His sense of character design is usually good and sometimes better than that; his steampunk Tesla collaborator, Tristan, is the best part of the art. But even though I like his characters, they do tend to look a little alike — or sometimes the same character doesn’t look anything like himself. In the first chapter, there is one too many old white guys with overabundant facial hair, and it took a second reading to realize there was only one black guy in the story. In a story that deals extensively with transformations and subtle hints, Ellis’s work — especially in the first chapter — doesn’t quite cut it, unless you’re willing to give it a second read. And High Moon is a high-concept romp — you shouldn’t have to read it twice.

But maybe I’m being too hard on Ellis’s pencils. His drawing isn’t helped by the coloring, which I suppose was his work as well. Much of the story is colored with a dominant palette, usually deep blues or fiery reds. In theory, such color schemes tend to set the mood. In actuality, they tend to drown out subtleties in the work and flood the eyes with uniformity. (Or bore the viewer; the post “No Man’s Land” Detective Comics stuck with almost a monochrome, and the art nearly put me to sleep.) These colors don’t bore. They are vivid, leaping off the page at readers’ before the linework has a chance to make an impression. In the second and third chapter, this isn’t as important, since there are fewer subtleties to the plot or transformations. But, as clichéd as it is, you never get a second chance …

Gallaher’s story and characters should be fun. I can feel it in my bones. Somehow, though, I never engage with the characters and never enjoy the plot. The former is because there are carefree, fun characters; everyone has a dark past, something that has literally and figuratively scarred them. It could have to do with the switch in protagonists after Chapter 1, especially given the two leads didn’t interact enough, and the new lead felt thrust upon the reader by authorial fiat. Also, Gallaher seemed to feel there was a symbolic passing of the torch, but it never showed up on the page.

The story … the story is lacking, somehow. The art can’t be entirely blamed for the confusion; Gallaher plays it a little too subtle in places. (That might be my fault for not reading too carefully, but I don’t know that I should have to read that carefully.) The quest of former Pinkerton agent MacGregor to round up a gang, rescue a kidnapped girl, and deal with the supernatural he’s obviously battled before has a lot of great elements, and his own secret adds a little something to his character. He has a grim sense of humor. But the addition of his past with Eddie Conroy, the secret of the mines, the sheriff’s daughter … I think Gallaher thought he was wrongfooting readers who saw the big werewolf and jumped to the obvious conclusion. He was, but he was also adding a lot of clutter to a story that didn’t need it to be interesting. The second and third chapters are a little more streamlined, but the new protagonist isn’t quite as interesting.

Perhaps it was a great misreading on my part, thinking that the story should be fun. But on the other hand, I have no interest in a weird Western where everyone is miserable, especially when the writer heaps the misery on the characters before he gets me to start liking them.

(Oh, and I’m sure having the cavalry captain say “I’m your huckleberry” seemed like a cool idea. Yes, it sounded cool when Val Kilmer said it as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. It’s not cool here. And the army doesn’t have a rank of “commander.”)

Obviously, I didn’t like High Moon. The rating below is higher than my negative comments might indicate; High Moon gets a bonus simply for being part of the weird Western genre. Fortunately, readers can sample it before making a decision — actually, read the entire series, including the start of the fourth chapter, online at Zuda Comics.

Rating: (2 of 5)

The Essential Batman Encyclopedia

Collects: Original content

Released: June 2008 (Del Rey)

Format: 400 pages / 32 pages of color plates / $29.95 / ISBN: 9780345501066

What is this?: A thorough reference book detailing 70 years of Batman comics

The culprit: Writer Robert Greenberger

When the Random House blog Suvudu launched last August, they had a Batman trivia contest; the prize was The Essential Batman Encyclopedia by Robert Greenberger, a former editor at DC. I was fortunate enough to win the contest, and even though it took about half a year to get the book (I have no idea why, although I suspect some sort of personnel shuffling), I was impressed with the prize.

One word of warning, though: Do not read this book all the way through at once. Since this is a set of alphabetical entries on just about everybody Batman has come across, that is not the way to read this book. Approach the Essential Batman Encyclopedia the same way you would Wikipedia; look up something, see an interesting cross reference, and then start wandering. Reading straight through, as I did … well, it takes a while, because it’s hard to read more than six or eight pages at one gulp (basic dictionary / Bible rules), no matter how interesting the subject matter. And after a while, it all begins to blend together, and your brain feels ready for a long stretch in Arkham.

There are, in essence, three or four types of entries, all of them footnoted to help place them chronologically. There are the gangster entries, which stretch from the beginning of Batman’s career to the end of the Silver Age. If they’re goofy gangsters — the ones with stupid gimmicks or the ones who take advantage of Batman being intangible or having a broken arm or being a purple giant — they’re from the ‘50s and ’60s. If not, they’re from the ‘40s, and the stories sound surprisingly sane and interesting. If they mention real crime — you know, with ethnic groups, so we can blame our troubles on foreigners and minorities — then the character’s from the ‘90s or later. The second kind of entry covers the long careers of Batman’s costumed villains; these aren’t as fully footnoted as I might have hoped, but they are pretty complete entries. Then there are entries that tie in to all the crossovers and plot devices Batman’s gone through since Knightfall.

It gets a little repetitive. That’s not Greenberger’s fault, and he tries to throw in cutesy nicknames like “Bird of Banditry” (Penguin) to add a little variety to the entries. (They don’t help.) And it definitely doesn’t help when he has to deal with Earth-1 and Earth-2 versions of characters, then any revisions to the Earth-1 character that were caused by Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour or Infinite Crisis.

But Greenberger makes things as simple as they’re likely to be. He is to be praised for not stinting on those entries focusing on Batman’s early career, even if I didn’t care about Ferris Hedrant or “Fingers” Nolan (his name is the most interesting thing about him). The Essential Batman Encyclopedia also doesn’t focus on those early “glory” days, giving readers plenty of info on Gotham’s current happenings. I felt there might have been fewer entries on the ‘70s than other decades, but maybe nothing other than Ra’s Al Ghul’s plots happened back then.

The illustrations do help; they are sprinkled throughout, and rarely do two pages go by without some sort of illustration. Those in the text are black and white, taken from all points of Batman’s publication history; there are also 32 pages of color plates from many different artists, although they shade toward the last 20 years. Some of the black-and-white pictures aren’t captioned, and although most are easy to place with an entry, some are difficult.

For those of you who wondered exactly what orifice Grant Morrison was pulling his ideas out of during his Batman run, here’s where you can find out. If you read through this book, you find that almost every odd plot point, every weird name came from some Silver Age story you haven’t read. (And judging from the descriptions, you don’t want to.) Zuhr-En-Arr, Thomas Wayne in a Batsuit, the Batmen of All Nations (or Club of Heroes, if you prefer) … They’re all here. Unfortunately, the book was published before the end of Morrison’s run, but it does include a portion of those stories as well.

Greenberger’s done an excellent job with the The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. It is reasonably priced, and it’s very detailed. (I wish he would have used a more conventional style for his references — put the period after the reference, man! — but that’s a minor, if enduring, criticism.) Despite all the boring stuff that’s happened to Batman (any character who’s been around for 70 years is going to have a lot of boring stories in his books), The Essential Batman Encyclopedia is extremely interesting.This is really an outstanding work for all Bat-fans.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

The Hood: Blood from Stones

Collects: The Hood #1-6 (2002)

Released: July 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 160 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785128182

What is this?: A small-time crook gets an alien’s cloak and boots, which give him superpowers — and a chance at becoming a big-time crook.

The culprits: Writer Brian K. Vaughn and artist Kyle Hotz

When the trade paperback for The Hood: Blood from Stones went out of print, I thought my chance to read the story was pretty much nil, unless a local library picked it up. But somehow Marvel slipped a hardcover copy past me a couple of years ago …

Hood is the story of an obvious Spider-Man analogue, Parker Robbins (“Parker” for Peter Parker, “Robbins” because he’s a thief and a thug). Unlike Peter, no one was around to teach him about the correlation between great power and great responsibility, so when he and his cousin shoot an alien and take his super shoes and cloak, Parker’s thinking of supervillainy, not superheroics.

Not that Parker is evil. He visits his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, in the nursing home, telling her stories he thinks will make her happy, and he really wants to get her into a better home. He wants to build a better life with his pregnant girlfriend, although he lies to her about how he gets his illegal money. When the use of his powers leads to the grave injury of a police officer, he’s deeply sorry; when his cousin is thrown in jail for his crimes, he works hard to get him cleared.

But he wants to be a criminal like his father, who worked in organized crime. He visits a Russian prostitute. He lies, takes the easy way out, makes the easy choices, often by pulling a trigger. Like Peter, he has had a hard life; unlike Peter, he doesn’t have strong moral teaching or a moral anchor. So he drifts. It keeps Parker sympathetic, despite all the wrong things he does.

Hood is labeled as — and definitely is — part of Marvel’s Max line. There are plenty of sex, violence, and cursing. The interesting part is this allows writer Brian K. Vaughn the freedom to write natural dialogue in a way that’s totally different than Brian Bendis’s “natural” dialogue, even when Bendis was doing indy comics and could curse. There’s no stammering, no awkward pauses; it’s just men laughing at and with each other, insulting everyone in sight. It feels natural and is often funny.

The Hood’s big plan is to rob an incoming shipment of blood diamonds, and there he runs into his first superpowered opponents. If there’s a fault in the story, it’s in Parker’s opposition: he easily defeats the Constrictor, Jack O’Lantern, and Shocker (at once), outwits a pair of FBI agents (who aren’t that bright), and manages to pull one over on the mobster he robs and his enforcer. Even though a pair of pistols are technically part of the Hood’s “powers,” Vaughn does make sure they’re not the answer to Parker’s problems — they do little to the supervillians, and they only make his problems worse in the end.

The story ends with an obvious set-up for later stories: the crime boss who the Hood fought cries over a picture of his family, the widow of a man killed during the story takes on a costume, and the alien whom Parker killed to get his super-equipment is shown to be alive. None of this is followed up on; whatever Vaughn had in mind, it came to naught. This is a bit frustrating, mostly in the sense that Vaughn’s vision for the Hood — which has largely been subverted — is an interesting one. The subplots he used as a trailer … well, I won’t miss not seeing them.

I like penciler Kyle Hotz’s art, although a good amount of credit should also go to inker Eric Powell and colorist Brian Haberlin. The Hood’s world is entirely a nighttime one, and it’s filled with shadows and darkness — appropriate for someone who’s path keeps going farther and farther into the darkness. In this world of darkness, Hotz’s art creates a New York filled with wide-eyed craziness, shabby apartments, and second-hand lives. The women are all overly curvaceous, although he avoids gratuitous shots.

I wish I had read The Hood earlier; it really is an excellent story. It’s too bad Vaughn and Hotz’s version of the character was jettisoned like a horse in the Doldrums, but that doesn’t affect this story.

Rating: (4 of 5)

Non-fiction excuse

The reviews have been missing for the last few weeks, I realize.

I would like to come up with a fanciful explanation, but the real reason is a bit more prosaic: I am co-writing a book about how libraries can build their collections of graphic novels. This has been taking my time for the last few weeks — having a co-author is good in that it means you won’t slack off, but it also means when they expect material, you have to buckle down.

The deadlines will continue for a while. So, unfortunately, I’ve decided to cut back the reviews to one per week; the new reviews will go up on Fridays. (This week will be The Hood: Blood from Stones. The first winner of the Zuda contest, High Moon, will be the Halloween entry.) There may be other posts during the week. We’ll just see how things go.

So I’m sorry for the cutbacks in reviews. It’s hard times. Cutbacks are everywhere.

The Fate of the Artist

Collects: OGN

Released: April 2006 (First Second)

Format: 96 pages / color / $17.95 / ISBN: 9781596431331

What is this?: Artist Eddie Campbell details the investigation of his own (fictional) disappearance.

The culprit: Eddie Campbell

I know nothing of artist Eddie Campbell, except that he collaborated with Alan Moore on From Hell. Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist is an “autographical novel” told in many different artistic styles. So many styles, with a thin but baffling plot, that frankly, I don’t know what to make of it.

Fate is nominally about Campbell’s disappearance, narrated by the police officer who investigates. So there’s a lot of interviews with the family, although few of them are straightforward. The daughter is interviewed with crude speech balloons above photos of her. Some of the story is told through comic strips — interactions between Campbell and his wife are in the marital comic “Honeybee,” with other stories told through strips such as “Angry Cook,” “Theatricals,” and “Our Problem Child.” And some of the reminiscences about Campbell are told through straightforward, nine-panel-to-the-page, watercolored comics. When Campbell appears in these, the narration notes Campbell will be played by Richard Siegrist, a fictional actor.

So, first of all: do not expect anything of the plot. Anything. It’s extremely thin, has no real payoff, and is used as a frame for Campbell to talk about what he wants. It’s discarded when it’s convenient. I can’t see why Campbell used his fictional disappearance in an autobiography. He’s obviously talking about things that are very important to him, and the frame only distracts. It’s obviously a metaphor, but a metaphor that doesn’t work in the story is merely a big, distracting sign screaming “Look at me!” into your ear.

So, ignore that. Fate is made up of short vignettes, reminiscences of Campbell’s family life, told through his wife, his daughter, and the comic strips. They are melancholy tales, with rarely a happy story among them. Campbell seems obsessed with the ideas of roles — his part is played by Siegrist, the comic strip gives everyone defined comic roles, his observations of the “state of modern marriage.” Campbell’s art tries to break free of those roles in their startling variety, mostly well chosen for their roles. (His daughter in photos is an especially good choice; the comic strip “Honeybee,” which reduces marriage to stereotypical roles and punchlines is another.)

The storytelling is similarly scattershot but isn’t quite as effective. The second part of Fate begins delving into historical characters, real or fictional. Campbell uses this to delve into the role viewers play in art: the critics, the audience, contemporaries. He goes from a short essay on reconstructions of loss classical structures to a direct speech on the matter to his own imaginary historical friends, which his daughter calls “a lot of good listeners.” These digressions allow Campbell to make the points he wants to, but it disturbs the book’s narrative (such as it is) and is a bit less artful in saying its piece than the rest of the book.

Which is a shame, because the final section, in which Campbell adapts O. Henry’s “Confessions of a Humorist,” is very well done and much more to the point than anything in the rest of Fate. In the adaptation, in which “the leading role is played by Mr. Eddie Campbell,” Henry and Campbell tell of a humor writer who becomes successful by mining every interaction for nuggets of wit and interest. He becomes despised and unhappy; when he chucks that career to buy into a funeral home, he becomes happy again. The sincerity of “Confessions” bleeds into the pages like the watercolors, and I get the feeling this is more true to Campbell than anything else in Fate, despite it being written about a century ago by another person.

I have a feeling the people who will like this the most are the ones who have the greatest familiarity with Campbell’s work. Having read none of his work, I was baffled occasionally and disinterested at other times. There is a serious discussion of art and the artist here, but the disconnect between the surface and the symbol are too stark for me to engage with either the discussion or Campbell’s semi-humorous life. (Or this representation of his life.)

Rating: (2 of 5)

Wonder Woman: The Ends of the Earth

Collects: Wonder Woman #20-5 (2008)

Released: March 2009 (DC)

Format: 144 pages / color / $24.99 (hardcover) / ISBN: 9781401221362

What is this?: A man with no soul sends Wonder Woman on a quest against a great evil, along with Beowulf.

The culprits: Writer Gail Simone and pencilers Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang

And to end Gail Simone Week, we have Wonder Woman: The Ends of the Earth. This is Simone’s second volume as writer of Wonder Woman (although again, it’s not like DC will tell anyone, omitting volume numbers).

Issues #20-3 make up the eponymous story, in which a nameless man with no soul forces Wonder Woman to gather Beowulf and a barbarian to fight the demon who has taken his soul. It’s a straightforward story, although Simone manages to get a few twists in. However, the major drama in “Ends of the Earth” seems to be whether Wonder Woman will lose touch with mercy and / or kill someone. Although that is threatened, it’s something that doesn’t seem very likely … Wonder Woman’s death seems more likely, since you can come back from death but not from being a murderer.

On the other hand, Wonder Woman has murdered a man, and the demon torments her with the knowledge. Wonder Woman did it for a greater good, but … this seems to be part of Simone’s grand unifying plan for Wonder Woman, the idea that assimilates (or tosses aside) all the piecemeal characterizations Wonder Woman has had and finally gives her a proper concept. It doesn’t quite work here, I think; the opponent feels generic, and the threat doesn’t have enough dramatic heft to make Simone’s concept stand out.

The final two issues have two stories: Nemesis meeting with Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta for half an issue, and the rest with Wonder Woman on the set of the Wonder Woman movie, which has been hijacked by a villainess. Both of these B stories are better than the main tale. Hippolyta and Wonder Woman put the bewildered Nemesis through hell, tormenting him both as a test and because they can, and it is, at times, hilarious, although it is over the top. The Wonder Woman movie is amusing as it goes through all the bad ideas that have been thrown at the Wonder Woman character over the years and forces the character to face them. She is rightly embarrassed and wishes they would go away. The villainess is forgettable, but Diana’s superintelligent ape advisors amuse me greatly. I’m not sure I’d want their help on contract negotiations, as they’re too distracted by offers of fresh fruit, but I’m sure they’d be a benefit if discussions got too sticky.

The Ends of the Earth features a couple of strong artists. As I mentioned in my review of Wonder Woman: The Circle, I like the work of penciler Bernard Chang, who drew the final two issues. His Wonder Woman stands out as a warrior and not a pinup. Aaron Lopresti penciled “Ends of the Earth” and did a very good job, although his work is a little too generic — or perhaps Dodson-like — to truly stand out. Still, I have no quibbles about the art itself.

This one’s out only in hardback, which I’m a little disappointed in; the paperback is due out next March, according to Amazon. (Obviously, solicitations aren’t announced that far ahead of time.) DC often waits a year before putting out paperback version of hardbacks. I don’t like that, but it’s their company. On the other hand, this is my review, and I can’t recommend buying this in hardback. If you’re a Wonder Woman or Simone fan, by all means, get the paperback — but $25 is too much for this.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Birds of Prey, v. 3: Between Dark & Dawn

Collects: Birds of Prey #69-75 (2004)

Released: February 2006 (DC)

Format: 176 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781401209407

What is this?: Huntress infiltrates a cult while Oracle battles the enemy within; then, the Birds clear up loose ends before leaving Gotham.

The culprits: Writer Gail Simone and pencilers Ed Benes, Ron Adrian, Jim Fern, Eduardo Barretto, and Eric Battle

Gail Simone Week begins with Birds of Prey, v. 3: Between Dark & Dawn, the third volume (even if DC is loathe to admit it) of the Gail Simone-written run on the title.

I’ve reviewed the first and second volumes of the series, but this is the first one that has disappointed me. The main plot, which takes place in issues #69-73, has Huntress investigating a cult that revolves around superheroes and Oracle dealing with what appears to be a cybervirus. (There’s also an amusing sideplot about Oracle giving Savant a job to prove himself worthy, but that one pays off in #74.)

Neither of the plots worked. Despite having fun dialogue and the characters readers have come to enjoy, this was too by the numbers. First, interfacing between “cyberspace” and the real world is always a dicey proposition, and even though the explanation for Oracle’s infection makes sense, it still doesn’t feel right. It starts out interesting — Oracle seeing patterns in an unplugged screen is suitably creepy — but the more it becomes concrete, the less interesting it is, the less possible madness is for an explanation and the more it becomes a standard fight that Oracle shouldn’t win. She does win, of course, through the most hackneyed way possible: beating the logical machine with emotion.

I have only one word for the hybrid of Oracle and the infection: no. Silver skin with thick electrical cables for dreadlocks does not work as a look.

I also have my troubles with Huntress and the cult. Simone has fun with Huntress, making her sharp witted and sharp tongued. But I’m not quite sure Simone pulls off the idea of a cult leader with mind control (unoriginal) and faith in superheroes. That the mind control works only on those with faith doesn’t help; instead, it only muddies matters, throwing another element into a story that might have needed something different to help it along but didn’t need what feels like tacked-on mutterings about belief.

The final two issues are excellent and raise the book out of the doldrums. Issue #74 has a few different elements, but most of them are amusing, and even though it’s an overall mishmash, it is wrapping up some dangling plots. Issue #75 blows up Oracle’s base with no warning of plot development — it’s a fait accompli when the issue begins, so I don’t feel bad about spoiling it — but it takes off from there, with the Birds of Prey running one last mission before leaving Gotham. The issue also introduces Lady Blackhawk to the Birds with a bittersweet story of a timelost character — it’s not a new idea, but on the other hand, her gender and feelings of discrimination make her a unique fit for Birds.

If you’ve read my reviews of the other Simone Birds, you know my feelings about his art: overemphasis on cheesecake, but other than that, a good artist. I particularly like his work on the Lady Blackhawk story (if that’s who it was; DC doesn’t provide credits on individual issues). On the other hand, dreadlock cyberOracle was his fault, and he makes Black Canary wear a flyaway frilled blouse to the hospital; it’s aggressively ugly. Some artist also thinks bait for fishing looks like hotdogs, but I believe that’s Ron Adrian who drew #69. Adrian does an admirable job of fitting in with Benes’s work. Adrian and Eric Battle pencil #73, and Jim Fern contributes #74; I imagine Eduardo Barretto does #75, but I have no proof. None of these artists really stand out, except for Adrian.

Although this is below average for Simone, I think this is just a bump in the Birds of Prey road. I’ll keep reading along — and I’m excited, because in only two more volumes, there will be a new artist.

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

Sin City, v. 1: The Hard Goodbye

Collects: Stories from Dark Horse Presents: Fifth Anniversary Special and Dark Horse Presents #51-62 (1991-2)

Released: 1992 (Dark Horse)

Format: 208 pages / black and white / $17 / ISBN: 9781593072933

What is this?: A mentally ill thug named Marv is framed for murdering a prostitute, causing him to launch a one-man war on Sin City’s power structure.

The culprit: Frank Miller

Last Friday, it was the newest non-superhero comic to be made into a movie. This Friday, it’s one of the best.

Frank Miller wrote and drew Sin City, v. 1: The Hard Goodbye as a feature in an anthology title for Dark Horse Comics. It is an ultraviolent noir tale, as Marv — a thug who gets confused without his meds — is framed for murdering Goldie, a prostitute who gave herself to him in return for his protection. Ashamed for failing Goldie, Marv investigates the murder, and not just because Basin City’s corrupt police force is trying to tie the murder on him.

Miller works hard to construct a noir world, from the title to the charaters and setting down to the black-and-white art. It’s not a setting constructed on Phillip Marlowe’s LA or Sam Spade’s San Francisco or even Mike Hammer’s New York, although it’s easy to see Hammer could get to enjoy Sin City. The Hard Goodbye goes well past Hammer’s gleeful gunplay and dead women, crafting something so violent it’s almost superhuman. In the movie, this was morphed into a sort of a noir fu, a martial art that relies not the purity of heart or the wisdom to learn but instead hinges on a person’s rage and corruption. The comic book is like that — Marv and his chief antagonist Kevin are bizarre aberrations, their ability to take and deal out pain inhuman in scope. Miller integrates them into a world that is mostly recognizable without a great deal of trouble, but Marv knows the truth: they’re freaks.

There is a legitimate complaint to be made about Miller’s depiction of women in the book: they’re all hookers or strippers. Other than Marv’s mother, the lone exception, Marv’s parole officer, makes her first appearance nude. The noir genre has a long tradition of ladies who make their living on the wrong side of the law, and there have been more than a few hookers among those. A charitable reader might make the point that Miller is being satirical, making Sin City so hyper-noir that every woman has been “corrupted” in some way. Or perhaps make the same point that Marv makes: what kind of woman would be seen around an unstable, ugly brute like him? Still, I feel uneasy about the undercurrent of misogyny, despite Miller’s attempts to empower the hookers by giving them their own section of the city where they rule. At any one point his depiction of women can be accepted as true. As an overall theme, it’s distracting at best and unappealing at worst.

I admit, the narrative is straight and to the point, not leaving a lot of room for extraneous characters. That’s one of The Hard Goodbye’s strengths, coming from its original publication in anthology comics. It’s impressive, given how effectively Miller builds the feel of Sin City and how well he constructs his psychopath with a heart of gold, Marv.

Miller’s art is a big help with that. The story is told in stark black and white, with completely dark silhouettes and no room for shades of gray. There’s not much subtlety to Miller’s work, but that’s not unintentional: the entire story’s about as subtle as a bullet to the head, and the art follows the story’s leads. Despite the lack of color, you can almost see the trail of blood Marv leaves behind. You can almost smell the corruption and feel the rain. This book is visceral all around, and it’s hard to imagine another artist who could pull it off — or at least pull it off with Miller.

The Hard Goodbye is as brutal as its protagonist, although there’s a great deal more sophistication. Despite some uncomfortable undercurrents, this book is still a hell of a read.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

Whiteout (movie)

Last week I reviewed the trade paperback of Whiteout, and I found it artistically interesting, although the story was a little weak: the mystery was not that complex, and the protagonist was not developed as fully as she could be because of the attention given to another character. Still, it was a decent book, worthy of your time if you wanted something not from the Big Two comic companies or not superheroes.

I’m happy to say the movie version of Whiteout is better than the book. It sticks with the same formula: scientists murdered in the Antarctic, with a U.S. marshal investigating. Stetko, the marshal, is more fully rounded than in the comic version, and the investigation takes one or two more side treks than its inspiration. The movie made Antarctica more menacing than the comic as well; every time the protagonists left base, it was certain that something awful would happen to them. The cold bled through the screen into the theater, although the air conditioning at my theater might have had something to do with that.

Whiteout has received negative reviews, mostly because critics felt the mystery wasn’t all that strong (I can’t blame them) or the thriller aspects were weak (which I disagree with). Still, the final fight scene is not all that exciting, despite it being a duel with pistols and icepicks in a blizzard. The fighters have to be attached to a rope (they can’t see where they’re going, so the rope is the only way they can find their way from one building to another), but the ropes aren’t threatened enough, and it was difficult to tell the combatants from each other. Plus, you know, it’s supposed to be whiteout conditions. Part of me wished they had the guts to put up a pure white screen with a soundtrack.

But what really concerns me — what always concerns me about comic book movies — is how it differentiates from the source material. Now you get to know too:

Carrie Stetko: In the comic: Stetko is a widow exiled to Antarctica by the U.S. Marshal’s Service after she snapped the neck of an escaped prisoner who had surrendered. She takes no guff from anyone, and she probably is the most intimidating person in Antarctica.
Also: Stetko is short, freckled, and looks a little dumpy in her winter gear.

In the movie: Stetko is a U.S. marshal who takes a post in Antarctica after her partner sold her out. He let a prisoner free to kill her, but she subdued the prisoner and killed her partner when he tried to shoot her. She’s more diplomatic than the comic version, and even though she has a gun when she first encounters the killer, she runs like a frightened girl into the cold instead of fighting back.
Also: Kate Beckinsale never looks dumpy, not even in heavy winter gear.

Stetko’s boss: In the comic: Brett McEwan, who’s always insulting and putting pressure on Stetko to not screw up this case.

In the movie: Who knows? Stetko’s autonomous, baby.

The McGuffin In the comic: Gold, found by researchers taking random mineral samples.

In the movie: Diamonds found by the Russians in Antarctica but lost when the plane carrying them crashed after the pilots got greedy and tried to steal them. See? Foreigners can’t be trusted!

The secret agent: In the comic: Lily Sharpe, a British secret agent who’s even more hard-nosed than Stetko and a good deal taller.

In the movie: U.N. “operative” Robert Pryce, who knows more about the situation than Stetko at the beginning, but he works for the U.N., so eventually she walks all over him. I think it’s clear the moviemakers didn’t want to burden American audiences’ minds with the thought that Antarctica is open to all nations; they took everyone foreign (except the pilot, Haden) and converted them into Americans. You might argue the U.N. adds a multinational tinge to things, but it’s the U.N.: all good Americans know they’re toothless and useless.
Pryce is played by Gabriel Macht; you may remember Macht from the title role in the horrible The Spirit. He looks nothing like that in Whiteout, thank God. I need no reminders of that movie ever.

The conspiring scientists: In the comic: Five men from four different countries.

In the movie: Three Americans. Because American audience don’t want no damn foreign science.

Doc: In the comic: Bald, fat, bearded, and named “Furry.”

In the movie: Bearded, played by Tom Skerritt, and named “Fury.” Since he’s American already, he doesn’t need to be changed.

Delfy: In the comic: An old hand at flying in Antarctica, Delfy is an African-American and Stetko’s most trusted pilot.

In the movie: A young Iraq veteran in his first year flying in Antarctica. He’s still African-American, though.

Haden: In the comic: An Australian pilot introduced about halfway through to be suspicious.

In the movie: An Australian pilot introduced cleverly at the beginning of the film to look like a background character.

Guns: In the comic: According to Stetko, firearms are outlawed by treaty in Antarctica, although Sharpe carries one around. Guns can be expected to malfunction after short exposure to the extreme cold.

In the movie: Stetko always carries her pistol with her. The guns never fail, as rarely as they are used.

The eponymous whiteout: In the comic: During Stetko’s accident, which happens at the end of issue #1 and beginning of #2.

In the movie: Climactic final fight scene!

The fingers: In the comic: Gone.

In the movie: Gone, although a long time passes between exposure and revelation. We see the character deal with the loss as well, although if only he / she had kept his / her gloves on …

The weather: In the comic: Other the single whiteout and the cold, not really a factor.

In the movie: A huge storm is about to hit the base, causing an early winter evacuation (and a deadline to solve the mystery).

The bases: In the comic: Amundson-Scott (U.S., at the South Pole), McMurdo (U.S.), and Victoria (U.K.)

In the movie: Amundson-Scott and the deserted Vostok (Russian). I repeat: None of that damn foreign science. It’ll give you the socialism. Listening to Russian music in a deserted Russian station is bad enough.

Whiteout (TPB)

Collects: Whiteout #1-4 (1998)

Released: 2001 (Oni Press)

Format: 128 pages / black and white / $11.95 / ISBN: 9780966712711

What is this?: Carrie Stetko, a U.S. marshal in Antarctica, investigates a murder.

The culprits: Writer Greg Rucka and artist Steve Lieber

Since I was planning to see the movie Whiteout this weekend, I thought I would be timely for once and review the original trade paperback.

Whiteout came out in 1998, before writer Greg Rucka became a big-name comics writer (he was a novelist at this point) or artist Steve Lieber became a regular contributor at DC. It was an unusual mystery series from a small publisher in Oregon. I have no idea why I picked it up; it was certainly the first non-Marvel / DC TPB I’d ever bought, or even read. But it was good enough it led me down the road to Rucka’s novels, to my regret.

Whiteout is set in Antarctica, where Carrie Stetko, a disgraced U.S. marshal, has to investigate a murder, a man found murdered out on the ice where a camp has just vanished. In her investigations, the bodies start piling up, the cold takes its toll, and she runs into a Brtish secret agent.

As a mystery, I’m not sure what to make Whiteout. Stetko is one of those investigators who bull their way though the investigation, leaving a wide swath of destruction behind them and the shockwave of their movement creating a smaller blast in front of them. This is common for mysteries, although it makes more sense in stories when the suspect pool is larger. Using Antarctica for a setting leaves Whiteout with a limited pool of suspects, and one would think a more subtle approach might be better suited for the story. But perhaps that’s just my stylistic choice.

Rucka spends a lot of time on Stetko as a character and on Lily Sharpe, a British secret agent who spends most of her time in Antarctica contravening treaties. The mystery isn’t overly complex — although it does have an unexpected twist or two — so Stetko’s personal journey has to be strong to deliver a gripping story. Stetko is an interesting character, but the presence of Sharpe pulls the emphasis away from Stetko. Time with Sharpe could be used instead to develop Stetko and tie together her life before the ice with her investigation, and I never really felt the two parts of her story meshed. Her life before got her sent to Antarctica, but it doesn’t lead her to see revenge or redemption or anything. It’s simply a backstory. Sharpe doesn’t ever advance beyond irritating sidekick.

When I originally read Whiteout, those twists pulled me in and made me interested in Rucka’s other work. In retrospect, I should have known better about Rucka’s novels. Hell, I even read his “Queen and Country” novel, A Gentleman’s Game.

Lieber is outstanding in Whiteout; on my second reading, his art is clearly the best thing about the book. He works in black and white, a choice I don’t think was his, but it’s perfect for a mystery set in Antarctica and it’s perfect for Lieber. His realistic style is a great fit for the story Rucka tells, and his realism doesn’t allow for a “perfect” Carrie Stetko. Stetko is more real for her physical imperfections, and they work better for such an imperfect character than the plastic, idealized women in many other comics. He has a great eye for detail, and his Antarctica feels cold. Whiteout might be more effective than an air conditioner on a hot summer day, really.

So overall it’s worth looking at, although it isn’t the absorbing story I remember from almost a decade ago. Next week, I’ll look at the movie and compare it to the TPB.

Rating: (3 of 5)

If This Not Be Bromance —

I am both relieved and disappointed to see that the TPB Marvel had solicited as Marvel Bromance has been released this week as Marvel Super Hero Team-Up.

Relieved, because Good Lord, Marvel Bromance was an awful name, and “Bromance” is a word that is helpful only because it identifies its users as socially deficient numbskulls. (I suppose it can be used ironically, although I’m not sure that’s any better.)

Disappointed, because, well, “Marvel Bromance” would be worth a laugh for years, and now there’s nothing to distinguish this collection. Hey — it’s a random bunch of team-ups! Of course, I could have bought Essential Marvel Team-Up, v. 3, and then I would have had a consecutive run of random team-ups instead.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, v. 1

Collects: Tales Designed to Thrizzle #1-4 (2005-8)

Released: July 2009 (Fantagraphics)

Format: 160 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9781606991640

What is this?: Absurdist madness designed to look like comic magazines of days gone by

The culprit: Michael Kupperman

I heard about Tales Designed to Thrizzle on the podcast House to Astonish. The two hosts tried to describe writer / artist Michael Kupperman’s humor. It was difficult for the hosts to describe why Tales Designed to Thrizzle #5 was so funny, but they were convinced it was hilarious.

I’m having trouble too describing the humor as well. But it’s extremely funny; you can be assured of that.

The first four issues are collected in Tales Designed to Thrizzle, v. 1, the first Fantagraphics book I’ve reviewed. The book is made up of one-page jokes, with the occasional feature that runs on for a few pages. Running jokes include Cousin Grandpa, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein as ‘70s cops, and Snake ‘n’ Bacon, a crime fighting / time traveling team consisting of a snake who can only hiss and a slice of bacon that says bacon-related things such as “Crumble me in a salad” or “Wipe me with a paper towel to remove excess grease,” neither of which actually fits into the story.

Really, that gives you an idea of the type of humor right there.

The jokes are presented to look like a Silver or Golden Age comic book, with plenty of fake ads that are designed to fill space along the margins. The art apes the style of the ‘40s through the ‘60s, although when appropriate, Kupperman shows he can draw in a more modern style as well. The content is absurd, although not in the Silver Age way — these are knowing absurdities, presented with a wink at the reader and often with a few obscenities mixed in. It’s hard to say why these jokes are funny, other than to point out their outlandish and outrageous nature.

But they are often hilarious: a feature on pornographic coloring books, Prohibition-era sex blimps and sex holes, the world’s worst choose-your-own-adventure story, and the story of Pagus, Jesus’s evil half-brother. The final Twain and Einstein story has ads that look like the junk advertised in ‘70s comics with a humorous twist: a “How to Avoid Being Dominated by Others” ad delivered in a bullying voice, “Learn to Pick Pockets for Fun and Profit,” “Learn How to Dance” (cowboys will shoot at your feet), and a floor safe that looks and smells like a pile of feces.

No, none of it makes any sense. But that’s part of the charm. It’s certainly unpredictable.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle doesn’t come out that often — by my estimates, an issue is released about once per year — so it may be a while before another collection comes out. But I’ll be waiting — well, probably I’ll try to pick up the individual issues, because no one’s that patient. But I’ll buy the collection when it comes out too.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

Marvelman — Does Everything a Marvel Can (provided Alan Moore lets him)

i09 reports an interview with writer Alan Moore by Mania.com has revealed that yes, Marvel will be reprinting his (and Neil Gaiman’s) famed runs on Marvelman (or Miracleman, if Marvel prefers). Moore has asked that his name be removed from the work, but he will be giving his share of the reprint money to Marvelman creator Mick Anglo. Marvel announced at San Diego ComicCon that it bought the Marvelman rights. io9 also notes that Moore hinted that Gaiman might complete his final Marvelman story, cut short by its publisher’s bankruptcy.

These stories are legendary, partially because they’ve been so hard to get. Rights issues have prevented them from being reprinted, and that’s helped drive up the prices of the original back issues. Now that Marvel is on its way to getting the stories back into publication, you can be sure of three things:

1. Sales will be high. This could get Marvel to the top of the New York Times Graphic Novel Bestseller list.
2. Readers will pay for these things. Marvel charges out the wazz for stuff readers are mildly interested in; for Marvelman, Marvel might even double their going rates. (Probably not, but I can see it happening. They did have to pay for the rights, after all.)
3. Two years after Marvel first gets Marvelman onto the stands, we will be drowning in formats. Premiere hardcovers. Trade paperbacks. Omnibuses. Hell, maybe even digests of the things.

Hellboy, v. 6: Strange Places

Collects: Hellboy: The Third Wish #1-2 and Hellboy: The Island #1-2 (2002, 2005)

Released: April 2006 (Dark Horse)

Format: 128 pages / color / $17.95 / ISBN: 9781593074753

What is this?: Hellboy under the sea! Hellboy, fighting on the beaches!

The culprit: Mike Mignola

To conclude Hellboy Week, we have Hellboy, v. 6 : Strange Places. This is an odd one; the two miniseries that make up this volume were published three years apart, separated by writer / artist / creator Mike Mignola’s work on the first Hellboy movie and other projects.

In 2002’s “The Third Wish,” Hellboy goes to Africa, as promised in Conqueror Worm. He spends very little time there, as he’s almost immediately dropped under the sea. There he doesn’t find singing lobsters or flounders, but he is immediately attacked by three malevolent mermaids who capture him for a sea hag called the Bog Roosh. The Bog Roosh, fearing his destiny is to end the world, plans to dismember him and stop that destiny. In 2005’s “The Island,” he fights a giant worm and listens to exposition. (The latter is less exciting than you’d think.)

Both “The Third Wish” and “The Island” focus heavily on Hellboy’s destiny. I don’t know if most readers will think thats as boring as I did, but I found it didn’t make for a compelling story. Hellboy seems aimless, tossed from one point on the globe to another, with people yelling at him that he will end the world. Hellboy is baffled, then punches people, and the story ends. It’s less than satisfying. Hellboy doesn’t seem to defy or deny his alleged destiny so much as he reflexively punches those who believe in it.

As with Conqueror Worm, Mignola features ghosts or spirits of those killed long ago. In both stories, the dead rise and bring a sense of justice to the story — old crimes redressed in “The Island,” the innocent getting a little comfort in “The Third Wish.” Hellboy has little to do with the moral compass of either story. He’s just … again, he punches and stabs creatures and gets punched and stabbed. He doesn’t even get much in the way of witty dialogue.

That puts the burden of the story on the villains and other characters. The Bog Roosh has one plan and needlessly delays long enough for Hellboy to foil it. In “The Island,” the antagonists are a giant worm and a long-dead heretic who knows the true history of the world. And of course, we get to hear the history of the world and the heretic’s history; neither is interesting. Do I care about the creation story for the entity who will use Hellboy’s hand to destroy the world? No, because he’s a dragon who will destroy the world. That’s all I need to know. Do I care about the heretic’s story or why the Inquisition killed him? No, he’s not interesting either. I do care how the inquisitors were reanimated to torment him, but Mignola doesn’t explain that.

So there aren’t any interesting characters in “The Island” except Hellboy, who doesn’t do a hell of a lot. This is a problem. But man, can Hellboy take the abuse!

The lackluster stories make me want to give a stern lecture to Mignola the writer because he’s wasting the work of Mignola the artist. Mignola notes he mainly wanted to draw rocks and monsters when penciling the story that inspired “The Third Wish.” Those still are Mignola’s strengths, and fortunately, there are a lot of them in both stories. Mignola’s atmospherics are superb, and one scene — one with ghost sailors drinking on a derelict ship in “The Island” — makes me feel the conviviality of the ghosts and the desolation of the true setting. The book also includes the original first eight pages of “The Island,” originally a much different story. There’s no lettering, but those pages are the best part of the book; I’d dearly like to see Mignola finish the story, perhaps by stepping away from Hellboy’s mythology for a few pages.

This book also has a “Now a major motion picture: Hellboy II” sticker on it. I cannot think of a more deceptive way to advertise this book.

Unless you’re incredibly interested in Hellboy’s mythology, the reason to get this book is to look at Mignola’s monsters. I am not enough of a fan of anyone’s art to buy a book for that reason, but it’s worth reading — or least thumbing through — for Mignola’s art.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Hellboy, v. 5: Conqueror Worm

Collects: Hellboy: Conqueror Worm #1-4 (2001)

Released: February 2004 (Dark Horse)

Format: 168 pages / color / $17.95 / ISBN: 9781593070922

What is this?: Hellboy vs. Nazis and space worms in Austria, with a little help from a homunculus and pulp hero Lobster Johnson.

The culprit: Mike Mignola

I’m starting Hellboy week with Hellboy, v. 5: Conqueror Worm. Why v. 5? Because I’ve already read the first four and found them excellent. I’ve read v. 5 before too, although I didn’t care for it much.

So I decided to look at it again, especially now that Hellboy is a multimedia hit. (The copy of Conqueror Worm I read told me so: it had a bright yellow sticker with “Now a major motion picture Hellboy II: The Golden Army” on it. The sticker goes very well with the muted reds, browns, and blacks on the cover.) I liked more this time, but the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with the execution lingered.

First, let me say what is unquestionably right: Hellboy drawn by creator / writer / artist Mike Mignola. Nothing looks quite like it, even if everyone’s feet are weird. It’s brooding, dark, and exists so a huge, bright red guy can smash through it. The castle in which the story is set is looming, always about to fall apart but always standing as well; the setting is oppressive and evil without being over the top. Mignola is an outstanding visual storyteller with an excellent sense of design.

There is a strong idea for the main plot: Hellboy has to stop a worm from space, which has been drawn to earth by Nazi superscience, from devouring humanity. There’s a supporting idea, which involves Roger the Homunculus, his burgeoning humanity, and Hellboy’s beliefs. But there’s stuff around the edges that aren’t weird enough to be gripping or strong enough to be interesting. Ghost Nazis and American soldiers? Lobster Johnson? I understand Mignola loves the pulp heroes, but I don’t care about Lobster, nor do I feel his inherent (although latent, for me) awesomeness. The ghosts make thematic sense, given that Hellboy is metaphorically refighting a battle that was fought between the Americans and Nazis, instigated by the long-dead Nazi ideology. But plain ghosts are a jejune, and they don’t get enough play to be more than a momentary flash on the screen.

Which is a shame, because those loose ends divert the focus from the real weirdness. Torture, transformation into inhuman beasts, Nazi science, the nihilistic conclusion of Nazi beliefs, a scientist’s head in jars (I’m a sucker from brains / heads in jars), War Apes. … That’s the interesting stuff. The Nazis are seen as a cartoonish evil these days, but the chanting of the dead and changed Nazis after the Conqueror Worm returns to Earth is creepy in a way I rarely see in books. Mignola also gives the story an emotional element to the story in the form of Roger’s fight for his life and his humanity. Mignola even manages to make the readers feel (briefly) sorry for a Neo-Nazi.

This is a story that is very wrapped up in continuity. Rasputin and Hecate battle at the end after Rasputin wanders through an edge of the story; an alien who had met Hellboy a couple of times before pops into another chapter. It seems random, despite Mignola’s attempt to make these cameos seem less so by tying them into continuity. There are plenty of footnotes also, and although it gave me the feeling I was missing something (having never read the original comics), it did give me the feeling that the story was part of something larger, of a large tale worth reading. As a long-time Marvel fan, I can respect that. It would have been useful to have changed the footnotes to reflect where the stories referenced fall in the collected editions or give a timeline (or summary) on these tie-ins.

There is a sketchbook in the back as well. I would have preferred to have had the covers from the original miniseries instead, but we take what we can get from our publisher overlords. Original design sketches are not going to do much for me unless there are radically different designs or interesting commentary; there aren’t here.

I think my original impression was correct. This is a good story improved by Mignola’s art. But the unimportant details, the odd bits of continuity make Conqueror Worm seem less enjoyable than it should be, nibbling away at the fringes of the story until it looks moth eaten and shabbier than it really is. These niggling bits have a greater effect on the story than they should. Still, their effect is very real.

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

November solicitations

What’s the deal? Spin the wheel with November’s TPB solicitations:

Marvel, soon to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney, is trying to choke you with Dark Reign, but I’ll ignore that:

• Kathryn Immonen’s first arc is put between two solid covers in Runaways: Homeschooling (if you’re into the hardcover thing). It collects #11-4 and a What If? issue, and Marvel isn’t afraid to sell it for $19.99. It can hardly be worse than Terry Moore’s run.
• The Korvac Saga? In hardcover? Really? With two different covers? Huh. On the other hand, there’s Fantastic Four: In Search of Galactus. It reprints the first Fantastic Four comic I’d ever read; I had no idea what was going on, but it had the Sphinx and Nova and Diamondhead and the Fantastic Four growing old (except Johnny) and everyone was afraid of Galactus (I didn’t know why) and oh no I think nostalgia will make me buy it even though I already have the 44 Years of the Fantastic Four DVD. It collects #204-14. $29.99 each
• A sign of the coming apocalypse: Star Comics: All-Star Collection, v. 1. Reprinting two issues each of Planet Terry, Wally the Wizard, and Royal Roy (Royal Roy?) and three issues of Top Dog. The thought of someone paying for this makes me weep. $19.99
• The Deadpool Classic line must be doing well: v. 3 reprints #9-17 (and Amazing Spider-Man #47, which Deadpool visits). Expensive, though. Still, better this than another version of The Korvac Saga. $29.99
• Relive the high point in Howard Mackie’s career (or perhaps even life): Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Classic, v. 1. The first ten issues of the second volume will remind you of what the ‘90s were truly about: looking kewl. The art, by Javier Saltares and Mark Texeira, might be worth it, but I balk at spending $29.99 on Howard Mackie’s writing.
• One of the most unusual ‘80s / ‘90s offerings from Marvel is being rereleased in November: The ‘Nam, v. 1. It collects the first ten issues of the series as well. The price tag is almost justified — well, since it’s so different from everything else in the solicitations, it at least makes it palatable. $29.99
• The Essential for the month is Moon Knight, v. 3. A little disappointing, really. The page count looks a little light on this one too, and they advertise it as collecting stories from three monthly series but they only have two Moon Knight volumes represented. If this had been cut short to wrap up v. 1 plus some extra material, with a corresponding lower price tag, I might have bitten … $19.99

DC likes you and wants you to save money for a rainy day:

• DC is releasing a new printing of Batman: The Cult. I mention this mainly because I just read the entry on the villain of this book, Deacon Blackfire, in The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. It’s a four-issue miniseries by Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson and involves Batman vs. a charismatic leader of a cult, and Batman gets to beat up the homeless. $19.99
• If you like your Silver Age in color, there’s Green Lantern Chronicles, v. 2, reprinting #4-9. $14.99
• The Showcase for the month is Wonder Woman, v. 3, reprinting #138-56 for the value price of $17.99.

For those of you concerned with your Image:

• The critically acclaimed Chew releases its first TPB, Taster’s Choice. Det. Tony Chu lives in a world where bird flu has made poultry illegal; his ability to get psychic impressions from whatever he eats makes him a hell of a detective, even if it leads, inevitably, to cannibalism. I haven’t heard a bad word about this series, and the price is astounding: $9.99
• The Omnibus craze has caught up to Spawn, and unsurprisingly, Todd McFarlane has proven too weak to fight back. Spawn Origins Collection: Deluxe Edition, v. 1 collects #1-25 in 620 hardback pages. $100

If you want to bet on a Dark Horse:

• The first half of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan run is reprinted in the Barry Windsor-Smith Conan Archives, v. 1. A second volume is presumably planned. Two hundred pages in hardcover for a steep $49.95.

Jack Kirby’s Birthday

Since it’s Kirby's birthday (or would be, had he not passed away 15 years ago), I present this image as the craziest thing I’ve seen in quite a while:

How is ... what is ... that woman ... anatomy defying ...

I don’t even know where to begin: a man with a mohawk tossing a woman encased in a concrete planter. It’s Jack Kirby, and there was only one of him.

Essential Dr. Strange, v. 4

Collects: Dr. Strange (v. 2) #30-56 (1978-82)

Released: June 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 584 pages / black and white / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785130628

What is this?: Dr. Strange battles foes old and new and deals with Clea actually getting a personality

The culprits: Writers Roger Stern, Chris Claremont, and others; artists Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers, and others

I expected to be underwhelmed by Essential Doctor Strange, v. 4. I usually am underwhelmed by Dr. Strange stories, despite being a fan of the character. I think most Marvel fans are underwhelmed by Strange; it’s why everyone thinks a Dr. Strange series is a good idea but no one buys them .

But v. 4 surprised me, after a rough start. The book certainly has the pedigree to succeed; Roger Stern, who was at his peak with early ‘80s Marvel, writes most of the book, while Chris Claremont writes eight stories (#38-45) and the included Man-Thing story. Stern feels like the better fit. He’s remembered for writing Spider-Man, who’s a solo hero, like Strange. Claremont is known for his legendary X-Men run, which doesn’t seem to have much in common with Dr. Strange at all. But it’s Claremont, who wrote #38-45, who really gets things going in v. 4.

It’s through a typical Claremontian concern for female characters. Under Claremont’s pen, Clea, Strange’s lover and disciple, realizes she has learned somewhere between jack and squat from Strange, despite being raised in a more magical dimension. She draws the wrong conclusion from this — that she’s a bad student, rather than Strange being an indifferent-to-incompetent teacher — but at least it breaks the status quo and gives us a reason for Clea’s relative insignificance in magical battles. Claremont also develops Wong a little — well, mainly his forebears, but it’s something.

Claremont also introduces new magical enemies who look like Native Americans and gives Strange a business manager, Sara Wolfe, who’s both a woman AND a Native American. This reminds us that even when Claremont was at the height of his powers, not all his ideas were winners.

Stern gets the beginning (#30-7) and end (#47-56) of the book. His first run is a running battle between Strange and the Dweller in Darkness’s goons, and Strange never does figure out who is behind his assailants. The story ends abruptly, with the Dweller making a unilateral declaration of a nebulous, non-physical victory, as Stern leaves. His exit was probably the reason for the sudden stop — Stern had already switched to plotter (Ralph Macchio scripts) with #33 — but frankly, it had become dull even before then. Stern’s exit was a mercy killing. The only interesting bit is Stern reusing a character from a minor story from an issue of Chamber of Chills, but even that was done haphazardly.

When Stern returns, though, he picks up with Claremont’s disaffected Clea (and drops almost everything else). He introduces a romantic rival for Clea, which finally gives movement to Strange’s static personal life. He also brings back Mordo, one of the go-to villains for strange. Really, Mordo’s just there for credibility; the magician could have been anyone. But Mordo (and eventually Dormammu) lead Strange back through time on a great series of stories (#50-3) that brings in Sgt. Fury and his commandos, Nazis, the Fantastic Four, and Rama-Tut and ends with Clea leaving Strange. Another story has D’Spayre trying to convince Strange he’s a fictional character, even introducing him to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko analogues. In the final issue, Strange plays with former minions of Mordo who thought they were being clever. It’s a strong finish to the book, and it makes me eager for v. 5.

On the other hand, having such expectations of consistent quality is a recipe for disappointment. On the other other hand, the Unofficial Handbook of the Marvel Universe says the next 20 or so issues are Stern teamed up with artists Paul Smith (who did a great job on #54 and 56) and Dan Green with a few others.

Adding even more to the plus side, Stern also has Strange and Clea engage in a rather suggestive “tantric exercise,” which Clea describes as “wonderful” and one she wants to try “more often.” So points to Stern for that. On the other hand, Stern kills a cat. So no perfect score for him either.

The pencils are primarily from Gene Colan and Marshall Rogers. Both are excellent choices. Few artists in Marvel’s stable did shadowy and spooky like Colan, who excelled at it on Tomb of Dracula and Daredevil. (To be fair, Marvel’s bright spandex world didn’t need it so often.) But he does an excellent job here (#36-45, 47), atmospheric and moody and occasionally frightening. His Strange frequently looks a bit too much like his Dracula for my tastes, but they don’t cross over so there’s no confusion, and they’re both imposing, handsome figures, so that’s OK. He uses darkness effectively, so that the reader always suspects something horrible is about to come from the shadows. That expectation is frequently greater than any actual horror inspired by the creatures on the page, but I blame that on the rather plain demons and adversaries Stern and Claremont give him. The black-and-white reproduction doesn’t help him either; with no color to help the shading, his work occasionally looks blotchy.

I am shocked that I enjoy Rogers’s pencils, given how unimpressed I was with his work in Batman: Strange Apparitions. His run (#48-53) is shorter than Colan’s, which is a shame. His style is completely different than Colan’s; while Colan eschews clear lines and his characters look like they can find shadow in a desert at noon, Rogers’s work is clear and bright, even in black and white. His art looks more modern than his contemporaries’, and some of the panels in this look like something that could have been created in the ‘90s, except Marshall has a command of anatomy and exaggerates physical attributes only slightly. Rogers’s Mordo is impressive, full of menace. His work in #53, in which Strange breaks down after Clea announces she’s leaving, is heartbreaking.

I didn’t expect to enjoy Essential Dr. Strange, v. 4. After the first ten issues, I really didn’t, despite the beginning of Colan’s run. But the story grew on me, and the art, more than the writing, won me over. By the end, though, Stern was putting together an impressive run, and I’m looking forward to finding out if he continued it.

Rating:

“Excuse” Is Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

I missed putting up a review today. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

There’s a race of creatures, tiny but malevolent, that live among us. They have been with humanity for centuries unmeasured, lurking in the shadows, so old they don’t have a name. They hate us for stealing the sunlight they believe should be theirs, for gouging and cutting the woods and the dells they loved, back when their hearts were capable of love. They sour the milk, they tie the cat’s tail into knots, the prick the baby so that he screams in the night. Slowly they grow bolder, so that murder can’t be far from becoming a reality …

The reason I don’t have a review up today has nothing to do with them, though. I’m just wondering if anyone has any tips on how to get a particularly nasty infestation of the things out of the garden. I’ve tried poisons, setting the neighbor’s dog on them, bars of soap, and urinating on the little buggers, but they won’t go away. Any help?

Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson, v. 1

Collects: Thor #337-48 (1983-4)

Released: May 2001, as Thor Legends, v. 1: Walt Simonson; with current title, December 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 288 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785131892

What is this?: The mythological hero Thor deals with the noble alien Beta Ray Bill, the evil faerie Malekith, the dragon Fafnir, and the temptress Lorelei.

The culprit: Walter Simonson

There are some things comic book readers argue about constantly, and some things are taken as an article of the faith. That Walter Simonson’s run on Thor is one of the title’s few claims to greatness belongs to the latter group. But can we see that greatness in the beginning of the run, as collected in Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson, v. 1?

First of all, let’s start with the high point: This book has the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill, the noble alien whose spirit is transplanted into an engineered / cyborg body to protect the rest of his race, who have been loaded onto sleeper ships on their way to a new planet. He gets in a fight with Thor — of course — and during the fight picks up Thor’s hammer, which only the worthy can do. Bill is probably the greatest thing to come out of Thor post-Kirby, a reflection of Thor’s dichotomy of mythology and space / cosmic adventures. Bill starts in the latter, but Simonson brings him into the former effortlessly. An impressive accomplishment, and one that helps show why Bill has remained a favorite part of the Marvel Universe for so many.

He’s not the only impressive creation Simonson came up with in v. 1; there’s also Malekith the Accursed, who, if nothing else, has a striking visual. It’s he and the other villains that give Simonson the most room for creativity. He draws and writes an excellent, if somewhat restrained, Loki; his Lorelei looks like the temptress she is. But I’m not sold on Fafnir, who is a dangerously dull for a dragon, or v. 1’s hidden villain, a flaming giant who looks laughable rather than frightening when he’s finally revealed.

It says something about the character of Thor that in what is hailed as the title’s best run, the main character shares the title with a large supporting cast. A large part of v. 1 deals with Baldur coping with his post-traumatic death disorder and Sif wondering what her part in the mythos is now; the villains get a lot of time to plot and scheme, and Simonson isn’t afraid to shunt Thor to the side and give the guardians of the Cask of Ancient Winters center stage for a couple of issues. Thor spends a couple of issues with his mind altered. I think this crystallizes my feelings about v. 1: it’s a large mythological tale without a real center — or perhaps with a big, bland, blond center who is more impressive when he’s off stage.

I can’t help feeling Simonson might have been better off creating his own mythological tales without the baggage of the Marvel Universe tied to his work. In many ways, Simonson’s Thor has a lot in common with Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: mythology heavy, lots of neat-looking monsters, with an ensemble cast, dealing with world-ending threats. But while Mignola’s Hellboy is a strong character, Simonson’s Thor isn’t, even if he gets a new civilian identity.

That’s really the problem, and there’s not a lot Simonson can do about it. He gives Thor small flares of personality when he feels abandoned by his father or when he fights over his hammer (in a spectacularly stupid plot point). But Simonson doesn’t really follow up on that, even though Thor has more than enough daddy issues to keep a series going. Thor doesn’t have a romantic life; he has some interest in Lorelei, but it’s impossible to tell how much. Thor’s character seems based on respect of other heroes. So Simonson has to turn to his supporting cast to keep interest high. It’s a lot like making cauliflower soup; you have to add a lot of other stuff to make it interesting, and after you add enough spices, meat, flavored broths, and salt, it isn’t cauliflower soup any more, and you wonder why you even thought cauliflower soup was a good idea in the first place.

And I will never ask for cauliflower soup, no matter how little it tastes like cauliflower. Even if it’s Asgardian cauliflower, and it’s dressed in a Kirby helmet.

Rating: (2 of 5)

We Have Many Winners

The 2009 Hugo Awards have been announced, and the winner for Best Graphic Story is Girl Genius, v. 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, by Phil and Kaja Foglio, beating four other nominees. The full list of winners can be found at Locus Magazine.

100 Bullets, v. 13: Wilt

Collects: 100 Bullets #89-100 (2008-9)

Released: July 2009 (DC / Vertigo)

Format: 304 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9781401222871

What is this?: The finale to the crime / conspiracy series 100 Bullets, in which the main characters start dropping like flies.

The culprits: Writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso

Here’s another end to another crime / conspiracy series: 100 Bullets, v. 13: Wilt. This ending is more recent and more anticipated than the end of the Bendis / Maleev run on Daredevil, but is it any better?

Writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso certainly set their sights higher. It is more difficult to come up with a successful new concept than revitalize an old one, and 100 Bullets, with the freedom and planning that Vertigo seems to specialize in, had a planned end even as the series began in 1999. And while 100 Bullets had higher goals, I can’t say the conclusion actually made it to those lofty heights.

100 Bullets tells the story of the Trust, a conspiracy that laid claim on the New World. They formed a group of gunmen called the Minutemen to keep the peace between the thirteen families that make up the Trust. But the Trust betrayed the Minutemen, who went into hiding, and their leader, Agent Graves, planned his revenge. In Wilt, that long-planned revenge comes to fruition, although not without snags — and the Trust hasn’t been idle either.

This is definitely a cataclysmic conclusion of the old school; Shakespeare, in his way, would have been proud of this revenge tale, as all the remaining important players meet and try to kill each other. Azzarello leaves none of the big players at loose ends, tossing them all together in a big firefight at the end. It’s not exactly a satisfying end for most of the players, other than to say they are violent men who died because of their pursuit of violence; but there’s little poetry in most of their ends, and it comes across as a lot of violence feeding on the ever decreasing list of characters. But it’s the way the story had to end, given the violence inherent in the setup; the only question was who would survive, if anyone did.

The biggest failure of Wilt is it’s all resolution and no solution: there are no mysteries of any consequence to wrap up, either in plot or character. Motivations are sometimes left ambiguous in the final story, but that’s part of the debate and fun of so long a series. But the Minutemen shift their loyalties in the time it takes to pull a trigger. Before the ending, the motivations seem like trails of gun smoke: insubstantial and easily blown one way or the other. That’s not fun. It just seems arbitrary, taking the importance out of how the characters reached the story’s final battlelines.

I think, of all the series I’ve read in trade paperback form, 100 Bullets suffers the most from waiting for the trade. You really need a scorecard to keep track of who’s playing, and the trade paperbacks don’t supply anything of the sort — no summaries, no recaps, no handy lists of characters. The release schedule of the monthly issues might have been able to keep readers familiar with who’s who, but when it’s been six months or a year since the last volume, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on without doing research. I don’t think it speaks well of 100 Bullets that I would need Wikipedia or a guidebook to understand what’s going on. Chances are, if I read the whole series at once, it would be a lot easier — but who has time to read all thirteen volumes?

Azzarello isn’t big on the old superhero comic cliché of trying to slip exposition into his dialogue, which is more natural, but it also makes it a challenge for the reader. He also isn’t afraid to introduce new characters and let the readers puzzle out whether he’s important or a returning character or both or neither. In previous volumes, I could let this slide, hoping it would come out all right in the end, but in the final volume, that’s just not going to work. In Wilt, for example, one character drifted through the book, shooting and maiming, but not only did I not know who Will Slaughter was until the final issue, I didn’t know he was the same character who had appeared before.

Risso isn’t a big help on this score. I enjoy his style, but a long storyline with a large cast of characters shows his flaws. His art fits the subject matter perfectly, full of atmosphere and violence, with gore and blood dripping off every page. The dangerous men look like they could jump off the page and beat you to death with your own arm; the femme fatales look like they could tempt a man to sin and worse. But his dangerous men tend to be similar looking large men in suits; the schemers behind everything tend to be similar looking old men with short haircuts. The femme fatales have similar faces and body styles, looking as if they might be related somehow. Still, it’s impossible to imagine Wilt or 100 Bullets without his half of the work.

I know this isn’t what I should be talking about, but Wilt is a bargain: twelve issues for $20, and most people can get it for a discount somewhere. Compare that value with the next book up for review: Marvel’s Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson, v. 1. Same number of issues, a few fewer pages, but the price is $29.99 — ten bucks higher. Given that Wilt is more recent, it’s even more astonishing; Simonson probably doesn’t get the same type of royalties as Vertigo gives out, and the Thor Visionaries is a reissue of an older book, so Marvel probably already had the printing set-up completed. And that doesn’t even take into consideration timeliness: one contains the completed ending of a recent, long-anticipated storyline, and the other contains issues almost a quarter of a century old that anyone who wanted could have tracked down in quarter bins or back-issue boxes. Is the paper in Wilt as nice as it is in the Simonson volume? No. Do I care? Not even a little. In one book, DC sums up the difference in value between it and Marvel.

For fans of 100 Bullets, Wilt wraps up the story. That’s rewarding in and of itself: here is the finale of a story, and nothing more will follow it. I wish I could be enthusiastic and unstinting in my praise, but I can’t. Wilt isn’t as engrossing or fun of a conclusion as I would have hoped, but it does make me want to reread the previous volumes. Also, I can’t deny Azzarello and Risso have ended the story in the manner in which they had began it. And that’s something, despite the confusion and unsatisfying ends that conclusion brings.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Daredevil, v. 13: The Murdock Papers

Collects: Daredevil #76-81 (2005-6)

Released: March 2006 (Marvel)

Format: 152 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785118107

What is this?: Bendis and Maleev end their run on Daredevil as Matt tries to stay out of prison.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev

Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev began their run on Daredevil with (v. 2) #26, and with a couple of exceptions (Bendis worked with fill-in artists on #38-40, and #50-4 was David Mack writing and drawing an Echo story), they continued on the title together until #81, more than four years together. It is a run of impressive length — if not always impressive quality — for a 21st-century comic from the Big Two.

Daredevil, v. 13: The Murdock Papers ends that run, an end that was too long in coming. But that isn’t The Murdock Paper’s fault.

Bendis finishes on a strong note. The story, in which the Kingpin tries to trade his freedom for evidence that will put Murdock in prison, allows Bendis to pull in the most important Daredevil supporting characters for his final ride. The Black Widow, Elektra, and the new White Tiger try to help Daredevil escape; Foggy foggies his way through the chaos; Phil Urich is the observer and reporter as always; and the Kingpin and Bullseye try to finish Daredevil off in their own ways. Matt’s estranged wife shows up to, uh, watch the chaos unfold. Bendis shows, if nothing else, he knows how to end the story he put into motion, and it ends the only way it could.

The fights are good, with plenty of violence and action. The characters, for the most part, get used well; Elektra’s return is a welcome sight, as is the Black Widow’s and Milla’s. I was glad Matt reconciled with his wife; leaving her as a loose end would have been an egregious error by Bendis. On the other hand, the verbal abuse hurled at Elektra is unwarranted, and the new White Tiger gets short shrift. The story has a growing sense of inevitability as it approaches the end, and a momentary dream sequence, as Matt ponders escaping the courthouse, is a nice surprise that underscores why the story can’t go that way.

The logical underpinnings of the story, though. … In The Murdock Papers, it is clearer than ever that Bendis is a writer, not a lawyer; if he played a lawyer on TV, I’d be tempted to ask for his disbarment. The Kingpin’s big plan is to prove Daredevil / Matt was near the site where the alleged evidence against Matt was stored, but that doesn’t prove obstruction of justice, as he and the Feds allege; any lawyer could argue coincidence or that Daredevil, as a hero, was there to preserve the evidence from the supervillains running around. The Feds giving the Kingpin immunity is stupid, and the legal loophole the Owl and the Feds use to circumvent that agreement is unconvincing. (Surely the Kingpin’s lawyers are better than that?) Singling out Daredevil for punishment is stupid, an obvious witch hunt that would prejudice the government’s case in court given the status of other vigilante superheroes. I’m relatively sure a federal agent can’t be fired as easily as Agent Del Toro was. Phil Urich’s refusal to protect his sources is asinine, to say the least; J. Jonah Jameson, frankly, should fire him for rolling over to the feds over the threat for being “lock[ed] … up for the whole day!!” (A whole day? Horrors!) If I thought Bendis’s Urich was the real Urich, I’d be upset that a good journalist was acting like a reporter for a high-school reporter. Probably a Skrull, though.

Maleev’s art isn’t quite up to his par. It’s still good on the aggregate, but Elektra seems to elude him; Maleev seems to have the idea that her face is a plastic mask, unmovable, and he can’t give her costume the reality that other artists have. (Admittedly, it is a unrealistic costume, but the other weird costumes look normal.) In fact, every time Elektra enters a fight, the action becomes stiff and posed. In the rest of the volume, though, Maleev’s work looks exactly like it always does: excellent.

This story should have been written three volumes earlier; Bendis said, in the afterword, that it ended the way it had to, but he didn’t want to saddle the next writer with a setup he didn’t want, and until he found a successor who wanted that ending, it was difficult for him to finish his Daredevil work. Still, it ends well. Despite its flaws, The Murdock Papers puts a nice capstone on one of the great Daredevil runs.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Usagi Yojimbo, v. 23: Bridge of Tears

Collects: Usagi Yojimbo (v. 3) #94-102 (2006-7)

Released: July 2009 (Dark Horse)

Format: 248 pages / black and white / $17.95 / ISBN: 9781595822987

What is this?: The rabbit ronin fights ninjas and gangsters, but he’s completely out of his depth with a waitress

The culprit: Stan Sakai

Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo is one of the most consistent series out there. Month in and month out, Sakai delivers issues that are excellent reads. The collections are no exception, and Usagi Yojimbo, v. 23: Bridge of Tears is just the latest example.

In Bridge of Tears, Usagi deals with assassins and gangsters — the usual stuff, really; if Usagi is to be believed, feudal Japan was filled with ninjas, swordsmen, and gangsters. (And anthropomorphic animals; but I digress.) But a waitress who just wants to blow town and hit the road is Usagi’s greatest challenge, one he’s completely unprepared to deal with.

The book begins with Usagi foiling the assassination of a merchant; this is standard stuff for the rabbit ronin, who runs into trouble and people needing armed help wherever he goes. But this makes him a target for the League of Assassins. Sakai draws others into the story: the reluctant assassin Shizukiri and his prostitute lover, the waitress Mayumi who desires only to run away from her gangster-corrupted town. Sakai spends eight of the nine issues in Bridge of Tears moving them toward a climax that is far more moving than it has any right to be, given that two of the characters were created only in this volume.

Sakai also advances the subplots of other characters: Chizu, former leader of the Neko ninja on the run from her clan, and the demon Jei, being chased down by bounty hunters Ren and Stray Dog. The latter involves a dramatic battle in which it seems at any moment that Sakai might kill or maim one of his long-running characters; the former allows Sakai to give a frightening look at one way the Jei storyline might play out as well as weakening Usagi for the climax of Bridge of Tears. (Usagi is such a great swordsman even Sakai realizes it’s hard to believe Usagi will fall in a swordfight if he’s at full strength.) Though these two stories are not part of the main plot, none of the book is wasted — each story, each revelation contributes to building Bridge of Tears or in whetting the appetite for the next volume. Which I want. Now.

The only complaint I have about Bridge of Tears is that the covers are not placed before the story they illustrate, being instead grouped at the end of the volume. As good as the cover for the “Fever Dream” story — a demonically possessed Usagi in front of a long line of corpses, with the speech balloons with their last breaths filling the cover — is, it would have had an even greater impact if it had been placed with the story. Still, I suppose I should be glad they’re included.

The end of the volume is a “roast” of Stan Sakai, celebrating 100 issues of Usagi Yojimbo at Dark Horse. Although there is the occasional chuckle, it isn’t a roast, as it doesn’t make much fun of Sakai or his most famous creation, and for the most part it isn’t that funny. Sakai’s own stories in the feature and the short Sergio Aragones reminiscence of things he’s eaten with Sakai are pretty good, though.

As always, you should be reading Usagi Yojimbo. Buy this book and pre-order the next, whenever it might come out.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

October 2009 Solicitations

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral, it’s time for October Solicits:

From Marvel:

• Kabuki: The Alchemy: David Mack is still doing these? Huh. $24.99
• Hardcover ’80s nostalgia: X-Men: Asgardian Wars, collecting the X-Men / New Mutants crossover from around Uncanny X-Men #200, and Thing: Project Pegasus, which you can get in Essential Marvel Two-in-One, v. 2-3. These feel a little overpriced, but a) so does everything Marvel puts out, and b) I already have all this material. Both are good, although I’m shocked Project Pegasus is getting a hardcover — it’s not quite that good. $34.99 for Asgardian Wars, $24.99 for Project Pegasus
• Runaways: Rock Zombies: Find out the mystery of shock jock Val Rhymin. I can hardly wait. Side note: would it kill Marvel to put volume numbers on these things so I don’t have to remember the names to figure out if I already have the material in another format? I mean, they release old books in new formats every month, for God’s sake. $14.99
• Of all the Marvel titles for the month, X-Men Forever, v. 1 interests me the most. Nostalgia! Wallowing in past / alternate continuity! Oh, sweet Claremont, how I’ve missed you! $16.99
• The Essential for the month is Essential Ghost Rider, v. 3. The page count seems a little long for the number of issues included, but I’m too lazy to actually do a standard page count. At the old price, I would have been all over this; at $19.99, eh, I can be patient.

From DC:

• Batman: Battle for the Cowl Companion: All the uninteresting parts of Battle for the Cowl, which is a feat, since the entire story was itself uninteresting. $14.99
• DC Classics Library: Shazam! Monster Society of Evil: I’m not one for DC’s Comics Classics Library — the stories generally don’t interest me — but this one does. The story is legendary, but I don’t know if it’s ever been released in a collected form. Captain Marvel, back when he was really popular, fights a Golden Age fight (with all the logic and restraint that entails) to get to his ultimate enemy: a two-inch talking worm. That’s the Golden Age, baby! $39.99
• The Flash vs. the Rogues: Does DC do many of these pick-and-choose, best-of collections? I always thought that was more of Marvel’s game. If you want a look at the Flash’s Rogues, this one has nine Rogues stories for a reasonable price. Of course, DC is all about the reasonable price these days. For the same money, you can get four issues of Runaways in this month’s Rock Zombies. $14.99
• Shade the Changing Man: Chris Bachalo and Peter Milligan’s surreal Vertigo series is back: Shade the Changing Man, v. 1: The American Scream is being reissued, and a new volume, Shade The Changing Man, v. 2: Edge of Vision, will be released the same month. I’ve never been interested, but there was a time, on Usenet, when people wouldn’t stop talking about it. It definitely goes into Milligan’s “weird” work and Bachalo’s “readable” work. $17.99 for American Scream, $19.99 for Edge of Vision
• The Winter Men: I’ve heard nothing about it and know no reason to be interested, but something about post-Cold War Soviet superheroes catches my attention. I don’t know why. $19.99
• The Showcase for the month is Superman Team-Ups, v. 1. Pass. $17.99

Oh, Dark Horse:

• Dark Horse continues to ride the Robert E. Howard / Marvel money train with The Chronicles of Kull, v. 1: A King Comes Riding and Other Stories and The Chronicles of Solomon Kane. $18.95 each
• You can’t keep a good idea down until all the life has been flogged out of it: The Escapist started as an idea in Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Escapist got his own series in 2004’s Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. (Or maybe that was the Michael Chabon comic; I forget.) The Escapists is a reprint of the Brian K. Vaughan’s 2006 series, which is more of a continuation of the comics-industry parts of Kavalier and Clay. I have no idea if it’s any good, but it’s pedigree is interesting. $14.95
• Grendel: Behold the Devil: You know if you want this hardcover or not: Matt Wagner writes and draws this one, which from what I gather, has been fairly rare in the last decade or so. If you don’t know how Behold the Devil is different from other Grendel stories, the solicit says it follows Hunter Rose through a “lost period early in his criminal career.” That should be distinctive. If that’s not enough for you, “includes additional pages previously only seen on MySpace!” $19.95

Image!:

• Liberty Meadows Sunday Strips, v. 2: I somehow missed v. 1. Hmm. Well, I love Cho’s art, and I think Liberty Meadows was a fun, if often juvenile, strip. (Joke-a-day strips do hide some of his failures as a plotter.) $29.99
• Not a collection, but #3 of Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man will be out in October.
• Also not a collection: Cowboy Ninja Viking #1.
• Question: Which is more gloriously, stupidly high concept: Cowboy Ninja Viking or Batman and Superman vs. Werewolves and Vampires? Show your work.

Eisners

... were given at San Diego Comic Con. The winners can be seen at http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_eisners_main.shtml.

Runaways (v. 9): Dead Wrong

Collects: Runaways v. 3 #1-6 (2008-9)

Released: June 2009 (Marvel)

Format: pages / color / $15.99 / ISBN: 9780785129400

What is this?: The Runaways head back to LA and find a new set of adversaries waiting for them, while Chase has to find a job.

The culprits: Writer Terry Moore and penciler Humberto Ramos

When Joss Whedon took over for Brian K. Vaughn as Runaways writer, the choice was logical, and it worked out — Whedon was different, but he brought his own strengths to the title. When Terry Moore was chosen to succeed the glacially paced Whedon, the choice was also logical. But whatever Moore brought to Runaways, it sure as hell wasn’t his strengths.

Runaways: Dead Wrong is easily the weakest volume of the series so far. (Also: For those keeping count, this is the ninth volume. Just because Marvel stops counting doesn’t mean you have to.) In Dead Wrong, one of the Runaways, Karolina, finds the remnants of her race, the Majesdanians, waiting to deal out retribution for her parents’ betrayal of their race. This is not immediately evident because Moore takes a long time to remind the reader that Karolina is a member of the same race as these Majesdanians; the logic is also a bit opaque because despite being a logical, law-abiding race, the Majesdanians believe in the child being punished for the sin of the parent. Except when they don’t, at the end — because bloodthirsty remnants of a decimated race often have 180 degree changes of heart in the middle of fights.

But put that aside for a moment. Moore has the team acting out of character for most of the book. It’s intentional, or so we’re supposed to believe: a spell gone awry. Leaving alone for a moment that the spell that caused the problem for the Runaways had a completely different effect on their opponents, I believe making established characters act out of character is a bad choice for a writer in his first assignment on a new title. It doesn’t instill any confidence, and it certainly doesn’t get the writer into a rhythm with the new characters. But more importantly, the characters don’t feel right, and the characters are what make Runaways important.

There’s a lot that doesn’t feel right. The Runaways find one of their parents’ hidden safehouses, but they don’t think to search for a cache of money and supplies? What kind of criminal masterminds don’t have emergency cash lying around? Why does the house have, instead of normal-but-lethal safeguards that won’t attract much attention, big fuzzy automated demons that destroy all sorts of stuff and practically scream for attention? Given how concerned the neighbors turn out to be, that would be a problem. And why does Moore think I’ll be entertained by radio shock jock Val Rhymin? To get across the characterization, penciler Humberto Ramos draws him as a younger, cut-rate Howard Stern; it’s also painfully obvious he has mind-control powers that Chase is somehow immune to. (And if he’s really so popular, how did Chase get hired so easily by him?) And haven’t I seen the ending to Dead Wrong before? Oh, yes, I did — right here. Didn’t even have the courtesy to change the age range of the characters.

Lesson here, boys and girls, is that heroes will likely be stupid. But aliens will likely be even more dense, so it’s OK.

I enjoyed Ramos’s work with Paul Jenkins when they were teamed up on various Spider-titles; Ramos’s distorted, exaggerated style works with a character as kinetic as Spider-Man, combined with the lack of expressiveness of his mask. However, Ramos feels all wrong for Runaways. In large scenes, the action looks muddled and confused; in the opening fight with the Majesdanians, I had no idea what was going on half the time. Xavin’s frequent transformations meant I had trouble figuring out who he was supposed to be most of the time. When it came down to it, I rarely could tell the difference between Ramos’s Carolina and Chase — and they’re not even the same gender, just the same hair color. It’s just a big mess full of undifferentiated hipsterwear and unkempt hair.

I am a big fan of Runaways, but I’m not such a big fan that I’m going to try to push this fragrant flower on you. Give this a pass. I’d advise doing the same with the next Runaways trade — featuring the shocking secret of Val Rhymin! Gosh! How exciting! — but I’m a big enough of a glutton I might not be able to help myself. I don’t know if I’m going to justify spending some majority fraction of $15 for it, though.

Rating: (1 of 5)

Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 2

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #552-8 (2008)

Released: December 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 168 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785128465

What is this?: More post-deal with the Devil adventures with Spider-Man and his more appropriately themed villains.

The culprits: Writers Bob Gale and Zeb Wells and pencilers Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo, and Barry Kitson

Although I enjoyed the first volume Brand New Day, it didn’t guarantee I would enjoy the second. Given the rotating stable of artists and writers, I knew the quality and tone of Amazing would fluctuate over the arcs. So I shouldn’t be surprised I didn’t particularly care for Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 2.

The first three-issue arc and the final issue of v. 2 are written by Bob Gale, who is best known for co-writing the Back to the Future movies and a Daredevil arc few liked between the ones almost everyone did like (v. 2 #20-5). Gale’s work focuses on a new villain: the Freak, a drug addict who injects a bunch of samples from Curt Connors’s lab looking to get high. Instead, the Freak gets mutated. And every time he’s “killed,” he goes into a chrysalis and mutates again, becoming immune to whatever killed him.

The Freak didn’t thrill me. A villain who gets more powerful every time he’s defeated is difficult to make work because eventually he has to win or become a joke, neither of which is good. (The former can work; it just rarely does.) The final issue seems a throwback to monster movies of the ‘50s and ‘60s, where the monster has to be stopped with a common chemical (The Horror of Party Beach, for instance). The Freak, blaming Spider-Man for his predicament, desire revenge on Spider-Man; despite the Freak being the cause of his own misery, he doesn’t have to deny or confront his own shortcomings. He’s repetitive in his screaming and slashing; that’s fine for a villain who appears in only one issue, but when it’s four, that’s a bit too one note.

Gale writes a good Spider-Man. That’s one thing in Brand New Day’s favor so far: all the writers seem to understand Spider-Man needs to be funny. He also advances the plot with J. Jonah Jameson, dealing with his wife’s sale of the Bugle. He seems to overestimate the power of Carlie Cooper, the friend of Harry’s girlfriend who works in the coroner’s office; she seems to have real influence here, whereas in v. 1, she was obviously low on the totem pole. I also enjoyed a return appearance by the Bookie, but I have my doubts about whether some of the villains shown placing bets would really be in a supervillain bar. But perhaps that’s an art problem.

The second storyline, written by Zeb Wells, is a misstep. Spider-Man visits with the New Avengers and teams up with Wolverine, for no other real reason I can think of other than to show he still is part of the New Avengers. Then he fights Mayan snow ninjas (did the Mayans have much snow?), a monster from Beyond, and a crazed priest of a Mayan god. Nothing in those two sentences “feels” like Spider-Man, and nothing Wells does makes it any more like him. Joining the New Avengers was one of the screw ups that caused the “One More Day” / “Brand New Day” nonsense in the first place, and mystic adventures was one of the three major problems people had with the J. Michael Straczynski run (the other two being animal totems and Gwen Stacy’s Goblin babies). The banter with Wolverine is fun — like I said, all of the Brand New Day writers have done well with the Spider-dialogue, and Wells isn’t an exception — but Wolverine is gone after the first issue, and despite some helpful bums, the plot gets less interesting the rest of the way.

Still, there’s something about the art from Chris Bachalo that I enjoy. I can’t quite put my finger on it, though. His pencils tell a comprehensible story — a big challenge for him at one point — and his odd, angular style works with the odd, mystical story, complete with a monster from a place where the geometry might not be the same as ours. (It never says, one way or the other, about the geometry; that’s just my inference.)

I’m less thrilled about Phil Jimenez’s work on the first arc; it’s just as professional, but it’s less distinctive. It comes across as boring but effective; that’s not the worst review, but it’s not an endorsement either. I also don’t care for his design(s) for the Freak. It’s a hard job designing characters who are supposed to disgust the reader visually. The Freak is certainly revolting, but … the picture Jimenez draws is not as effective as my imagination. The story doesn’t give Jimenez the opportunity to obscure the villain’s deformity, but I wish he could have. I enjoy Barry Kitson’s Freak more; Kitson, who penciled the final story in Brand New Day, v. 2, has a Freak who is much more visually streamlined, less deformed, and more menacing.

Overall, because of the strong start on v. 1, v. 2 of Brand New Day is a disappointment despite its competence. Nothing clicks as well as it did in the first volume, and Brand New Day drifts into areas that are distractions rather than strengths for Spider-Man.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Spider-Girl Presents Wild Thing: Crash Course

Collects: Wild Thing #0-5 (1999)

Released: November 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 128 pages / color digest / $7.99 / ISBN: 9780785126065

What is this?: The future daughter of Elektra and Wolverine has “adventures.”

The culprits: Writer Larry Hama and penciler Ron Lim

Before you ask or make a joke, there are two things I need to say about Spider-Girl Presents Wild Thing: Crash Course:

1. It does not make your heart sing.
2. Nor does it make everything — or anything — “groovy.”

Crash Course was part of Marvel’s now completely defunct M2 universe, which imagines the Marvel Universe one generation into the future. So there were many second-generation heroes, led by Spider-Girl, Spider-Man’s daughter. The eponymous Wild Thing, nee Rina, is the result of the improbable coupling of Wolverine and Elektra. As a setup, I can get past this, although like most of the M2 universe, like a lot of Spider-Girl’s ideas, it reeks of an abandoned ‘90s plot. So writer Larry Hama had his work cut out for him making the setup work. Unfortunately for Hama, he doesn’t quite succeed. Hama was an excellent choice for the job, having just finished a long, defining run on Wolverine, and Wild Thing offered a chance to do similar stories with new twists — the same except different.

But that’s not what we get here; what we get are Rina’s uninteresting high school experiences, complete with a rich alpha female and a boy she has a crush on but barely notices her. Neither is interesting. I’m unsure what to make of Rina’s home life; both her parents are around, but it’s impossible to tell whether they’re with each other or who lives with Rina. Part of me thinks she lives with her upscale mother, while Logan lives in the woods in a fort made out of empty beer cans with Molson bottles forming the windows. But that’s my imagination; on the other hand, I’ll wager that image is more interesting than anything in Crash Course.

The action sequences aren’t anything to write home about either; it’s bog standard dullness, with none of the excitement either of her parents bring to a battle. The less said of her “psychic claws” (huh?), the better; the claws are only supposed to affect the mind, and although they leave no trace on clothes or the landscape, they have no trouble affecting humans, mindless creatures (but I repeat myself), demons, or robots. It smacks of the ‘90s X-Men cartoon, where Wolverine had to wait to fight robots to cut loose because the audience would be too traumatized if he used his claws on living villains. Rina similarly slashes with no consequences.

That isn’t her greatest problem, though: she’s simply not original. Her costume is too entirely close to her father’s to be an homage. Her villains are borrowed from her parents — Wolverine, mainly — and the only original villains she fights are a kidnapper with an armored suit and roller skates and a robot that seems borrowed from the Silver Age Fantastic Four. I half expected Reed Richards to pop out of the ether on Doom’s Time Platform and ask Wild Thing to stop poaching their villains.

The costume is Ron Lim’s problem. The penciler turns in a workmanlike performance that seems to come alive only when Wolverine was on the page. Given that the X-Men were still big in ’99, perhaps he was auditioning for a Wolverine or X-Men gig. Still, the art tells the story, even if it’s not desperately interesting.

Wild Thing #2-5 each carries a J2 (son of Juggernaut) backup written by Tom DeFalco with Lim on pencils. These are forgettable; the J2 series didn’t interest me, and the backups are smaller while retaining the same lack of interest. If you desperately needed to know what happened to J2 — his reunion with his father, the original Juggernaut, for instance — here it is. For the rest of the populace, there’s only one story that particularly works, with Juggie Jr. dwelling on unrequited love without realizing someone’s interest in him.

I can’t even say Crash Course has missed opportunities. It’s just dull. There may be potential in the character, but I don’t care. This is just one of the steps on Hama’s painful descent from an excellent writer toward Howard Mackie-dom, and Ron Lim being merely professional isn’t going to save it.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Birds of Prey, v. 2: Sensei & Student

Collects: Birds of Prey #62-8 (2004)

Released: January 2005 (DC)

Format: 168 pages / color / $17.99 / ISBN: 9781401204341

What is this?: Black Canary and Lady Shiva meet for the death of their sensei and are entangled in Cheshire’s poisonous plots; Oracle is menaced by a talented hacker.

The culprits: Writer Gail Simone and pencilers Ed Benes, Cliff Richards, Michael Golden, and Joe Bennett

When it comes to Birds of Prey, v. 2: Sensei & Student, there is a strong temptation to say, “Second verse, same as the first, good job,” and call it a day. Very strong temptation — hmm, I wonder when happy hour begins down at that tiki bar down near the public beach …

No! No, I have to do a better job than that. This isn’t a retread of the first volume, Of Like Minds. Writer Gail Simone didn’t slack off, and I shouldn’t either. There are new antagonists, a new interaction for Black Canary, and thrilling new hacking action! OK, that last part isn’t true: the hacking is decidedly not thrilling.

The most interesting part of Sensei is Black Canary’s story. She heads to Hong Kong to see her dying sensei; while there, she meets the assassin Lady Shiva, who is also there to pay her respects. When the sensei is murdered before he can die, they team up to find the culprit; the trail leads to assassin / poisoner Cheshire, who insists she’s being set up.

The interaction between the three is great; a grudging respect between Canary and Shiva is turned into a genuine partnership when the truly evil Cheshire is thrown into the mix. The dialogue and characterization of the three is great, even if Cheshire shies away from some of her evil (mutilating Shiva) for no defined reason. Simone does her best work in this part of the story; every time Shiva is on the page, the story seems more lively, more interesting, and more dangerous, and some of that rubs off on Black Canary.

Unfortunately, Oracle’s subplot, in which she is menaced by a hacker whose abilities seem to outstrip hers, seems lacking. Although it’s nice — and it would have been eventually necessary — for Oracle to run into someone better at the keyboards, there’s no effective payoff for that part of the story. Oracle is also abducted by a mysterious government group, forcing her to call on Huntress for rescue; even though those two storylines have a connection, they never feel related, just like Canary’s story doesn’t feel connected with Oracle’s despite common antagonists. That’s worse, in its way, than a swarm of completely unconnected plots.

That has me worried; I’m not quite convinced about Simone’s overall plotting skills. There’s too much coincidence in the story; the plans of Cheshire, the hacker’s employer, and an old serial killer investigated by the original Black Canary come to a head all of once, and the evil is all related by blood. This raises certain nature / nurture questions Simone doesn’t address, despite the presence of a perfect candidate: Huntress, a daughter of the mob. Speaking of Huntress, if a male writer had emphasized her sexual proclivities as Simone does, he would probably be accused of titillating his readers. And while we’re on gender politics, doesn’t Oracle know any male superheroes? All the ones who aid in her escape are female, except Savant; although I appreciate his presence as a tie in to the previous storyline, I’m not sure about his long-term viability as a character.

Ed Benes provides most of the pencils (and some inks) for Sensei, and he shows his usual restraint and taste when drawing the female form. There’s nothing I can say that I didn’t say in the review of Of Like Minds: he’s a good artist who lets the female anatomy dominate his style. I have nothing to say about Joe Bennett (penciler for #68) or Cliff Richards, who pitched in with pencils on the first two issues. For Richards, that’s good, since he’s obviously supposed to blend in with Benes’s work. It’s good for Bennett as well; his style differs from Benes’s more than Richards, but he definitely fits in with the artistic tone of the book: I mean, just look at the crop top he gave Canary in that issue.

I’m torn on Michael Golden’s work on #66; it’s a flashback, in which the bulk of the issue is narrated by Canary’s mother, the original Black Canary. It’s a nice idea to have a different artist for the flashback issue, and Benes’s pencils would have looked odd in the shadowily defined past. But Golden’s work doesn’t say “past” to me either, for the most part; he does better on the more detail-oriented pages — in the hospital, for instance. At one point in the story, though, I had trouble figuring out a murder victim was a woman rather than an Albert Einstein impersonator. Perhaps she was both. I don’t know.

Although the comments in this review are different than the ones for the first Birds of Prey volume, the summary and rating aren’t: I’m looking forward to the next volume, and I’ll be very happy when Benes has moved on. Now, if you will excuse me, I can already hear the steak sizzling, and the beach is calling …

Rating: (3.5 of 5)

Harley Quinn: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes

Collects: Harley Quinn #1-7 (2000-1)

Released: January 2008 (DC)

Format: 192 pages (hardcover) / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9781401216283

What is this?: Harley Quinn, the Joker’s devoted sidekick, gets her own series.

The culprits: Writer Karl Kesel, penciler Terry Dodson, and inker Rachel Dodson

Harley Quinn is an odd choice for a series lead. When DC launched her eponymous comic in 2000, she was a female sidekick who had slightly faded in prominence after the cancellation of Batman: The Animated Series, where she was created. But Karl Kesel was named the writer, and the Dodsons — Terry on pencils and Rachel on inks — were dispatched to create, create, create.

The series lasted 38 issues, but it took five years after its cancelation for the first collection, Harley Quinn: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes, to be released. I wondered if that delay was because of lack of confidence in the character or in the work itself.

The tone of Preludes is confusing. On one hand, you get the corny Silver-Age alliteration and exclamations that marks it as a silly throwback. On another, there’s Dodson’s eye candy, posing women in uncomfortable positions to accentuate the more salacious aspects of their bodies. And then, if you cover your eyes with both hands and look through the fingers, you occasionally get glimpses of panels that are reminiscent of the B:TAS style, reminding readers why they liked Harley in the first place. It makes it difficult to determine what Preludes is about.

Nominally, it’s about Harley gaining independence from the Joker. The first arc has her falling out with her “puddin’,” then she has her all-female slumber party, and finally she embarks on a solo criminal career with henchmen called “Quinntets.” The first few issues are rough. Kesel’s dialogue is atrocious, hearkening back unironically to the worst of the Silver Age, and the plot itself doesn’t make Harley all that likeable, enduring abuse from men who don’t have any regard for her: she’s more of a doormat than a character. Harley comes across less “mad” or “manic” than “deluded.” Kesel’s characterizations feel slightly off as well, although I have trouble putting my finger on why. All of this taken together caused me to consider putting this book aside a half dozen times within those first three issues.

The slumber party issue is painful to read. I’ve been harder on DC than Marvel for their T&A art — probably because I’ve read more of DC’s female books — but this is the reason I do so. I have no idea who thought it was a good idea; it’s as if someone in DC editorial (I don’t know who) thought an issue of Terry Dodson drawing females in various stages of undress (but almost uniform skin-tightness of their remaining clothes) was a necessity. And Dodson does not stint, not bowing to quaint concerns like “balance” or “weight distribution” to get his characters into poses that will appeal to a certain demographic. Not that the problems end there. There’s little humor and no fun in the issue; the characters grate, especially Harley’s mooning over the Joker and her subsequent declaration of independence. I also can’t fathom why President Luthor’s staffers Hope and Mercy would attend, given that, you know, it would look bad for their employer if they were seen with notorious criminals, and the invitation was something less than secure. The entire issue is a dud.

But after that issue, the book turns a corner. Harely working with her gang is more fun, Kesel’s horrible dialogue gets turned down a notch, and Preludes begins to have a purpose again. Issue #5 is a strangely affecting story of a thug who thinks he has a resemblance to the Joker and is shot in his futile attempt at living the life of a near double to the Joker. The final two issues, with Harley and the Riddler both trying to rob Wayne Manor with their gangs, is actually interesting, although I’m not sure about Big Barda’s characterization. The running gag about the gang continually losing their fifth member is also funny. It’s not an elite comic, by any means, but it is entertaining.

The more I see of the Dodsons’ work, the less I like it. The faces look more and more alike, the women’s figures are uniformly shapely, and I’m tired of hands that look like flippers. I understand why their work is popular, and the Dodsons can tell a story, but I’ve had enough of pencils and inks that seem to be primarily interested in women’s physiques rather than the story.

The penultimate issue also seemed to have a strange miscommunication, emblematic of Preludes’ inconsistent tone: Craig Rousseau does some fill-in work in a more cartoony style and draws an incapacitated character with smudges on the face and planets and punctuation circling her head — injured, but not seriously. On the next page, Dodson draws her with blood coming out her eyes, nose, and mouth and with broken glasses, a considerably more serious (probably fatal) injury.

Preludes is a frustrating book; its inconsistencies are too large to overlook. I want to reward the promise of the final arc, but I can’t ignore the tone-deaf writing in the first half. The Dodsons draw very pretty pictures, but I won’t look the other way when it comes to the cynicism of someone at DC in regards to audience taste. Good, bad, who knows? The faults are large enough that my inclination was to rate it very low, but I have to admit: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes is a perfect title for the first Harley Quinn collection, and that moves it closer to mediocrity.

Rating:

Hulk, v. 1: Red Hulk

Collects: Hulk (v. 2) #1-6, stories from Wolverine #50 and Mini Marvels (2007-8)

Released: February 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 176 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785128823

What is this?: Who is the Red Hulk? And who will he beat up / shoot next?

The culprits: Writer Jeph Loeb and penciler Ed McGuinness

We finish our fortnight of Hulk reviews with Hulk, v. 1: Red Hulk. If you have any hopes of this troika of reviews ending on a high note, please wad those hopes up and drop them in the nearest recycling bins now. ³⁶

After World War Hulk, Bruce Banner is imprisoned, but a new Red Hulk stalks the land, pummeling and shooting the Hulk’s enemies … or anyone else who gets in his way, or meets, for that matter. Writer Jeph Loeb asks the question, “Who is the Red Hulk?” The follow-up question is, “Who the hell cares?” The Red Hulk is a snarling force of nature that only destroys and doesn’t have the magnetism or even simple charm of the “Hulk-Smash!” Hulk. An earthquake would have been more efficient and has more character. He uses guns, for heaven’s sake; Hulk punches harder than guns! Even the best SHIELD tech can’t compete with the Hulk’s punches.

The trouble is, I am curious who the Red Hulk is. God help me, I want to know. Loeb is blatant about not revealing who the Hulk is, having people knocked over the head or whisked off stage just as the Red Hulk’s identity is revealed. The Red Hulk’s identity can’t be withheld forever; it isn’t revealed here and hasn’t been revealed yet, and there’s only so long a writer can keep the mystery alive without alienating the audience. This sort of obvious dangler (Who is Stryfe?) is simultaneously what kept the X-Men at the top of the comics heap for so long and caused its popularity to dip in the new millennium.

When it comes down to it, the Red Hulk is stupid. He punches (and shoots) everybody: Iron Man, She-Hulk, Thor, even Uatu the Watcher. (Why? Since when has punching the Watcher been a mark of might?) He rages throughout the story without betraying any emotion other than smug vindictiveness. That’s not a character: that’s a character note, something the writer reminds himself to work in or refer back to while doing more worthwhile things with the character. I’m not about to get into “A-Bomb,” the new gamma-spawned halfwit monster who’s really Rick Jones, but rest assured the idea is even less rewarding than you’re thinking. And who thought, “The madder Red Hulk gets, the hotter he gets” was a bright idea? And why would overheating be a problem for the Red Hulk?

I don’t know. But plotting isn’t an important consideration for Loeb. He wastes most of the first issue with a pointless “investigation” into the Abomination’s death and a fight with the Winter Guard, Russia’s superheroes. Space is wasted on heroes trying to shore up San Francisco and save its residents while the Hulks fight; I can do without that. Loeb could have used that space for … something interesting, if he could find it. Uatu shows up out of nowhere just to get punched. So does Thor, for that matter. And I don’t believe for a second that Red Hulk can pick up Thor’s hammer.

There are a few bits of dialogue that are amusing, and the extra touches on the Gamma Base are interesting — robot guards and robot harpies that look like Betty Banner as the Harpy — but mostly it’s smashing and dumb Hulk (and dumb A-Bomb) talking in broken sentences while the Red Hulk is insufferable. It gets irritating quickly.

Penciler Ed McGuinness is better than the material he’s given. His work is larger than life, gleefully dynamic, and fun to look at. Really, he’s almost the perfect fit for this storyline, and there’s not much negative to say about his pencils. However, I will anyway: either he has a dental fetish or he really enjoys drawing teeth; the Hulks look like supersized PSAs for dental care. I’m not sure what emotion the final panel is supposed to inspire: the incapacitated Red Hulk grits his teeth and glares at the reader in front of a featureless background after he’s been berated by puny humans. Fear? Amusement? It actually managed to confuse me, so that’s an emotion right there. There’s also a small error in that he draws the Red Hulk’s gun in two different ways: humongous revolver and ginormous automatic. Well, I say it’s an error; it could be Loeb doubling his idiotic idea by having the Red Hulk steal two Hulk-sized guns. (Why would SHIELD even make one? What possible advantage could that give them?)

There are also some interesting extras at the end of the book. The three Red / Green / Blue Hulk Mini Marvels strips, by Audrey Loeb and Chris Giarrusso, are reprinted from the second Mini Marvels collection. They’re fun, as is anything Mini Marvel related. Loeb and McGuinness’s backup from Wolverine (v. 3) #50, “Puny Little Man,” is also included; it retells the story of Wolverine’s first confrontation with the Hulk, although Wolverine admits he doesn’t quite know what’s true and what’s story (and for good measure, the Hulk tearing Wolverine in half from Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine is included to muddy the waters). Decent backup, although it’s more Wolverine related than Hulk.

Still, neither McGuinness nor the extra features should be enough to induce buyers to pick this up. Stay away, save your money, and keep watching comic-book news sites and Wikipedia for the revelation of who the Red Hulk is.

Rating: (1 of 5)

Incredible Hulk: Incredible Hercules

Collects: Incredible Hulk #106-11 (2007)

Released: May 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 152 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785129912

What is this?: Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person on the planet, gathers a ragtag bunch to save the Hulk and prove he’s not a killer.

The culprits: Writer Greg Pak and pencilers Gary Frank, Leonard Kirk, and Carlo Pagulayan

The follow-up to Planet Hulk, which ran from Incredible Hulk #92-105, should logically run in Incredible Hulk #106-111. That just makes sense, right? Of course.

But Hulk: The Incredible Hercules, which reprints those issues, is not the logical continuation of the story. No, sir. That story is too big to be continued in Incredible Hulk, instead getting its own miniseries, World War Hulk.

So Incredible Hercules can’t tell the main story. What’s left for it to do? Tell a story in which the Hulk is a secondary character — maybe even tertiary. Bold! Daring! Perhaps incredibly stupid!

The protagonist is teenager Amadeus Cho, the “seventh smartest person in the world,” who can take out tanks with a pebble. Thanks to a chance meeting with the Hulk before Planet Hulk, Cho is certain the Hulk isn’t a monster; to prove it, he gathers a team including Namora and former Champions Angel and Hercules. They hie themselves to New York to stop Hulk from committing atrocities or maybe verify he isn’t doing so.

Writer Greg Pak has to be certain not to tread on the toes of the main story. He can reference Hulk destroying New York or capturing the heroes who shanghaied him to a gladiator planet or taking out Sentry, but he can’t delve into it as fully as one might want. He has to stay on the periphery of the story. Cho is his vehicle to do this, leading his team to prevent New York from blowing up and convincing the Hulk he’s not a monster. The estimate of Cho’s intelligence seems entirely too low; if he were a supervillain, he would be entirely too effective. Cho’s character is that of an irritant: he’s so smart he thinks he knows better than everyone else, and the most annoying thing is he’s right. It’s fun to watch him run mental rings about Angel; Hercules certainly thinks so too.

The pacing is entirely off. It takes Cho two issues to get to New York and confront Hulk, and the next (#108) is wasted on contrasting the attitudes of Rick Jones and Miek, the Hulk’s first and latest sidekicks. The issue feels like filler, a needless flashback, and it saps the momentum of the story: the conflict has been launched, and then Pak presents readers with two opposing visions of what the Hulk is, a philosophical argument in text boxes. Never mind that neither Rick nor Miek makes an important contribution to Incredible Hercules; their views are put forward as credible and significant. (NOTE: After writing this review, I learned the conflict between these two is important in the main World War Hulk story. Given that I had no idea about the tie-in, I have to feel this element of the story is a failure.)

The second half is divided between saving the collapsing rubble that is New York, Cho arguing with Hulk over the Hulk’s essential nature, and absorbing the spillover from World War Hulk. Either of the first two could have been an effective story, given the space and development afforded by this book. But with three issues to work with, and working with that spillover, there’s not enough room for any of those threads to support significant interest.

So the overall story is weak and disjointed. Does this work to launch the book in its new direction, a Cho / Hercules team up? Yes and no. Cho is definitely developed enough in the book, and although he’s an annoying little know-it-all, I could see him as a sidekick / partner in a book. However, Hercules is just one of his teammates, despite getting cover billing — perhaps the supporting character with the most screen time, but without anything other than a willingness to listen to Cho and an ability to believe the best in Hulk to distinguish him. This book doesn’t make me want to read a Hercules solo book. It doesn’t make me want to read a Cho book, for that matter; he’s just too annoying.

A sign of Incredible Hercules’s second-rate status is in the art: pencils are divvied equally between Gary Frank, Leonard Kirk, and Carlo Pagulayan. Marvel can’t even be bothered to make them in sets of two; Frank has the first two issues, then one by Kirk, two by Pagulayan, then the final issue by Kirk. They’re all good artists with connections to the characters — Pagulayan worked on Planet Hulk, Frank worked on several Incredible Hulk issues during the Peter David run, and Kirk is the definitive modern artist of Namora, given his work on Agents of Atlas. Still, three pencilers in six issues is never a good sign.

Despite the book’s many flaws, I can’t deny there are more than a few fun moments, with Cho’s calm contrasting against the panic of Angel and others. Although I don’t think Hercules is a strong enough character to deserve his name in the title, Pak does seem to have a soft spot for him, giving him the larger-than-life good cheer and brawling nature that has marked his appearances and adding a strong, stubborn streak of loyalty to both Cho and the Hulk.

There are some small gems in here. This story can’t support itself; to be mine those gems, you have to also read World War Hulk.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Freedom Excuse

It’s the Fourth of July; I’m celebrating my freedom. Here is a story about how I choose to do it:

You might think the Evil Robot James Buchanan would choose Independence Day as his special day to terrorize, given that his despicable brain patterns are based on a man who terrorized the country as an ineffectual president for four long years. But his brain-child has never tried to ruin the country’s birthday; the Evil Robot James Buchanan takes off all patriotic holidays as the excessive love of country sickens (and weakens) him. Also, no one has sent him a President’s Day card in a century, except for the director of Wheatland, his presidential home. And that’s just a pity card. He knows that — he’s not fooling himself, even if he does tell everyone President’s Day is just a made-up, Hallmark holiday. What really galls him is that Robot Lincoln gets tons of the cards; if only his progenitor had been able to end / stop the Civil War! Of course, if that had happened, Evil Robot James Buchanan would not be Evil Robot James Buchanan, and James Buchanan wouldn’t have been James Buchanan: he would have been competent.

I used to have a standing battle on July 4th against Red Tape, the Communist bureaucrat supervillain; it was a home-and-home thing, where he’d come over here on our Independence Day, and I’d head to Moscow or Riga or Astana or some damn place on May 1. (It’s still cold in most of country at that time of year, let me tell you; he could never figure out why I kept attacking the Crimea.) But since the breakup of the Soviet Union and the metamorphosis of Communist rulers into capitalist oligarchs, the matchup hasn’t had the same juice. We discontinued it after September 11; it just seemed tacky then. There’s some talk of him rebranding himself “Kleptocrat” or “Sticky Fingers,” a tool of the corrupt, but we both know that’s just talk. It’s sad, really. I have dozens of Yakov Smirnoff jokes I’m never going to get to use.

So the last few years I’ve been squaring off against a British brawler named John Bullsh*t, but frankly, he stinks. His fighting moves are crap, his quips are simply gutter level, and he’s a stain on the British national character. And he’s probably going to curl up in the bathroom and cry himself to sleep when he reads this. Boo-frickin’-hoo, John. Go buy yourself a stiff upper lip.

So I throw this open to my readers: do you know anyone who would make a good sparring partner for the Fourth of July?

Incredible Hulk: Planet Hulk

Collects: Incredible Hulk # 92-105, Giant-Size Hulk #1, Amazing Fantasy v. 2 #15 (2006-7)

Released: June 2007 (Marvel)

Format: 416 pages / color / $39.99 / ISBN: 9780785122456

What is this?: Hulk, exiled by not-so-smart guys, smashes a whole new planet.

The culprits: Writer Greg Pak and pencillers Aaron Lopresti and Carlo Pagulayan

I’ve said in other reviews that I am a fan of the Hulk because of his changeability, his not being tied to New York City or the same superhero ethos of his Marvel brethren. The Hulk does stranger things than the other heroes; even Marvel’s scientist-explorers, the Fantastic Four, confront the world through rationality and scientific inquiry. The Hulk has no such schema to help him; he’s just as bewildered wherever he goes, and brother, he sees some bewildering things. It can make even a repetitive Hulk adventure mildly enjoyable.

Then there is Incredible Hulk: Planet Hulk. Hulk has been exiled to another planet by people who should be smarter; unfortunately, he doesn’t end up on the planet he was aimed at, falling instead on Sakaar, a world ruled by a despotic emperor, where gladiatorial combats are a popular entertainment. The Hulk is taken into slavery when he arrives, and of course, after slavery comes the gladiatorial combats.

You can guess what’s coming next.

Writer Greg Pak guides the Hulk through this alien setting, with the Hulk meeting aliens from all over the Marvel Universe (plus new species). Weird new settings is Hulk’s forte, and certainly, the Hulk is the star of the show. Pak does an excellent job taking him through an emotional range that in earlier incarnations might have been overlooked. But the other aliens in his army — his Warbound — are interesting in their own right, each with their own personality and story. The Hulk swaggers through the story, smashing and creating havoc, but it’s his fellow gladiators who hold the story together.

It’s an amazing story, really: more than a year dedicated to one Hulk story with a large scope, from slavery to revolution to remaking a world. To a certain extent, such a thing couldn’t have been done before. Before Peter David, such extended storylines — more than a year on a single non-Earth planet — would have been a difficult sell (although Bill Mantlo did a long story about a mindless Hulk stranded at the crossworlds of reality, it traveled through several different settings). David’s long run could have had such a story, but David favored humor over the stark, violent world that Planet Hulk embraces. (Not that David couldn’t have done something similar, but it would have been an odd fit.) And the less said of the Bruce Jones run, the better.

Pak has created an entire new world for the Hulk to play in. He uses some of the established parts — the Brood, the Stone Men of Saturn that Thor fought in his origin — but the world of Sakaar is imaginative and detailed, as the appendix describing the history, society, creatures, and technology of Sakaar show. Pak has created a world that is a hodgepodge, and then he and the artists let their imagination go wild.

Both Aaron Lopresti and Carlo Pagulayan are up to the task. They both do excellent work, and their styles mesh well together. I prefer Lopresti’s work by a small margin, but both are imaginative, producing detailed work on one page and sweeping vistas on the next. Marvel scored a coup here, finding not one but two artists who could put into pictures what they and Pak imagined.

It’s hard for me to say how much I like Planet Hulk. Rarely do I read such a large superhero story and find it interesting; even more rarely am I absorbed by it. Planet Hulk is that story. It’s not perfect — the “Mastermind Excello” story at the end is a confusing trailer for the next story, and there are times the plot seems to wallow in misery for the purpose of making the story grittier. But Planet Hulk is among the best of the Hulk stories ever — certainly the best of the last decade, standing alongside the best of David’s run.

Rating: (4.5 of 5)

I give you yet another excuse

I missed putting up a review; a review will be up Tuesday. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

Listen:

There’s unrest in the spirit world.

And when you combat unrest in the spirit world, you hope to battle or meet really cool spirits: Napoleon, Rasputin, Hannibal. World-changing guys. Or if you don’t know the names, at least you hope they’re really evil.

But no, this time the disturbance was centered on Kansas. The cause of it was William Burroughs, who was babbling some stream-of-consciousness crap about Allen Ginsburg and drugs and Interzone. Turns out, spells that try to recreate the fabric of the universe don’t work so well when you’re not picky about the order you say the words in. It does cause weird side effects, but mostly the spirits were unquiet because they were tired of listening to Burroughs.

The worst part is it’s not all that fun beating up on the ghost of a spindly Beat poet. He just keeps asking for more drugs.

(Although this time I did battle the ghost of Evil President James Buchanan. It wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped: he just stood there and did nothing, smugly watching Kansas bleed.)

Omega the Unknown Classic

Collects: Omega the Unknown #1-10, Defenders #76-7 (1976-9)

Released: December 2005 (Marvel)

Format: 224 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785120094

What is this?: Reluctant superhero has strange connection to orphan boy, who’s trying to survive in Hell’s Kitchen with the worst foster parents ever.

The culprits: Writers Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes, and Steven Grant and penciler Jim Mooney and a little Herb Trimpe

My admiration for Steve Gerber’s imagination and occasional weirdness is vast; he is among the greatest imaginative talents (with Jack Kirby) to ever be part of the comics universe.

Howard the Duck is his signature character, but one that is emblematic of his career, in some ways, is Omega the Unknown. Its description by readers is so uniform it might as well be part of the name: weird. So when I found an inexpensive copy of Omega the Unknown Classic at a Charlottesville comics store, I was all over it.

Most of the weirdness is encapsulated in the concept, which makes it hard to sum up. There are two narrative threads: James-Michael Starling, a child who suddenly becomes orphaned, and an unnamed superhero who escapes from his devastated planet. James-Michael, who is far more analytical and unemotional than most adults, has to survive school and life in Hell’s Kitchen, which he is singularly unsuited to do. His half-attentive caretakers don’t help, and neither do the strange fits and occasional powers he exhibits. Both are seemingly linked to the hero, who comes to Hell’s Kitchen himself and gains the name “Omega” after his headband, which is in the shape of the Greek letter. Omega, mute and taken in by an elderly shopkeeper, becomes a superhero, although he struggles with our alien morality.

It’s interesting that for such an odd concept, the book is firmly ensconced in the Marvel Universe: Omega fights the Hulk and Electro, for instance, and battles minor villains like Nitro and Blockbuster. Perhaps it was Marvel editorial policy. Still, other than a villain revealed to be Ruby Thursday by a later writer, there aren’t any of the strange villains Gerber could and often did create.

Omega is largely follows the themes Gerber emphasized in works like Howard the Duck and Man-Thing: alienation, being an outsider, the senselessness of much of human endeavor. Sometimes I think it must have been a very lonely and frustrating existence to be Steve Gerber. His protagonists are rarely happy and can’t find even the minor victories that, say, Spider-Man indulges in.

It’s no different in Omega, although there’s none of the leavening of humor that you find in Howard. Everything is played deadly serious, as deadly serious as young James-Michael always is. I don’t know if this is because of the influence of co-writer Mary Skenes or because Gerber thought Omega was a more serious creation; perhaps there’s another reason. The school scenes with James-Michael are depressing criticisms of urban education; the extraneous elements of the school experience realistically overwhelm the classroom parts, which is puzzling and disturbing for a scholar like James-Michael, and that gets across to the reader quite well.

Steven Grant has the unenviable task of wrapping up the story; I don’t know if the idea to do so was his or Marvel’s. It certainly wasn’t Skenes and Gerber’s, who didn’t like Grant’s ending at all. (As far as I know, Gerber never revealed his ideas for the series after its final issue.) It’s not a horrible ending in the “any-ending-you-can-walk-away-from” sense. But it certainly doesn’t match Omega’s tone; it’s a bit too optimistic and striving to match any Gerber story, whose cynicism stared back at the reader from the page like a third eye. Interestingly, Grant doesn’t skimp on the weirdness, although he does it in a more modern sense: characters like Ruby Thursday and Moondragon, plus invading aliens.

Jim Mooney provides the art for the Omega run. This was the ‘70s, you see, and Mooney gives the effort a workman-like edge. There’s little memorable about the art; it looks like most of the rest of the decade. There’s nothing that matches the imagination of the concept; I have the idea Mooney probably approached Omega as just another job, perhaps one more baffling than others. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t want to come across as criticizing him. But if an artist with a distinctive style had worked with Gerber and Skenes, Omega might be a hidden classic rather than a curiosity. Herb Trimpe pencils the two Defenders issues and does a fine job.

Even after reading Omega, I’m still not sure what to make of it. It’s not as bizarre as I had expected, although it’s certainly different. It’s worth reading for two reasons: because it’s always worthwhile to explore Gerber’s body of work, and because it’s just interesting enough that a comic fan should have an opinion about it.

Rating: (3 of 5)

X-Factor, v. 6: Secret Invasion

Collects: X-Factor v. 3 #33-8 and She-Hulk v. 2 #31 (2008-9)

Released: May 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 168 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785128656

What is this?: X-Factor! She-Hulk! Skrulls! Darwin! Longshot! Try and contain yourself.

The culprits: Writer Peter David and penciler Larry Stroman (along with three others)

The math, at least, makes sense: She-Hulk is a second-tier title that had a reason to do a Secret Invasion (a subtle invasion by the shape-shifting aliens, the Skrulls) tie-in despite having little connection to the main plot. She-Hulk is written by Peter David. David also writes X-Factor. Since neither sell phenomenally well (She-Hulk has since been cancelled), make them cross over!

It makes sense, but the final answer, X-Factor, v. 6: Secret Invasion, doesn’t quite come out right. It’s a shame, really.

Jazinda, a Skrull, is She-Hulk’s sidekick. She and She-Hulk bull their way into Detroit (X-Factor’s new home town!), where the talisman of Skrull victory, a figure just below the Skrull gods, is hanging out, waiting for the war to begin (or end, perhaps). Why Detroit? you might ask. Why not Detroit? Not everything has to happen in New York … admittedly, everything does have to happen in America or within 100 miles of its northern border.

What’s amazing is what David manages to get out of the crossover. Admittedly, I expected nothing good to come of it, and he’s writing both ends of the story. But given how his story seems shoehorned into the cracks of the Secret Invasion event, it’s very readable. Not the plot, so much; that feels as if David said, “Plot? Who’s concerned about plot at this late stage in Secret Invasion?” No, it’s the characters that make the story readable and fun. The characterization of the X-Factor members doesn’t feel forced: it feels like a normal issue. The same goes for She-Hulk and Jazinda, although I’m not a big fan of Jazinda, and She-Hulk is in a “not playing well with others” stage. Darwin, introduced in Ed Brubaker’s wretched X-Men: Deadly Genesis, seems to flail around, but that seems to be his role: the person confused by everything as the plot revolves around them, and unable to do much about it.

What doesn’t help is Larry Stroman. He teamed up with David on his acclaimed ’90s X-Factor run. Unfortunately, it’s not the ‘90s any more, and his distorted style makes the characters look more like refugees from Marvel Apes, at times, than humans or Skrulls. It’s … not good, not good at all. Figures are distorted, exaggerated, twisted, and stripped of their differences, and not in a good way. It’s impossible for me to evaluate the work of Valentine de Landro, Nelson, and Vincenzo Cucca, who each contribute an issue; after Stroman’s work, anything looks good.

The second half of Secret Invasion is much better. The real Longshot, from Chris Claremont’s long X-Men run, is dropped into the cast, and the team’s reactions are both funny and spot on. The story is mainly an excuse to drop him and Darwin into the cast and see what happens; meanwhile, subplots aplenty advance satisfactorily, and there’s an unexpected twist at the end. Madrox’s development in particular is going in directions I didn’t expect.

Secret Invasion is a poor jumping-on point for new readers, not so much because it would leave them confused but because they would be put off by Stroman’s art or grow attached characters who might not be around for much longer (Darwin and Longshot). Even She-Hulk readers are unlikely, I think, to jump over to X-Factor, even if it’s continuing after She-Hulk has been cancelled. But it’s another of those books that reward the readers, the ones who are watching the development of the characters and appreciate all those character jokes.

The value of Secret Invasion lies not so much in its intrinsic qualities as it does in how Peter David manages to get excellent returns on a cast and idea I wouldn’t have bet would last a year. And that’s so amazing we lose track of how amazing it is.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Daredevil, v. 5 (hardcover)

Collects: Daredevil v. 2 #66-75 (2004-5)

Released: June 2006 (Marvel)

Format: 256 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785121107 (hardcover)

What is this?: A hardback that collects two Daredevil arcs: “Golden Age,” which features the return of the old Kingpin, and “Decalogue,” in which a bunch of New Yorkers talk about how Daredevil and supervillains entwined their lives.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev

I started buying collected editions of books just as the third Daredevil hardcover came out. Armed with money to start building a TPB collection, I jumped all over those three and the fourth when it came out the next year. It was good stuff, too: Kevin Smith, Joe Quesada, and David Mack in the first volume, followed by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev’s long run in the following volumes.

Bendis turned Daredevil’s life upside down by outing him to the press while making sure nothing could ever be proven. Bendis used this to take Daredevil’s life down predictable and unpredictable paths. It was fun, but by the end of the fourth volume, I was beginning to wonder how long Bendis could continue to dance between the raindrops. Not long, I figured, and that, along with the high price of the hardcovers (even with a discount, it would take up half my monthly budget) kept me from v. 5. But after a few years, you can sometimes find things cheaper …

So you have Daredevil, v. 5 (hardcover), which contains two storylines: “Golden Age” and “Decalogue.” There is a vast difference in quality between them, but they both feature the same chatty, “naturalistic” Bendis style of dialogue and pacing. Some people love it, and some hate it; you know which category you fit into.

“Golden Age” inserts a previous kingpin into Marvel continuity, Alexander Bont. Preceding Wilson Fisk,³¹Bont was ousted by the FBI and Daredevil at the beginning of the Silver Age. He used Gladiator, a costumed criminal who later went straight, as his failed instrument of revenge. Now, an old man, he’s released from prison, but now he knows exactly who to blame: Matt Murdock.³² Blackmailing the reformed Gladiator and using MGH, he seeks his revenge: blood and humiliation.

It’s an interesting story; I have to give Bendis that. The story shifts from the ‘40s to the ‘60s (Golden Age to Silver Age) to the present. But although the time shifts allow Maleev to show off, I’m not sure what they add. Bont gained criminal prestige in the ‘40s by having (a little) audacity and pulling the trigger of a gun; he was a licentious old man in the ‘60s. These are not exactly revelations. These scenes feel like padding for what should be a two-issue story.

Not helping things is Angela del Toro, the FBI agent assigned to the Daredevil case. She’s inherited the Jade Tiger amulets that allowed her uncle to be the White Tiger. She comes to Matt in a horrible conflict of interest to ask what makes someone become a hero. Matt responds in the jerkiest way possible — he’s even a bigger jerk than if he told her to buzz off. The subplot seems tacked on as a trailer for the White Tiger miniseries, especially since nothing is mentioned of Agent del Toro in the next storyline, “Decalogue.”

But we can be happy for Ms. del Toro, because “Decalogue” is a talky mess. The only thing worse than a bunch of Catholics³³ sitting in a church basement yakking about Daredevil is each of them telling the story about how a demon baby touched their lives. Did you know Daredevil functions better without supernatural elements?³⁴ Sure you did. But Bendis didn’t. Still, he takes five issues to tell this story, although admittedly he doesn’t introduce the demon baby until the third. The preceding two issues are a “touched by a Daredevil” special episode and a criminal tale. One might make a change of pace between storylines; two, during a storyline, tries the patience. Overall, “Decalogue” is confusing and dull. And set in a church basement, where confusion and dullness spend their summers.

And that’s not even taking into account that Matt all but admits he’s Daredevil to a basement full of strangers. He claims he never said he was, but he ventures far past the point of plausible deniability. That clinches a crap rating for “Decalogue.”

Thank God for Maleev. His work is well fitted to the character, and I think he goes into the conversation of best Daredevil artists of all time, along with Frank Miller and Gene Colan.³⁵ I don’t think he’d win, but he’s still excellent. In this collection, he gets to pitch his art as black-and-white Golden Age stuff (disclaimer: his art looks like nothing from the Golden Age) and as pantoned Silver Age material (it does look like some of the Silver Age). His work reminds me of series of stills, even at it’s most kinetic; that’s not a complaint, just an observation on stylistic choice. There are, however, many double-paged spreads that are just talking heads; it’s unnecessary and confusing, but given the prevalence of the practice in Powers, I can blame that on Bendis too. My only real complaint about the art, other than some odd color choices in “Decalogue,” is the lack of blood in a suicide scene; a character is supposed to have slit her wrists and gouged out her eyes, yet it’s impossible to see the character, in a wide shot, has anything wrong with her (the head is averted). Could be a coloring problem, but there doesn’t look like there’s anything in the pencils to indicate a large, seeping crimson pool.

This is a frustrating book. It goes steadily downhill, from a promising beginning to an ending that nosedives into the dungheap. Without Maleev as a saving grace, this book would hardly be worth picking up, even if you were picking it up to throw into the recycling bin.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

Punisher War Journal Classic, v. 1

Collects: Punisher War Journal v. 1 #1-8 (1988-9)

Released: August 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 208 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785131182

What is this?: Jim Lee doing a Punisher series before he became a mega star

The culprits: Writer Carl Potts and penciler Jim Lee

There are an awful lot of Punisher stories out there. Many are available in reprint form; one of those reprints is Punisher War Journal Classic, v. 1. How is this Punisher reprint different from all the others?

The others aren’t drawn by Jim Lee. That’s about it.

This is early Lee — before Image, before he took creative control of franchises, before he even began on X-Men. In fact, this is before everything he did at Marvel but Alpha Flight, where he worked on the tail end of Bill Mantlo’s subpar run. As you might expect, his early work is like his later work but less so, like a less exaggerated imitation of his later work. It’s good work, solid and filled with action, but it’s not the kind of work that would spawn a decade of imitators.

When I said Lee was the only draw for this book, that wasn’t to slight writer Carl Potts. At the time War Journal started, the first Punisher ongoing was at the end of its first year, so it must have seen like there was a near unlimited field of stories to tell. But from this end of the Punisher’s publication history, the novelty has worn off, and readers have seen some of these stories many times. The opening three-issue story with the Punisher running into the mutual revenge plots of two characters peripherally connected to his family’s murder is the most interesting. The Punisher is shaken from his general certitude about who to blame (and thus kill), and the plot is a good reminder that drugs and organized crime have a longer reach than we sometimes remember. It can be seen as a needless addition to the Punisher’s origin, which was my first reaction, but a tie-in to the Punisher’s origin is a logical start to a new series, and the characters involved can be easily jettisoned without regard to the story’s continuity or consequence. It’s not an epic story, but it was a good choice for the opening of the new series, and it does take the character in an interesting direction (temporarily).

The rest of the stories are mostly by the numbers. There’s also a story featuring the Punisher’s Vietnam comrades and a story with the Punisher vs. street gangs. Neither is very memorable, although the Punisher’s van beats a vicious street gang by itself in the latter story. The former involves a secret conspiracy that falls apart far too easily; the conspiracy is backed by a secret government organization — the DEA — and their trade in drugs. In the Punisher’s world, that stands for Defense Espionage Agency rather than Drug Enforcement Administration; I wonder whether Potts didn’t know about the real agency or enjoyed the irony of accusing the DEA of dealing drugs and spreading, rather than stopping, the drug trade. This story is preachy, making me suspect the latter.

Punisher War Journal, v. 1, also has a two-part story that is easily the most transparent and contrived excuse for a Wolverine appearance I have ever seen; strangely, despite Lee’s future career advancement, I found his Wolverine unimpressive. It involves cryptozoology and poaching in Africa; after noting the general lack of preachiness, the less said, the better.

A running subplot throughout the volume features the Japanese family that runs a convenience store in the first floor of one of the Punisher’s safehouses. It seems like a trailer for Potts’s Shadowmasters miniseries, which featured the family and came out later that year. Readers can look at this as a detriment; the optimistic can see it as a inducement for all the Shadowmaster fans — all five of them — to buy this book as a part of their self-constructed Complete Shadowmaster collection.

As a historical note, as a study of the evolution of an artist — and you shouldn’t hold your breath for those mostly forgotten (and rightly so) Alpha Flight issues to be reprinted — Punisher War Journal, v. 1, holds some interest. Otherwise, it’s mostly a bland book, with only the opening arc to rescue it from the skull-covered, Tim Bradstreet-drawn Punisher background.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Essential Spider-Man, v. 9

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #186-210, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #13-4, and Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #1 (1978-80)

Released: May 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 600 pages / black and white / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785130741

What is this?: A slice of late ‘70s / early ‘80s Spider-Man that introduced the Black Cat and features the return of the Burglar who killed Uncle Ben.

The culprits: Writers Marv Wolfman and others and artists Keith Pollard, John Byrne, and others

Can you have nostalgia for something you never experienced?

Marvel sure wants you to. The Brand New Day continuity is a direct throwback to the Spider-Man you can find in Essential Spider-Man, v. 9, which reprints Amazing Spider-Man issues from 1978-80. Some readers will remember those days, and long for their return, but most of us only have second-hand evidence those days ever occurred.

The parallels between Brand New Day and v. 9 are striking. In each, there’s no MJ or other steady girlfriends, but there is poverty aplenty, Harry Osborn (and the rest of the supporting cast) hanging around, and a non-J. Jonah Jameson boss supporting Peter’s photography. Other than a healthier Aunt May and no Black Cat in BND, it almost feels like BND writer Dan Slott or editor Tom Brevoort gave pre-publication copies of Essential Spider-Man, v. 9, to the other writers and said, “This is what we’re looking for.”

And v. 9 is at a level of quality the Spider-titles haven’t seen for years, so that would be good, even though I just made that anecdote up. Marv Wolfman, who wrote #186-204, was in a sweet spot in Spider-Man lore here: after the doldrums following Gwen Stacy’s death and leading into the revitalizing run of Roger Stern (who wrote #206). Wolfman brings back the Burglar and gives him a reason to have killed Ben Parker. In an interesting story that shouldn’t work but does, Wolfman slips in an unnecessary retcon, uses Mysterio and the Kingpin as blocking figures, and still writes a story that hits all the important Spider-Man notes, managing to be moving while both using past continuity and advancing the characters.

This is not an empowering book for any female readers. (Any out there? And how can I tell if those chirping crickets are female or not?) Wolfman creates the Black Cat in this volume, which is a mixed blessing; she’s a big part of the ‘80s, but although she comes across as level headed and capable in her first arc, he and David Michelinie portray her as a crazy stalker in the second. Given the way Wolfman writes Betty Brant, as a clingy ex-girlfriend who has to have a man after leaving her husband, no one was going to be giving him any awards for positive portrayals of women. Denny O’Neill, who wrote #206-10 and Annual #14, balances things (a little) by introducing Madame Web, a criminally underused supporting character. But back on the other hand, Peter also treats Deb Whitman, departmental secretary at his graduate college and occasional date, like crap no matter who was writing him.

The villains are among Spider-Man’s best: Electro, Dr. Octopus, Kraven (with Calypso!), Chameleon, the last appearance of Alistair Smythe, Man-Wolf, and the aforementioned Kingpin and Mysterio. Smythe’s attempts to kill Spider-Man and Jameson are especially good; his final plan, which involves strapping both to a bomb, is one of the better Spider-Man stories, and his attempts to use John Jameson to do his dirty work show a man who’s thought about his revenge and decided to make it as cruel as possible. (The strapping Spider-Man and Jameson show a man who has not thought things through completely.)

The long-term subplots in this book lack a satisfying end. Betty Brant’s attempts to win back Peter were wrongheaded to begin with, and Peter’s attempt at getting her to go away was cruel and almost villainous. The resolution to Jameson’s long-running bout of insanity feels … well, stupid, really, but I’ll settle for “rushed.” And Peter’s entire employment at the Globe is contained in this volume; I thought his employment at the Bugle’s competition was cut too short, as his smarmy boss at the Globe offered a nice contrast to Jameson’s fury.

(One more thing: The linked annuals — Amazing #13 and Spectacular #1 — tell a story about Dr. Octopus’s plot to steal a nuclear sub. Wolfman wrote the first part in Amazing Annual, while Bill Mantlo wrote the second. God bless Mantlo — and he should, at least once more — but seeing the two parts juxtaposed like this reveals some … stylistic excesses in Mantlo’s approach.)

Keith Pollard isn’t going to be listed among the top Spider-artists of all time, but he takes the torch handed to him by the likes of Ditko, Romita, and Andru and carries it admirably. His work looks a little like a modified version of Ross Andru’s; if there were an early house style for Spider-Man, Pollard would be an excellent example of it. His Spider-Man is athletic and flexible without being distorted or overstylized, and his supporting characters are all distinct and recognizable. (Of course, most artists could do that in those days.) Pollard also created the Black Cat’s signature costume, which you can take as a criticism or compliment.

John Byrne does a few fill in and annuals, and his work is outstanding — although I enjoyed Pollard, I would have really enjoyed seeing Byrne on Amazing rather than on Marvel Team-Up, where he had worked a little earlier. Byrne’s work in v. 9 is everything his early work was — beautiful, imaginative, stylish. Sal Buscema, Frank Miller, and John Romita, Jr., also contribute excellent work to the volume, as do Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Alan Weiss and Richard Buckler. Really, if you weren’t one of the best, Marvel wasn’t going to let you near Amazing Spider-Man (although technically Buckler worked on the Spectacular Annual).

There’s a lot to like in Essential Spider-Man, v. 9. And there’s a decent amount that comes across as lacking. Although I enjoyed the book throughout, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that it just missed being great. So it has to settle for good.

Rating: (3.5 of 5)

Powers, v. 12: The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time

Collects: Powers #25-30, Powers Annual 2008 (2007-8)

Released: February 2009 (Marvel / Icon)

Format: 200 pages / color / $19.95 / ISBN: 9780785122623

What is this?: Deena Pilgrim’s mysterious powers finally are explained and her storyline ends.

The culprits: Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon Oeming

(While researching this review, I was poking around Jinxworld, Bendis’s site. Somehow, I ran across the Bendisizer — I don’t remember how I got there, and I’ve lost the URL. Anyway, the Bendisizer recasts any text put into it into Bendis-flavored text. There’s even three settings: Low Bendis, Medium Bendis, and Entirely Verbalized Pauses. I selected the “low” setting because anything greater would result in an incomprehensible review; it promised not to use explicit obscenities. Also, I admit I cleaned up the result since I didn’t have the heart to leave in all the misspellings and grammatical errors that comprises Powers’s writing style.)

So this is the direction they decided to go, huh?

Really.

Geez.

You’d think that — I mean, really, now — you’d think Bendis would be able to figure out a better ending for this storyline. I mean, writer Brian Michael Bendis had — what? — four years to figure out what was going to happen. And artist Michael Avon Oeming can plot, too — he’s not a halfwit with a sharp pen. Well, not just a halfwit with a sharp pen.

Four years. And this is what we get.

For f*#@’s sake.

Powers, v. 12: The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time is disappointing, to say the least. I’ve had trouble keeping interested, with all the, you know, delays. The delays were — let’s be honest: they’re embarrassing for a job that you actually get paid to do. I know, I know, Bendis and Oeming have better things to do, but I’ve been waiting for v. 12 for a while now, and I thought the delays meant Bendis and Oeming were working hard on making a quality product. Instead, Bendis was working hard on his Avengers projects and Bend-overs²⁴ and Oeming’s working on whatever Oeming works on.

But I kid Oeming. I’m sure he wasn’t working on anything.

In short, at the end of Powers, v. 11: Secret Identities, Det. Deena Pilgrim, infected with a virus that gives her powers and apparently some sort of insanity, freaked out and disappeared when she saw her partner, Det. Christian Walker, had been keeping his own powers from her. Rather than see any of the interesting fallout from that development, v. 12 starts eight months later.

Hey, those eight months don’t matter. I’m sure — I mean, who cares? Really.

Walker’s got a new partner, Pilgrim’s unraveling from the effects of the virus, Internal Affairs wants to nail Pilgrim (wherever she is), and the virus is starting to reach critical mass, as the infected are using it as a weapon against underage girls. Walker, saddled with a new partner, investigates, and Pilgrim traces the killers as well as her condition steadily deteriorates. I guess “deteriorates” — she looks like hell. That has to be bad, right?

And, of course, everything comes out OK in the end. Not for — the dead girls, they aren’t OK, but everyone else. Not to burden you with spoilers, but — well, this TPB came out four months ago, and the single issues four months before that. So: Spoilers. Yeah.

Triphammer — remember Triphammer, been seen once since the first TPB? Red armor, pain in the ass? Of course you do, he’s f*#@ing unforgettable — cures the virus, just as it is about to overwhelm everything. Didn’t know Triphammer was a brilliant f*#@ing biologist? Neither did I. Neither did anyone. But that’s OK. You don’t — I mean, who looks a gift cure in the mouth? And Pilgrim, cured, is absolved of all the horrible things she’s done. Just like that. Even gets a $3 million payoff from her employers to go away forever.

And then — big reveal! — her big regret is killing some scumbag years ago. The readers had forgotten. Mostly, yeah, I know you didn’t forget. But did you care? I mean, really? No. We’d all moved on. That was — I mean, look, it was ancient history, and no one cares about ancient history. Ask somebody if they care about Hannibal invading Greece with elephants, and they’ll tell you to go f*#@ yourself. She’s not haunted by killing her ex-boyfriend, because, hey, he was creepy. No loss there. And her brother, the until-now-unmentioned minor superhero? Just a blip on the radar, baby, and then he’s f*#@ing gone. Killing his adversary is a momentary thought. No, shooting someone — someone she killed long ago, and for all we know never crossed her — never even entered her mind since then …

I mean, we’ve never seen the murder affect her. She must have been hiding it well. Some people — you know some people are like stone outside. And inside, when they know readers are looking in their head. They don’t show anything.

Who’s killing the dead girls? Some random people with the virus. Supposedly, they’ll be legally absolved as well, but they ain’t Deena Pilgrim, so f*#@ them. Who cares? Sure, the dead girls — the dead girls are dead, though. They don’t start too many arguments.

As a side issue, no one asked for a sequel to the monkeysex issue from v. 1 of Powers, but we got it anyway, in the reprinted Powers Annual 2008. I mean — don’t get me wrong, your science teachers must be very proud of you and your knowledge of comic-book evolution — but no one liked it as anything more than a joke the first time. We sure as hell didn’t want to see it again.

And the title — cute. Nice joke. Must have knocked them dead on the playground, but this is the big leagues, Bendis. Try something that actually had something to do with the story next time. I mean, I know you’re busy deciding who gets to abuse whatever female reserve Avenger you have “respect” for this month, but see if you can buy an assistant editor to do it for you. They work for sandwiches and comp copies, right?

I admit Oeming’s gotten off lightly on this one. He has — I guess you’d say tics of his own, although I like his style usually. But there’s no — I don’t have much to say about his work this time. Since this will be my last volume of Powers, I have to say I won’t miss his unnecessary double-page spreads. I have a lifetime — I’ve been reading from left to right on a single page my entire life, and when it becomes a guessing game as to whether I should read both pages or just one at a time and I guess wrong, well, I’m not going to blame myself. Half the time it takes me an entire issue to figure out I made a mistake. Of course, if there was any action on the page, it would help me decide, but instead it’s Bendis’s disjointed — OK, punchy dialogue. I think — really, it could be read in any order and come out all right.

I sincerely won’t miss the double-page, 5x7 panel (per page) sex scene. Because — no offense, that’s the least interesting sex scene I’ve ever scene. What’s the purpose? Really? No purpose? It’s not relevant or interesting or sexy — for … Why? Does Oeming have a fetish for miniatures? Is there a minisex Internet community or something?

Goodbye, Powers. I’ve been reading since the beginning, and I’ve excused your foibles. I can’t any more. I’ll miss the three or four issues Bendis and Oeming put out a year. But it’s kinda appropriate: Bendis and Oeming have better things to do, and so do I.

Rating: (0.5 of 5)

Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand

Collects: Uncanny X-Men #495-9 (2008)

Released: September 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 120 pages / color / $12.99 / ISBN: 9780785119838

What is this?: The X-Men find their new home city of San Francisco is a bit trippier than they expected.

The culprits: Writer Ed Brubaker and penciler Michael Choi

You might expect the first X-Men volume after Messiah CompleX, which essentially stated things would be different for the X-Men, would seize the new direction and run with it. You would be wrong.

So instead, we get a five-issue stall in Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand, in which the X-Men wait for issue #500 in Germany, Russia, San Francisco, and the Savage Land. Oh, Scott Summers tells us things are different, but the San Francisco storyline flashes back to the psychedelic ‘60s and the X-Men fight old villains throughout. And you don’t get much more classic X-Men than the Savage Land, although I’ve never understood the link between mutants, Tarzan knockoffs, and Lost Worlds.²⁹

After their vacation in the Savage Land, Scott and Emma head to San Francisco, where they find the city (and many of their teammates) are in the midst of a ‘60s flashback. Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Colossus head to Nightcrawler’s and Colossus’s old European stomping grounds (technically, I believe Colossus is supposed to be from Siberia — Asian Russia — but I don’t think that’s spelled out). There, they run afoul of the Russian government and Omega Red … who I think is the only evil Russian mutant I can remember. It says something — and it isn’t good — that several years after M-Day, writers can still do stories about the obvious consequences of that story that no one else has done; in this case the Russians rightly wonder why the X-Men were relatively unaffected by M-Day but Mother Russia lost all their operatives.

None of it is terribly high-tension or earth-shattering, but not every storyline has to be about the end of the world. Besides, just because Divided We Stand is marking time doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining. I’ve never seen what others have seen in writer Ed Brubaker — perhaps because I haven’t read his strongest work — but I get a glimpse here. Emma and Scott’s vacation is entertaining, and we finally get a glimpse of why Emma stays with Scott after she’s already cracked his nut. (Metaphorically.) Brubaker also has a good sense of the humorous interplay between Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler. The dialogue is in character, and although it’s not quite as sharp as, say, Joss Whedon’s best, it’s still very good.

Penciler Mike Choi gets to have the great fun of putting the X-Men into ‘60s fashions — well, it looks like it’s fun. I’m not sure if I like his work; it’s clear and straightforward but a little soft and unassertive in its line. Choi also makes his males a little less rugged than you would expect from a superhero comic, especially Wolverine. (I’m beginning to think any sort of manga-influenced art is a bad idea for Logan, as it makes him look less animalistic and powerful, two of the keystones of his character, and more like a teenage manga character — the weird hair is mandatory for both, though.) Still, as I said, the ‘60s costumes are fun, and there’s nothing wrong with his work: I just find it a little … off.³⁰

Brubaker, through Cyclops, keeps promising things are going to change. I haven’t seen it yet. After the cause of the ‘60s flashback is revealed to be an amnesiac mutant, he even has Emma give a speech calling the middle-aged hippies “pathetic” for using the mutant to “relive [their] glory days.” I think the implications are clear: not only is Brubaker going to change things, but dwelling on those glory days is pathetic. I don’t disagree. The only way to go is forward. I resent having to wait for the next book, but the change is long overdue.

Rating: (3.5 of 5)

What the Hell, DC?

I got my copy of Batman: Battle for the Cowl #3 in the mail yesterday. (I had subscribed to Batman, which got switched to issues #2 and #3 of Battle for the Cowl — but not #1. Thanks, DC!) Anyway, I noticed that Black Canary appears in one panel in the issue, in a crowd scene but in the foreground.

Writer / artist Tony S. Daniel has made the decision to go for a rare triple on Black Canary: ass shot, torn fishnets on legs that are 150 percent as long as her head and torso combined, and breasts in profile with a hint — the merest hint — of an upturned nipple. As I mentioned, this is Black Canary’s only appearance in the issue.

Comparatively, Daniel played it conservatively with Huntress — she too has her backside to the reader, but she has her hand obscuring her rear. Her legs are as proportionally long as Black Canary’s, but of course she features boots just above the knee rather than fishnets. Still: breast in profile, hint of nipple.

Keep it classy, DC.

New York Times Graphic Bestseller List, May 23

I really tried to give updates of the New York Times Graphic Books Bestseller List. But, you know, from week to week, it gets a little boring. But I’ll make another try. Follow along with last week’s list:

Marvel uses the might of Stephen King to take the top and bottom of the hardcover Top 10 list, with Dark Tower: Treachery and Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born. Both titles are written by Peter David, with art by Robin Furth. Unlike the lists I looked at in April, Marvel also managed to get some of its superheroes into the Top 10 — Civil War at #7 and Hulk: Red and Green at #9. Marvel also places Marvel Zombies (the list doesn’t specify which volume — I’m going to assume it’s v. 3 by Fred Van Lente and Kev Walker) at #5.

If DC is miffed they’ve lost their stranglehold on the hardcover list, they can console themselves with holding onto most of the top spots while also keeping five titles on the list. The new Superman: New Krypton, v. 1, is #2, the evergreen Batman: The Killing Joke is #3, Batman: RIP is #4, Joker surprisingly remains on the list at #6, and Y: The Last Man: Deluxe Edition, v. 2, checks in at #8.

The paperback list is a different and more egalitarian affair. DC is the nominal winner of the list, with Watchmen at #1, V for Vendetta at #5, Sandman, v. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes at #6, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns at #8. Still, none of these titles were created in the last decade; can DC hold onto this list with evergreen titles only?

Film is a big influence on the rest of the trade paperbacks. Marvel’s only title on the list, Wolverine: Origin at #4, obviously benefits from the Wolverine movie. IDW similarly benefits from Star Trek (Star Trek: Countdown, the prequel to the movie, at #3) and Terminator: Salvation (Terminator: Salvation Movie Prequel, the … uh, movie prequel, at #10). Image keeps putting Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead on the list — or maybe Kirkman keeps putting Image’s Walking Dead on the list. Either way, v. 1 checks in at #7 and v. 9 at #9. Dark Horse is the final publisher in the top 10 with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, v. 4, at #2.

Manga? Well, there’s Naruto. There’s always Naruto. Volumes 40-44 are #3-7, although not exactly in that order. Neigma!, v. 22, is #1 … I know nothing about Neigma!, really, so I can’t tell you much about it, but the protagonist’s name is Negi Springfield. There’s something so perfectly manga / anime about that name. Full Metal Alchemist, v. 18, is #2, Otomen 2, which appears to be a gender-role comedy, is #8, the popular Fruits Basket, v. 18, is #9, and Vampire Knight, v. 6, is #10.

Wonder Woman: The Circle

Collects: Wonder Woman v. 3 #14-9 (2008)

Released: August 2008 (DC)

Format: 160 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9781401219321

What is this?: A reinvisioning of just what it means to be Wonder Woman, an Amazonian princess in Man’s World

The culprits: Writer Gail Simone and pencilers Terry Dodson and Bernard Chang (with some help)

Many comic fans much more prominent than I have wondered what is compelling about Wonder Woman. Does she have a claim to prominence other than being an editorially mandated peer of Batman and Superman? What is Wonder Woman, other than a female superhero — what’s her schtick?

Is she a warrior? A soldier? A diplomat? Martial artist Diana Prince? A superspy? The ambassador to Man’s World?²⁸ A goddess? She’s been all this and more, really, although she’s never really staked a solid, long-term claim to anything other than a warrior, and warriors in superhero comics are a drachma a dozen.

In Wonder Woman: The Circle, writer Gail Simone goes for the best of all of these things. As helpfully pointed out by writer Mercedes Lackey in her introduction to the volume, Simone has made Wonder Woman into the “Supreme Warrior,” who wants to end conflict — a diplomat, a warrior, a tactician, with compassion and strength. With a bit of the goddess thrown in.

That’s a heck of a standard to live up to, and to be honest, it doesn’t resemble the character I’d read about in Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman, v. 2: Love and War. But I have to admit, for the most part, Simone’s Wonder Woman does live up to the billing.

The Circle has two stories: one in which Wonder Woman deals with Nazi invaders and native fanatics in Themiscyra, and the other in which she is brought to a world of aliens, whose prior invasion of Earth she had thwarted, to end a war they are losing badly. The first, the eponymous “The Circle,” is the big one, in which Simone sets up her status quo and tells the reader who her Wonder Woman is going to be. And she pulls out all the stops to make us like her: there’s a couple of fights with intelligent gorillas from Gorilla City, a lot of punching of Nazis. Superpowered Nazis, even. And I’m impressed with how well the mostly-new, a-good-deal-different Wonder Woman works. She converts enemies into allies. She shows a decent handle on diplomacy, although some of it seems to be at the cost of long-term consequences. She tries to use tactics, although again I doubt some of her wisdom. And the reappearance of Lt. Col. Candy comes out of nowhere, but at least she’s a long-standing Wonder Woman character. The point is, Simone tries to pull off her Supreme Warrior Woman, and it mainly works.

I didn’t think the subplot worked, though. In it, Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, appoints four Amazons as her personal guards before Wonder Woman was born; when they see their queen pregnant, they think the child’s birth will tear the island apart, so they try to murder poor infant Diana. And fail. And when the island is invaded, many years later, they get free and try to kill the adult Wonder Woman. But the four Amazons have the feel of characters ret-conned in for a specific story — even if they weren’t, they have that aura — a story I felt went nowhere. Also, I remained unconvinced as to why those four felt so sure their queen having a baby would be such a catastrophe. Perhaps I underestimate the emotional power of an island full of childless women (who will likely remain childless), but the betrayal felt arbitrary. Simone may be setting them up for a longer-term plot, but that doesn’t make me optimistic.

The second story, “Expatriate,” is much more to my liking. Wonder Woman begins her formal and funny courtship of Nemesis, and an alien race she had trounced before calls her for help. And then a Green Lantern gets involved, and the questions of justice and genocide are put into play, and it really does seem deeper, in two issues, than four issues of punching Nazis and rogue Amazons do in four. The situation Wonder Woman finds herself in makes diplomacy a better option than in “The Circle,” although Diana’s solution should come back and bite someone on the ass, even if it doesn’t.

The art on “The Circle” is furnished by Terry Dodson on pencils and Rachel Dodson on inks. If you’ve seen the Dodsons’ work before, “The Circle” looks exactly like that, down to the identical noseline on every female character. It’s very pretty, and I have no real complaints, other than Wonder Woman usually seeming more like a model than a Supreme Warrior. Ron Randall fills in for half of one issue and most of another and does a good job — the same sort of pretty, smooth line but without aping Dodson’s style. However, I prefer the work of Bernard Chang on “Expatriate.” His Wonder Woman looks stronger, more human, and slightly different — definitely not standard Western European supermodel that most artists provide. His aliens are a little too human in their trappings, I think, but at least his females look different.

The Circle is the best Wonder Woman story I’ve read — not a major competition, really, but still an accomplishment. I have some misgivings about the plot, but I enjoyed the audacity of the character, the depth given to someone who was previously “the female one.” But this doesn’t feel like the same character I’ve read about before, and I have a hard time expressing how uncomfortable that makes me feel. Is this the real Wonder Woman? I have a hard time saying anything but “Yes.” If that’s true, then who was that other woman I read about? For some reason — unlike, say, Batman — I have a hard time considering multiple takes on Wonder Woman. (I have the same problem with Superman.) Given the mediocre / forgettable Wonder Woman stories I’ve read in the past, I’d almost rather Simone have created a new character; but given that Wonder Woman has cachet and a need for a definitive characterization (other than bondage model), then this will do well.

Rating: (4 of 5)

Guardians of the Galaxy, v. 1: Legacy

Collects: Guardians of the Galaxy v. 2 #1-6 (2008)

Released: March 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 152 pages / color / $16.99 / ISBN: 9780785133384

What is this?: In the wake of the Annihilation events, Star-Lord puts together a “proactive” team to fight cosmic menaces and repair damage.

The culprits: Writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning and penciler Paul Pelletier

I’ve always felt Marvel should do more with their cosmic characters. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but there was a great big universe out there in which tell stories — any kind of story you wanted, really, with at least a dozen characters Marvel fans were familiar with. But for a decade after Jim Starlin’s Infinity series, there wasn’t much — no Silver Surfer, very little Thanos, few (if any) events.

Then Marvel released their Annihilation crossovers, and I was happy they seemed well received, both critically and commercially. I didn’t particularly want to read long, involved space crossovers, but if they renewed interest in Marvel’s deep space program, then more power to them.

But when Marvel released Guardians of the Galaxy, v. 1: Legacy, I was intrigued. Playing off those crossovers, with characters who had been among their protagonists, Guardians was telling a new story going forward — more manageable, it seemed, than a sprawling crossover. I decided to get on board, and I’m glad I did.

First of all, the characters as written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are fantastic. Rocket Raccoon is the most fun — how can a talking raccoon who blows up stuff not be? I enjoyed the bluntness / simplicity of Drax, and the telepathic Russian space dog Cosmo is a hoot as well. The other characters are also distinct: Star-Lord is a leader who may be over his head and might like the action a little too much, Gamora is deadly and sensual, the new Quasar is a new hero trying to connect with the father of her former girlfriend. (OK, they are well-worn character tropes — except for Quasar. Still, the old tropes can still work in the right situation.) I’m not sure about Warlock and Mantis, who don’t remind me of what I’ve seen of them in the past, but I’ll chalk that up to the Annihilation crossovers I haven’t read.

The idea of the team is a logical one — a proactive team to fight threats like the Annihilation wave and the Phalanx before they can commit genocide and to repair the damage those attacks did. Still, proactive teams never work in comics — well, rarely work. The Guardians’ standard heroic missions and fights against the Universal Church of Truth are entertaining, and although Skrulls are overexposed, the Skrull / Secret Invasion storyline that makes up the second half of Legacy succeeds; I especially like Drax’s method of rooting out Skrulls.

On the other hand, I am less enthused about Major Victory and Starhawk / One Who Knows (from the original Guardians) and Mantis’s heavy foreshadowing (if you can call blatant prophecy “foreshadowing”). I don’t care for playing with timelines — go read Exiles, if that’s your thing — and prophecies rarely turn out well, either for characters or writers. I am extremely uninterested in Star-Lord’s method of recruiting and a potential breakup of the team; the sooner the next volume is past that, the better.

Paul Pelletier’s pencils are great. The character designs are excellent, and their similarities show the team’s connections rather than being confusing or boring. Pelletier’s storytelling is great, and his art is sharp and beautiful. His aliens are imaginative, vibrant; he even makes each tentacled space beasts distinct.

My misgivings about the long-term plot threatened to lower my enthusiasm about the initial concept, but Pelletier’s art saves Legacy, pushing it past good into very good territory. I’m looking forward to the next volume of Guardians when it comes out in paperback (presumably in the fall; the hardback is already out out this week).

Rating: (4 of 5)

August 2009 solicitations

Is it solicitation time again? Prep the fog machines and cue the music:

For the first time that I can remember, I have no interest in buying anything Marvel’s putting out in a month. Marvel’s solicitations are clogged by “Dark Reign,” but two titles transform Marvel into the House of Dubious Ideas:

• Marvel Masterworks: Deathlok, v. 1 (hardcover): I can see it, we’re almost there … yes, we’ve just scraped the bottom of the barrel. Marvel should be pleased: I’m sure all twelve hardcore Deathlok fans will shell out the steep Masterworks price for this one. $64.99
• Marvel Bromance: No. Just … just … no. Has “Marvel Team-Up” become a code word for a homosexual relationship, so they had to use an incredibly stupid term to describe male friendship? I think this is a counterweight to Marvel-meets-Sex-in-the-City Marvel Divas. $24.99
• Spider-Man / Mary Jane: ...You Just Hit the Jackpot: Some good stories here (and a few not-so-good stories), but is there something I’m missing? Has Mary Jane — oh, she’s making her return to Amazing Spider-Man in August. Be nice if the TPB solicit had mentioned that. $24.99
• Our Essential for the month is Essential Marvel Team-Up, v. 3. Some good Claremont / Byrne stuff in there. I already have the issues, but if I didn’t, I would shell out $19.99 for it. Of course, it’s Marvel Team-Up, so I’m not sure it’s worth that much, but it will definitely be inoffensive and probably better than I remember.

At budget-conscious DC:

• The Flash Chronicles, v. 1: Flash joins Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern in getting his story retold from the beginning in color and relatively inexpensively. Are there enough Flash fans out there to make it work? $14.99
• Icon: A Hero’s Welcome: None of the other three companies on this list have anything like the Milestone imprint. Given that uniqueness, DC needs to do something with it. Keeping reprints of the flagship of the minority-heavy imprint available is the least of it. Also: Dwayne McDuffie and M.D. Bright working together. $19.99
• The Showcase is Showcase Presents Warlord: Ostensibly, this is to support the new Warlord series, especially since both are written by Mike Grell. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to release this Showcase in the month the new Warlord launched, instead of when #5 comes out? Still, Showcases have two things Essentials do not: a $17.99 price tag (up a dollar, but still $2 below an Essential) and page numbers.
• Peter & Max: A Fables Novel (hardcover): A Fables novel by Bill Willingham. An interesting idea, at least. Accompanying illustrations by Steve Leialoha. $22.99

Over at Dark Horse, where they’re keeping my interest by picking over the bones of Marvel when they’re not releasing Usagi Yojimbo volumes:

• Chronicles of Conan, v. 18: Isle of the Dead and Other Stories: Entering an undistinguished patch of the series, this book marks Conan the Barbarian’s halfway point. Weird. Roy Thomas is gone, but John Buscema and Ernie Chan are still there, they’ve got the original covers now, and it’s a decent value — 200 pages for $17.95.
• Groo Treasury, v. 1: This, on the other hand, is a fantastic value: 336 pages for $24.95. This has the pre-Marvel stuff mostly, with the six-issue Epic miniseries at the end. Also included are commentary and history. If you like sword-and-sorcery parody, this is for you. Get it.
• The Umbrella Academy: Dallas: Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s second Umbrella Academy miniseries, in trade paperback. I haven’t read anything by Way, but both minis were well received. $17.95

For Image, there aren’t any collections I’m interested in, but I want to mention G-Man: Cape Crisis #1, the first issue of Chris Giarrusso’s five-issue miniseries with his own creation, G-Man. If you liked Mini Marvels, you’ll likely feel similarly about G-Man; you can find sample pages at the Image solicitation page. At an affordable $2.99, I might pick up the single issues instead of waiting for the trade.

Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 1

Collects: Amazing Spider-Man #546-51, Spider-Man: Swing Shift Director’s Cut, backup story from Venom Super Special #1 (1995, 2008)

Released: May 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 200 pages / color / $24.99 (hardcover) / ISBN: 9780785128434

What is this?: The first collection of post-reboot Spider-Man stories.

The culprits: Writers Dan Slott and Marc Guggenheim and pencilers Steve McNiven and Salvador Larrocca and friends

I’m going to get this out of the way now and then move on: Spider-Man’s “One More Day” was a stupid, stupid idea, as many others have pointed out more forcefully and in a more timely manner. Trading his marriage, his happiness, and his wife’s happiness to the devil for the life of a woman who has been terminally ill since about 1964 makes no sense; I’m sure Aunt May herself would have said, “Don’t be a halfwit, Peter.” And given that Aunt May tends to “die” every 200 issues anyway, well, I wouldn’t bet much on her surviving much past Amazing Spider-Man #600. And what the hell is Mephisto going to do with a marriage, anyway? It’s not a commodity you can sell or trade or even use as a stake in poker game.

That out of the way, I can move on — as Amazing Spider-Man itself did — to Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, v. 1. In it, Peter Parker’s a hard-luck 20-something in New York City, trying to scrape by on a photographer’s income while also being an outlaw hero. His marriage with Mary Jane never happened; Harry Osborn is back from the dead, after bumming around Europe for a while (to be fair, that’s essentially how they brought back his father); and Peter Parker’s back to being a hard-luck superhero, poor and rootless.

I came to Brand New Day with some misgivings, and I can’t say they were completely mollified. I admit there are some very good ideas here. The change of ownership at the Daily Bugle and Spider-Man’s interaction with superheroes who registered during Civil War are great plot directions; the subplot of a murder who puts Spider-tracers in the mouths of his victims is intriguing. The new villains were in the vein of Spider-Man’s old villains but without being too derivative. But this book seems all too pleased with itself sometimes, from Harry Osborn’s smug face to the Stan Lee-inspired editorial tags and narration. We’re going to back to the basics, it says, if we have to kill Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, dig up and zombify their corpses, and chain them to desks in the Marvel Bullpen so that you can get Spider-Man in the Mighty Marvel Manner!

In moving forward, Brand New Day is continually looking backwards, regressing Peter, rolling the clock back on his development, making Spider-Man a police suspect and Aunt May an activist (again), and generally trying to make it feel like the mid-‘80s (if not the ‘70s or Silver Age). But the past is gone. I am not interested in revamps, reboots (hard or soft), or reimaginings. Characters or the writers’ interpretations must grow and move forward if they’re to speak to new readers; if they don’t, the characters will die. Brand New Day wants to move forward, but it is determined to hold on to that past like a life preserver, little realizing it’s an anchor: it can steady you or give you hope, but it can’t support you.

And it’s a pity that overshadows the stories. Are they classic Spider-Man stories? Although they’re in that vein, they probably won’t feature in a Best of Spider-Man volume any time soon. But they are solid stories, with new and somewhat interesting villains (time will tell how interesting) doing unpredictable evil. There’s little confusion over the new continuity. Writers Dan Slott (Swing Shift, #546-8) and Marc Guggenheim (#549-51) do an imaginative job with the new Spider-Man setup. Editor Tom Brevoort’s manifesto, reprinted at the end of the book, has many excellent ideas: bringing back the supporting cast, creating new villains, sticking with consistent looks and characterizations on the old villains, making Spider-Man funny again. These are all excellent ideas, and they didn’t need a reboot to implement them. And the idea of the thrice-monthly Amazing with a regular rotation of writers and a head writer is an excellent plan; I hope sales remain strong enough to continue it.

Steve McNiven (#546-8) provides the pencils for the first arc, and Salvador Larroca draws the second half (#549-551). Neither really knocks me out, and I’m surprised that for such a high-profile storyline Marvel didn’t get bigger artists (nothing against McNiven or Larroca). I prefer McNiven, who seems to have a good sense of the kinetic nature of Spider-Man and gets the interesting challenge of drawing the chromatically reversed Mr. Negative. Larroca’s art seems stiffer and puffier, although that may be a result of the off-putting coloring, which seems to go out of its way to refuse to show any vibrancy. The names of the artists involved in smaller roles are better known to me: Phil Jimenez on Swing Shift and Greg Land, Phil Winslade, and Mike Deodato on some backups. John Romita, Jr., illustrates a two-page summary of the new continuity at the beginning of the story. For completists, Mark Bagley is the artist for Slott’s first Spider-Man story, a forgettable backup from Venom Super Special #1 reprinted at the end of the book.

After reading Brand New Day, I have a new respect for X-Men: Messiah CompleX. I enjoyed Brand New Day much more — much, much more, really — but as I said in the Messiah CompleX review, that book works better as a statement of what’s to come than as a book. Messiah CompleX says the future’s going to be different that what you’ve seen, so you better pay attention. Brand New Day says the future’s going to be a lot like the past, so if you want to take a snooze, you probably won’t miss much. For that reason, they average out to about the same rating.

Rating: (3 of 5)

X-Men: Messiah CompleX

Collects: X-Men: Messiah CompleX, Uncanny X-Men #492-4, X-Men # 205-7, New X-Men v. 2 #44-6, and X-Factor #25-7 (2007-8)

Released: October 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 352 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785123200

What is this?: A massive X-Men crossover in which the X-Men, Marauders, Cable, Bishop, and the Purifiers all fight over the first mutant baby born since M-Day.

The culprits: An accomplished crossover crew, including writers Ed Brubaker, Mike Carey, Peter David, Chris Yost, and Craig Kyle and pencilers Billy Tan, Chris Bachalo, Humberto Ramos, and Scot Eaton

I haven’t read much of the X-Men titles since the “House of M” event — haven’t read anything other than X-Factor and Astonishing X-Men, really, since Grant Morrison left New X-Men. (Also: X-Men: Deadly Genesis, which left me less than eager to read anything else with Ed Brubaker’s fingerprints on it.) But my local library’s getting in all sorts of titles, and this gives me a chance to read X-Men: Messiah CompleX and feel like a Usenet dino.

X-Men was better in the old days! Well, I’ve got that out of my system now.

For those of us who have been away, Messiah CompleX (man, do I hate that terminal capital “X”) is not a jumping on point. It sets up plots for the foreseeable future, yes, but it’s an exercise in clearing out the old. If you’re coming in with no knowledge of the X-Men — or if your knowledge is out of date — you’re going to be a little confused. Who are these New X-Men, and what can they do? Why are they so angry? Why do they die so easily? And why was Cable thought dead? Why does Bishop have a superplane? What happened to Cyclops’s father? There really aren’t any footnotes, although some of the information is given in context (eventually) and some of it doesn’t matter. Still, the New X-Men seem bolted onto the crossover awkwardly, and they aren’t very well explained, despite playing an important part in the crossover.

If you’re looking for action, Messiah CompleX has it. A new mutant baby is born —the first since the Scarlet Witch decreed “No more mutants” — and all the groups concerned with mutants want the baby: the X-Men to protect it, Mr. Sinister’s Marauders to control it, the Purifiers to kill it, the intensely stupid “Predator X” to eat it, and Cable to take it to the future. This gives rise to an intense level of action: the fighting is nearly non-stop, with numerous casualties. By the end, there’s a very real possibility the reader will be numb to the carnage; the number of mutants who are dead, dying, or deactivated is astonishing, given the restricted number of mutants at today’s Marvel.

The coordination of the crossover is a cut above what I’m used to; perhaps Marvel learned something about how to make the edges more seamless during the past decade. Writers Ed Brubaker, Peter David, and Mike Carey and New X-Men co-writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost do an admirable job writing a story in which the chapters and characterizations don’t contradict each other. This is partly because the big revelations from the ancillary titles, X-Factor and New X-Men, largely happen in those titles. Still, everyone seems to do at least a passable job with the other writers’ characters, and that’s a real accomplishment.

I never thought I’d see the day when Chris Bachalo and Humberto Ramos would be penciling half a major X-Men crossover. Both are good artists but decidedly non-standard; I don’t think either is particularly “hot,” the kind of sought-after artist who makes the lists on Wizard. I’m not sure whether this represents a changing aesthetic on the X-titles or if it’s attributable to the X-titles’ loss of prestige over the years.²⁷ As I said, both are decent artists, with Bachalo keeping his more eccentric tics under control this time around. I can’t tell whether Xavier disappearing at the end is an art mistake by Bachalo or a plot point, though. Ramos … Ramos is an artist who divides fans, and with good reason. I think his exaggerated figures are better suited for a more lighthearted title — I think he was a good fit for Paul Jenkins’s Spider-Man work a few years ago — but Messiah CompleX is not lighthearted at all. I believe Ramos can do serious stuff, but there are times his characters look more comically panicked than stressed, and his tough guys (and gals) will never look as tough as a more realistic artist’s.

The other half of the art is from Scot Eaton, who draws Forge as Robert Downey, Jr., and Billy Tan. The contrast between the two halves is extreme. Tan and Eaton draw a shiny, glossy world where everyone is pretty and even the dirt is attractive, and Bachalo and Ramos create a misshapen setting where even the bondage models are strangely offputting. All of them do a good job — well, except perhaps Marc Silvestri, who’s even more pretty and streamlined than Tan or Eaton in the Messiah CompleX one shot and manages to draw Wolverine with a hint of androgyny — but the differences are startling. Personally, for this crossover, I think I prefer Bachalo and Ramos’s side of the divide, since this is a gritty, not pretty, story. This flies in the face of my usual preference for attractive, clean art, but I realize that’s not appropriate for every comic book.

The blurb on the back cover quotes IGN as saying Messiah CompleX is “easily the best X-Men crossover in a decade.” Assuming the quote is in context — and Marvel has a bit of history of using out-of-context quotes — they’re not exactly setting the bar very high, are they? They’re competing against “Endangered Species,” which ran as backups in the books in 2007; “Eve of Destruction,” which led to the Morrison / Casey reign on the X-Titles; “Dream’s End,” the swan song to Chris Claremont redux; the Apocalypse crossovers of 1999; and various late ‘90s forgettables such as “Hunt for Xavier” and “Magneto War” and various two-parters. “Operation: Zero Tolerance” sneaks in as well; “O:ZT” is one of the few major crossovers during that span, and it’s one of the prime reasons the X-titles shied away from the megacrossovers. None of them will ever be held up against “Mutant Massacre” or “Fall of the Mutants” as a high point of the X-Men. Hell, I wouldn’t say any of them were any better than “X-Cutioner’s Song” of ’92-3, although I admit I haven’t read “Endangered Species.”

As a volume, Messiah CompleX is mediocre — it misses the sweet spot between ultraviolence and story development by a decent margin. It does, however, deliver violent action until you can’t stand it no more. As a statement, a manifesto, it’s much better. It puts a violent, definite end to the past and says the future will be different, something at odds with the directionless wandering of the last few years or the warmed-over Claremont that marked the ‘90s. Whether that future will be better (or even readable) remains to be seen.

Rating: (3 of 5)

X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1

Collects: X-Men #53-4, Uncanny X-Men #334-5, Fantastic Four #415, Avengers #401, Onslaught: X-Men, Cable #34, and Incredible Hulk #444 (1996)

Released: February 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 256 pages / color / $29.99 / ISBN: 9780785128236

What is this?: Behold my mighty hand! Onslaught’s true name is revealed, and he begins his slow, ponderous march across the Marvel Universe.

The culprits: Too many to name or punish.

I remember the Onslaught “Epic”; although I did not behold his mighty hand first hand until years later, I watched the story unfold from the safety of Usenet in 1996. There was some excitement at the time, since the identity of the X-Traitor would finally be revealed and a big summer crossover would sprawl before the reading public. I don’t know that anyone was expecting it to be any good, though.

That was fortunate, since the crossover was widely panned at the time. But how does it stack up more than a decade later?

About as badly as you might expect. Wisely, the setup for the Onslaught storyline is omitted in X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1. It was too large and too confusing; the writers admitted they changed the direction of the storyline and at times were working blind. But it’s helpfully referenced in footnotes (when you can read the footnotes, which are often the same color as the text-box background).

The plot has the X-Men discovering the identity of the ultra-powerful psychic entity Onslaught, who happens to be one of their own; once he’s flushed out, Onslaught starts gathering his power by collecting Franklin Richards and brainwashing the Hulk. There’s unrealized menace and handwringing and angst and oh God text balloons everywhere. You might expect better from writer Mark Waid; keep right on expecting, because you’re not going to find it here. Waid wasn’t happy with the direction of the X-books or the freedom he was given; that probably explains the wretched pile of X-cess he and fellow writer Scott Lobdell handed in to editor Bob Harras — or maybe Harras ordered them to give him that. I don’t know.

Here’s what happens over 250+ pages and eight issues (plus a larger special issue):

• Buildup to the revelation (Onslaught taunts Jean, Juggernaut punchy-punchies his way into the Mansion) (X-Men #53-4 and Uncanny #334)
• Revelation — which was completely obvious by this time — plus fight (Onslaught: X-Men)
• Yak with the Avengers, during which nothing happens (Uncanny #335)
• Cable and a mind-controlled Hulk punch each other (Cable #34 and Incredible Hulk #444)
• Joseph (who was thought to be Magneto) introduced to the plot, for non-obvious reasons (Avengers #401)
• Onslaught kidnaps Franklin Richards (Fantastic Four #414)

The pacing is appalling. Interestingly, the ancillary titles actually have a decent pace — well, all right, two issues for a Cable / Hulk fight is excessive, but I’ll blame that on Cable. None of them stand out as particularly good examples of the comic book arts; even Hulk, written by Peter David, is sapped of all its individuality by the crossover. They’re either padded or unremarkable large-scale fight scenes.

The art is all over the place, but fortunately, since it’s the X-titles of the mid-‘90s, Marvel had a lot of their best working on this crossover. The two X-Men issues feature the flashy if a bit underdeveloped early Andy Kubert, while the Uncanny pencils are from the manga-influenced Joe Madureira. These work together about as well as you might expect. Kubert and Dan Green get the important X-Men: Onslaught issue; Green’s work resembled John Romita Jr. at the time, and Green had been an X-Men artist earlier in the decade. Interestingly, there are parts that look like the work of neither, but whyever that is, I’m sure the orange milk isn’t either’s fault.

But with the crossover issues, you have the early Mike Deodato on Avengers, which I didn’t care for, and Carlos Pacheco’s early American work on Fantastic Four. Then to end it you have the pretty-but-stiff Ian Churchill on Cable and the hideously unattractive work of Angel Medina on Incredible Hulk. (Those last two are one hell of a whiplash, I can tell you, since they are linked and back to back in the collection.) It’s a real mishmash with the ancillary issues added in. There’s nothing that can be done about it now, and it doesn’t detract from the readability (except for Medina’s work), but it’s a real range of styles.

The back cover and indicia claim Book 1 contains Fantastic Four #414 and Avengers #400; it doesn’t. There’s only a page from each of these comics in this book, and it’s deceptive to claim otherwise. (It’s the same practice that allows retailers to claim X-Men Visionaries: Jim Lee TPB has Uncanny X-Men #252, 254, 260-1, 264, 280, and 286 when in fact the book contains only the covers from those issues.) On the other hand, it’s better information than you can get on the Internet. The usually reliable (and invaluable) Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators claims X-Force #57 and X-Man #18 are included as well; they are not. Marvel.com makes the same claim, as does Amazon. In fact, wherever you look on the Internet, the listed contents of the four volumes in the series are contradictory or overlapping. (If anyone knows the true contents of these volumes, leave them in the comments.)

Much as you’d expect, the Onslaught crossover is best experienced through Wikipedia. Read X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic, Book 1, at your own risk.

Rating: (1 of 5)

Son of M

Collects: Son of M #1-6 (2006)

Released: August 2006 (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $13.99 / ISBN: 9780785119708

What is this?: Pietro Maximoff, the former mutant Quicksilver, attempts to regain his lost powers after his sister declares “No more mutants.”

The culprits: Writer David Hine and artist Roy Allan Martinez

Pietro Maximoff — the mutant known as Quicksilver — isn’t exactly a frontline character. He’s been prominent in a few team books: the ‘90s, Peter-David X-Factor and early, Cap’s-Kooky-Quartet Avengers. He even had a short-lived series in the wake of Heroes Reborn in the mid-‘90s. But he was always overshadowed by his sister, the long-time Avenger Scarlet Witch, and his father, mutant despot / liberator Magneto.

But with mutants no longer a force for the world and the Scarlet Witch missing after the “House of M” crossover, Pietro was all that was left. Son of M shows Pietro in the days after the Scarlet Witch’s reality altering leaves the world with fewer than 200 mutants and many more former mutants. Pietro’s one of those former mutants, but unlike the rest of them, who seem to be taking their loss placidly, Pietro not only wants to do something about it, he can do something about it: use his contacts with the Inhumans (his estranged wife, Crystal) to be exposed to the Terrigen Mists, which gives the Inhumans their enhanced powers and physiology.

The central plot, dealing with the return of the mutants’ lost powers, is something that had to be done somewhere, and Pietro — impatient, haughty, superior mutant and son-of-Magneto Pietro — was the perfect person to do it. His grief over losing his powers feels real, and his desire to help other mutants is in keeping with his character. The Inhuman who helps Pietro’s schemes is made more than just a dupe; he has an agenda of his own. And Spider-Man’s grief and outrage of having his perfect life given and then yanked away — by Pietro and his sister — was something that needed to be addressed; a son who no longer exists and discovering his ideal wife is his dead girlfriend (and not his wife) is a kick in the pants that needed to be addressed.

The mechanics of the plot, however, seem to have left a little less time for the human drama. Crystal goes from worried about Pietro to suspicious and disinterested in him in just a few pages. Crystal and Magneto, who should be major players in the family drama get perhaps less time and characterization than they might deserve. We see little set up for the discontent that allows Pietro to find a collaborator. I think some of the time given to setting up the following miniseries, Silent War, could have been better used for that purpose, but I admit that since I didn’t plot it, I might not appreciate how difficult that would have been. In any event, the Inhumans’ declaration of war was a neat moment.

I do not care for the art of Roy Allan Martinez. He gives everything a worn, ill-fitting look, and the pale palette supplied by colorist Pete Pantazis doesn’t help matters. On the other hand, worn and ill-fitting is a look that’s appropriate for the former mutants, and Martinez’s art does help make the confusing time-travel scenes understandable. So while I really don’t like his work, I can’t say it’s bad.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I should have. Hine does a good job telling the story, despite my quibbles, and it’s a story that desperately needed to be told after Marvel’s X-Men staff dropped the ball on the “House of M” fallout. But Martinez’s art … looking at it hurts my eyes. There’s something about his light line and oddly shaped (almost Quitely-shaped) faces that crosses signals in my brain and brings on almost a synesthetic distress. I can’t quite figure it out, and I’m sure most people will not have a similar reaction. I only know I’m probably not going read it again, although I probably will read Silent War.

Rating: (3 of 5)

Justice League of America, v. 3: The Injustice League

Collects: Justice League of America (v. 2) #13-6, Justice League of America Wedding Special #1 (2007-8)

Released: June 2008 (DC)

Format: 144 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9781401218027

What is this?: The Justice League comic crossed with the Superfriends and Justice League Unlimited cartoons — no Wonder Twins, though

The culprits: Writer Dwayne McDuffie and pencils by Ed Benes, Joe Benitez, and Mike McKone

I stay away from the mainstream DC universe because experience and other reviews have told me that they are so mired in continuity that they border on incomprehensible. But I have a soft spot for writer Dwayne McDuffie, and Justice League of America, v. 3: The Injustice League looked isolated enough, so I decided to take a chance.

The good news is that Injustice League requires almost no knowledge of DC history to enjoy, except perhaps that Green Arrow and Black Canary are getting married, but you can figure that out for yourself. The bad news is that Injustice League breaks no new ground, re-treading plots seen before while making the heroes seem not too terribly bright.

I will admit there are some fun parts. McDuffie is a good writer, and his script (if not plot) often shows it. The Wedding Special, with its infuriatingly superior Batman, is a nice touch, and the banter between Black Lightning (who McDuffie does well) and Jon Stewart is fun as well. McDuffie, who was also a writer for the animated Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, does a good job with a large cast, something that can be very difficult.

But Injustice League seems a little backwards looking to me. (And not just because of Benes’s art; zing!) It’s a simple, old-school plot: villains team up to take on heroes, capture the heroes, then screw up by not killing them. There are the rivalries between villains and between heroes and villains. Worst of all, Injustice League seems to take great pride in copying their animated television library. The Hall of Doom, looking exactly like it did in the Superfriends cartoon, gets a double-page spread at one point: Nothing else on the page, just a drawing of building that looks vaguely like Darth Vader’s helmet sitting in a swamp, for no other reasons than to help fanboys who don’t have access to Viagra. The composition of the League is more like the Secret Society of Justice League Unlimited, a large consortium of supervillains joining up to have a chance against the heroes. And then there’s Amanda Waller, also prominently from JLU, showing up to unnerve the heroes and take the captured villains off for some nefarious purpose.

I like the scene at the beginning, with Joker, Lex Luthor, and Cheetah (Cheetah? Really? Needed a Wonder Woman villain, I suppose) selecting the new Injustice league, but even that’s relying on the past, as it mimics the Justice League’s big three selecting the new Justice League at the beginning of v. 2. The difference is, of course, that judging from the size of the new Injustice League, they really weren’t that picky. I also don’t care for the little epigrams at the beginning of each issue; I don’t need my morals spoonfed to me in little yellow text boxes. (Like metal spoons and caviar, it affects the taste.)

Four issues in the main story, three different artists, three different flavors of cheesecake. Normally, I like variety, but not in this case. Look, these are competent artists, but they do have differing styles, and I’d at least like to get used to how females are exploited without having it shifted so quickly. Ed Benes likes him some female buttock — there’s a double page spread where he gets to draw nearly full-page versions of Vixen and Black Canary with their posteriors toward the reader, with a bonus of Wonder Woman spread eagled facing the reader. When he needs to, he contorts the bodies painfully to get a backside view. Joe Benitez seems to like his females standing on their tiptoes, plus he gets to draw a lot of Black Canary in her fishnets. Mike McKone didn’t really have that option. He has to settle for plot-mandated shots of Cheetah’s chest, plot-mandated strippers, and … all right, I’m unfairly lumping McKone in with the other two. Still, he only gets the Special, while Benitez gets #13 and Benes #14-5.

The two backups from JLA #16 strike me as inconsequential. One abandons a cop to an alternate universe and introduces an alternate universe Flash, leaving her lying on the page, without any resolution, characterization, or reason to care; Benitez doesn’t get any women on their tiptoes (plenty of Black Canary, though), but he does get to draw an extremely vacuous, naïve-looking female Flash. In the other, Red Arrow makes a former felon’s Christmas by remembering the old man used to try to kill him. It takes all sorts, I suppose.

This is not bad by any means. If you’re reading Justice League, this is just another volume, and it’s not one that is awful or disappointing. The problem lies with the potential; a huge group of villains against a smaller group of heroes could be pyrotechnic or at least exciting. But McDuffie doesn’t do anything spectacular with the concept, and he doesn’t do much new. I realize he might be setting up future stories, but honestly, even setup should be entertaining in its own way.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Another excuse

I missed putting up a review; a special review will be up tomorrow. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

I didn’t write an excuse for not posting a review on Tuesday.

I don’t think it needs to be excused.

I was on my decennial trek to Mt. Belmont, where I went through several trials to purge my guilt and obligations. I sat in the rain for hours until a disembodied voice from the heavens told me I could leave. I toured the overpriced markets and bazaars and had to resist purchasing items. I studied. I meditated. I slept in strange beds, ate food I prepared myself, and learned to conquer my fears.

And then I returned home, and I’m already covered with guilt and obligations again. Which is a shame, but there will be a review up today. Probably.

Blade, v. 1: Undead Again

Collects: Blade (v. 4) #1-6 (2006-7)

Released: (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785123644

What is this?: Blade gets his own series (again!)! Bet you can’t contain yourself, huh?

The culprits: Writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Howard Chaykin

Of all the characters there could have been to break the Marvel movie jinx, you wouldn’t expect it to have been Blade. He was a supporting character in Tomb of Dracula and had never been that popular. When the first Blade movie came out in 1998, Blade had managed to support one solo series, which ran ten issues in 1994-5. After the movie, Marvel tried two miniseries, one of three issues and the other with six. Neither did well enough to inspire an ongoing series. After the second movie in 2002, they tried again, and another ongoing lasted another six issues.

Whatever appeal a half-vampire vampire hunter has on the big screen, it wasn’t translating onto the page. Perhaps it’s just that people wanted to see Wesley Snipes in a black trenchcoat and fangs. Stranger things have happened. But Marvel was banking on being able to capture that movie audience when it started (yet another) series starring Blade in 2006. Perhaps the fourth time’s the charm, they might have thought.

Well, no, it wasn’t, but we’re left with the results, Blade, v. 1: Undead Again. Marvel tapped television and comics writer Marc Guggenheim to draw in the untapped market. And he tries very hard.

Too hard, in fact. In the first two issues, Blade fights Dracula, a vampiric Spider-Man, a helicarrier full of vampiric SHIELD agents, and Doombots aplenty. He seems to have very little trouble taking them out — even Buffy would be ashamed of how easily those vampires are going down. Dracula, in fact, seems like an afterthought, whereas in Tomb of Dracula all those years ago, he was at the end of a long quest(s). Guggenheim seems to be desperately trying to convince us Blade is awesome, when in fact, he’s convinced us he’s cheating. I mean, Doombots? The man should not be fighting Doombots! Especially not multiple ones! They can’t be staked, and they should be bulletproof and fistproof.

Blade also gets caught up in Secret Invasion, drafted into working for SHIELD; the less said of that, the better. Fortunately, it only takes up part of one issue.

Anyway. Guggenheim also decides we need to see Blade’s past. On one hand, that’s an interesting idea; I’ve never really wondered about what his past must be like, but there’s certainly some unexplored ground there. But there’s no reason for shocking revelations, especially when those revelations come across as ... well, unnecessary. His father being a (white) Latverian noble, who was turned into a vampire, seems weird and uncomfortable rather than intriguing. Why do such a thing? It’s surprising, yes; it’s not really interesting.

Exploring Blade’s past does lead to some interesting stories — a meeting with Wolverine, learning of how he became a vampire hunter, his training. (If you’re long-lived in the Marvel Universe, you probably met Wolverine before he became a hero. It’s just the law of averages, really.) In fact, after the first two issues, what with their rampant destruction and Latveria and Doombots, the story settles into an interesting groove.

Blade goes on a date, and his cover is blown after he’s arrested for murdering a vampire. He fights a demon who can jump from person to person. He fights Wolverine — that’s someone who is in his league. Half the stories in the book are interesting, combining vampire-fighting stories of a type I haven’t seen before with flashbacks to what made Blade Blade.

I’m not a fan of Howard Chaykin’s art, but I can’t deny he’s an excellent storyteller. There is little doubt about what happens in Undead Again, the characters are clearly delineated, and the action scenes are clear. (I also like using a monstrous “Yellow Kid” as a vampire during Blade’s youth.) However, I really wish he’d realize most heads are not thumb shaped.

There is a core of good stories here, and if it had stuck with them, the series might have been very good. But it tried for bigger things — bigger villains, bigger stories, bigger surprises without setting them up. So it failed.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Black Panther by Jack Kirby, v. 2

Collects: Black Panther #8-13 (1978-9)

Released: July 2006 (Marvel)

Format: 112 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785120698

What is this?: Black Panther (and his royal cousins) subdue a mutated Wakandan before he destroys the world and fight Kiber the Cruel.

The culprits: Jack Kirby, with a one-issue wrap up by Jim Shooter, Ed Hannigan, and Jerry Bingham

I have a confession to make: I don’t like Jack Kirby’s art. I’ve probably said it elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating for this review: I just don’t like his style. People are ugly, even the pretty ones. He has wacky perspectives I just don’t get, and often the way he draws eyes makes his characters look somewhere between manic and insane. In some of his action scenes, his figures look posed in the most uncomfortable positions. The “Kirby Krackle” and his intricate machines have never really done anything for me.

Now, I admit his art was innovative — or at least I’ve been told that so many times that I have to accept it. His art in 1961 is quite different than what you see from artists in the ‘50s, but so is Steve Ditko’s and others’; I just have to take on faith that the innovation flows from and through him. I do admire Kirby’s imagination, though, both in his art and his writing — especially his writing. Kirby, along with Steve Gerber, were underappreciated writers in the ‘70s, and their ideas are strange and wonderful even today.

But that imagination is not much in evidence in Black Panther by Jack Kirby, v. 2. The volume collects two Kirby storylines: one with a standard monster story, albeit one set in Wakanda and featuring Black Panther’s royal cousins, and a story with a villain who converts captives to energy for fuel. These don’t rival the flights of fancy from v. 1, where Kirby presented King Solomon’s Frogs, time travel, Abner Little, and a hidden city of samurai who guard the water of eternal life.

The most imaginative parts of Panther, v. 2, is the Wakandan royal family — a financier, a doctor, a race-car driver, and a “female grown too fat,” all successful in their fields — trying to capture the mutated Jakarra, who got too close to the outer-space metal vibranium. Such things will happen when you dabble in outer-space metal. I don’t buy the royal cousins’ heroics, but they are all well drawn individuals, and they are often fun to watch. It’s too bad Black Panther doesn’t really need relatives; in fact, they’re a hindrance to later and earlier stories told about royal intrigue, since they almost never pop up again. The only other interesting part of the book is the revelation of Kiber the Cruel’s true form, but that’s written in the final issue by Jim Shooter and Ed Hannigan, with art by Jerry Bingham, and there’s no telling how much input Kirby had on that issue. That Kiber can invade Wakanda’s self-imposed isolation is interesting, but not much is done with that; Black Panther’s newly gained psychic abilities in the final storyline are something different but wildly out of keeping with the character’s strengths. In any event, the new powers are gone fairly quickly after the story.

Really, Panther is standard ‘70s stuff, and standard ‘70s stuff at Marvel is usually a mediocre attempt to recreate the ‘60s at Marvel without all the interesting risks and weirdness.

Panther features art by Kirby. If you like it — and you know if you do or not — then here it is. It’s some of his later art, so it isn’t as exciting as his early work; frankly, Jerry Bingham, whom I had never heard of before, is a welcome relief on the last issue, and it’s one of his images (a villain warped and fused to the floor) and not Kirby’s that sticks with me. Despite his characters being occasionally overposed and stiff, Bingham is a solid artist, representing a generation influenced by (and overtaking) Kirby.

Panther sells for almost $20, which is a little expensive for six issues in paperback. I realize Kirby’s name has cachet for those who collect and read these old issues, but it’s just not worth the money for unspectacular Kirby. And it doesn’t even end v. 1 of Black Panther; two more non-Kirby issues remain uncollected.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List, April 18

The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List for the week of April 18 contains few surprises.

DC has a lock on the hardcover list again. Watchmen moves up two slots to the top spot, while Batman: RIP slips to second. Batman: The Killing Joke and Joker move up one spot apiece to #3 and #4. Batman: Heart of Hush drops three spots to #5. All-Star Superman, v. 2 drops two slots to #9. The Saga of Swamp Thing keeps the #10 slot. Superman: Brainiac falls out of the top 10.

Marvel manages to get two titles into the hardcover list: Marvel Zombies 3 and Civil War at #7 and 8, respectively. Good for them. Maybe they’ll set their sights on the top five next time. Random House’s lone representative, The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle, moves up three spots to #6. IDW’s Angel: After the Fall, v. 3, drops out of the top 10.

Much more instability on the trade paperback list, with five new titles. This time, there’s only four DC titles on the list: Watchmen hanging on to #1, V for Vendetta slipping two slots to #5, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns slipping one to #7. Batman: The Long Halloween enters the chart at #9. The first volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Y: The Last Man drop from the list. For Marvel, Wolverine: Origin drops to #4 from #2, but they also get Barry Windsor-Smith’s Wolverine: Weapon X in at #10. Hooray, Wolverine movie!

Among other publishers, the big winner is IDW, which puts Star Trek: Countdown, nominally by J.J. Abrams and others, in at #2. Image’s Walking Dead, v. 9, moves up one to #6, but v. 1 drops off the list. Rounding out the list is Drawn & Quarterly’s A Drifting Life (an interesting qualifier — “this 840-page memoir chronicles family troubles and the evolution of manga from 1945 to 1960”) and Oni’s latest Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Falling off the list are The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, v. 3.

Naruto takes the top 6 manga spots and seven of the top 10; the only mystery, really, is why v. 31 makes the list when the other Narutos are v. 39-44.

July 2009 Solicitations

Better late than never, they say. Of course, that’s debatable. Here are the July 2009 solicitations from the big four comic companies, minus IDW and plus Dark Horse (I kid Dark Horse, but really, it and Image fell behind IDW in sales).

From Marvel:

• Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign (hardcover): Can Jeff Parker bring back what everyone liked in the original (poorly selling) mini? $24.99
• X-Men: Wolverine / Gambit (hardcover): Reprinting the forgettable Wolverine / Gambit: Victims miniseries from the mid-’90s. The mini was published to capitalize on Gambit’s popularity, and it’s most likely reissued because of the movie. I mean, what other reason can there be to reprint this? (Yes, I know, Loeb / Sale. That doesn’t cover up that it isn’t much good.) $19.99
• Mephisto vs. (hardcover): The ‘80s miniseries that tried to cover up that it was a miniseries at all by having each issue have a different title! $19.99
• Spider-Girl, v. 11: Marked for Death (digest): Yes, they really are charging $13 for seven issues of a digest. That’s ridiculous and must stop now. $12.99
• New Warriors Classic, v. 1: It’s about time. It seems odd it would take so long for a cult favorite like New Warriors to get on the schedule, but the Classic line has been a little slow, so I suppose it makes sense. $24.99
• X-Men: The Shattering: Rumored on Amazon for a while, this one comes in at a whopping $35. Yes, it has eleven issues plus an annual, but that’s $3 an issue. And three of those reprinted issues are the Astonishing X-Men series, and I’m very reluctant to pay for those. $34.99
• The Essentials (now $20! Geez, there’s a recession on, Marvel!) are Essential Marvel Two-in-One, v .3, and Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, v. 4. Both are excellent choices, especially Spectacular, which will reprint the Owl / Octopus War and its aftermath, the Black Cat / Spidey romance, and a Fred Hembeck penciled issue. $19.99 each

From DC, who believe in giving you value for your money (and really is eating Marvel’s lunch on that score):

• Gotham Central, v. 2: Jokers and Madmen (hardcover): I didn’t see v. 1, but it’s good that Gotham Central is getting a hardcover reprint that includes all the issues, not just the greatest hits. The missing issues really upset me in the TPBs. Reasonable price for 12 issues in hardback, and I bet it will have better stories than the comparably sized but more expensive paperback X-Men: The Shattering. $29.99
• Secret Six: Unhinged: Gail Simone writes another series with second-tier characters. That’s usually enjoyable, and the price is right as well. $14.99
• Tom Strong: Deluxe Edition, v. 1 (hardcover): I haven’t read Tom Strong, but the other ABC titles were all excellent, and I doubt this will be different. It is $40 for twelve issues, though, so you might hunt down older, cheaper reprints. $39.99
• Fables, v. 12: The Dark Ages: The Adversary’s gone, but the story goes on. $17.99
• The Showcases (still a reassuring $17) are Showcase Presents Eclipso and Showcase Presents The Flash, v. 3. I have to admit, DC is much more daring with its Showcase selections than Marvel is with Essentials; on the other hand, I have a real distaste for a lot of Silver Age DC, so it doesn’t do much for me. If you’re less wedded to Marvel or another company, though, you have to love DC. $16.99 $9.99 for Eclipso and $16.99 for Flash
• Not TPBs, but DC is reprinting the #1s for Green Lantern: Rebirth, Y: The Last Man, Tom Strong, and All-Star Superman and Batman #608 for $1 each. Neat, although I wonder why the first issue of Batman: Hush is being reprinted.

From Image:

• Back to Brooklyn: Garth Ennis does a violent organized crime story. This is for a certain demographic, and you know if you are in that demographic if you have the entire Ennis run on Punisher. $14.99

From Dark Horse, which is always a little unusual compared to the other three:

• Noir (hardcover): An interesting black-and-white book. It’s a collection of noir stories, with an impressive list of creators, including comics’ noir leaders, Ed Brubaker and Brian Azzarello. $24.95
• Pictures that Tick: Dave McKean’s short comics stories from the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Probably worth reading, even if you don’t buy it — McKean is always interesting. $19.95
• I would mention The Umbrella Academy, v. 2: Dallas (hardcover), but it’s a limited-run $80 edition. No thanks. The TPB will be out in October.

Anyone else got any bright ideas?

Essential Power Man and Iron Fist, v. 2

Collects: Power Man & Iron Fist #76-100 and Daredevil #178 (1981-3)

Released: March 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 624 pages / black and white / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785130727

What is this?: A two-year slice of early ‘80s street-level Marvel superheroing, featuring the Heroes for Hire: Power Man and Iron Fist.

The culprits: Writers Mary Jo Duffy, Denny O’Neil, and Kurt Busiek and pencilers Denys Cowan, Ernie Chan, and Kerry Gammill, with many other writers and artists

When people get nostalgic for the early ‘80s, Jim Shooter-era Marvel, they don’t often wax nostalgic about Power Man & Iron Fist. (Not in my experience, anyway. I’m sure there are corners of the Internet where that is exactly what happens.) But in many ways, Essential Power Man & Iron Fist, v. 2, is part of the bedrock of that time.

Power Man & Iron Fist has its flaws, but it was a second-tier book that kept chugging along, month after month. Once past Cage’s “Sweet Christmas!” (not much in evidence here) and jive, there’s not much laughable about the title, unlike Dazzler or U.S. 1. Every month is a solid story — well short of unforgettable, usually, but rarely disappointing. There was a consistent supporting cast, well used. The villains … OK, these were mostly second-tier, and even with Sabretooth, you know no one had figured out quite what to do with him yet, other than use him as an Iron Fist villain. But these villains were appropriate to the heroes, they had a score to settle, and they frequently had an interesting hook or visual.

The writers all have solid credentials in similar low-powered superheroes, although Kurt Busiek found his success a little later than Denny O’Neil and Mary Jo Duffy’s best-known writing is probably Power Man & Iron Fist. The artists are nothing to sneer at either, although Ernie Chan is better known as the inker for Conan than a penciler and neither Kerry Gammill nor Denys Cowan are current superstars or objects of nostalgic veneration.

There is no overarching plot for the volume, of course; there never is in an Essential. So let’s talk about the writers. Duffy uses humor well, rarely letting it get in the way of the plot (except for #79, which is essentially a Doctor Who story, with a cut-rate non-licensed Doctor Who). Unsurprisingly, she’s also the most deft with the largely female supporting cast. O’Neil, who takes over with #85, does away with Duffy’s last shocking change — the scarring of Harmony, a fashion model and Cage’s girlfriend, as soon as it is safe — and … well, I’m not sure what to say about his run, which lasted until #89, except that it’s mainly forgettable: a couple of adventures outside New York, a rescue of Moon Knight, an anti-drugs story. Very ‘80s, in its way, I suppose.

Busiek takes it the rest of the way (except for #91, written by Steven Grant), but this isn’t the Busiek we know from Marvels or Astro City. He’s unpolished here, indulging in legacy characters by bringing back the ID and gimmick of Chemistro and picking up on hints from the O’Neil run that Luke might not be looked upon kindly by his Times Square neighbors. That’s an interesting idea, but he conflates the scum of Times Square, who might want to kick a hero out of their midst, with the African-Americans who think Cage is too white. (The word “Oreo” is used a lot.) Both those groups are wrapped up in the newest Chemistro, who is black and promises to keep the area safe for criminals — not like that Cage, who works with the po-lice. There’s a good story about the heroes escorting Hammerhead to a different prison (although why do they have to ride on the top of a truck to do it?), and Busiek does manage to keep a group of subplots moving forward quite ably, wrapping them up in the double-sized #100.

Gammill supplies the best art in the volume. His pencils are sharp, vivid, and kinetic, and for readers, it’s a shame he only stays on for only for only three issues, #77-9. In many ways, this style of art is underappreciated: without enough tics or exaggerations to be memorable, it has to settle for an understated excellence. Cowan’s style suffers from the black-and-white reproduction and a series of inkers; I remember his work being much better in color in the original issues. The inking of Carl Potts, who finished almost half Cowan’s work on the title (#80-4, 86-90, and 92-3), does him no favors, and that and the lack of color sometimes makes it difficult to make out details with his scratchy style. Chan works #94-100; his art starts off stiff, but it improves greatly when he stops inking his own pencils.

Some call it mediocrity, others consistency. But most of us who enjoy comics from that era can’t quite put our fingers on what to call it; we only recognize it has a familiar feel, comforting without being exciting. This isn’t probably the best way to spend your $20 — and don’t think I haven’t noticed that price increase, Marvel; you’re on notice — but most readers won’t regret the time or money spent with this volume.

Rating: (3 of 5)

New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List, April 11

The list is here.

Naruto’s domination is nothing new and certainly no surprise; you get the feeling it can take six of the top ten manga slots without a sweat. DC’s domination on the hardback and paperback lists is a bit of a surprise, though; Watchmen’s presence on both lists is unsurprising, but eight of the top 10 hardbacks? That’s dominance, although the titles on the list do make me a bit suspicious. (Superman: Brainiac is #8? Really? And The Joker #5? Hrmm.)

The paperback book list is also dominated by DC (five of the top 10) but makes more sense. You’ve got evergreen classics in Watchmen (#1), V for Vendetta (#3), and The Dark Knight Returns (#6); the first volumes of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Brian Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man are at the bottom of the list. The only Marvel title is Wolverine: Origin (#2), mostly likely pushed there by publicity for the movie. (Which is a shame, as there are much better Wolverine books.) Marvel has to be a little embarrassed; only one book on the two lists, while Dark Horse places two on the paperback list (#4 and #5). Image also puts two on the list with v. 1 and 9 of Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead.

Of course, as I admit, I’m a Marvel kind of guy. My bias is probably showing. It would be interesting to see how DC’s dominance of this mainstream list compensates for Marvel’s (lesser) control of the direct / hobby market.

RASL, v. 1: The Drift

Collects: RASL #1-3 (2008)

Released: January 2009 (Cartoon Books)

Format: 112 pages / black and white / $13 / ISBN: 9781888963205

What is this?: An oversized collection of Jeff Smith’s follow up to Bone, in which an extradimensional art thief is tracked by an assassin.

The culprits: Writer / artist Jeff Smith

I was at a loss for what to review today; fortunately, on Saturday at my local game shop, I ran across RASL, v. 1: The Drift, which is Jeff Smith’s follow up to the epic Bone.

RASL stands out, and not just because it’s taller and wider than the average collection or comic book. Its plot is somewhat similar to Casanova, but Smith’s writing is nothing like Matt Fraction’s. Both series deal with ne’er do wells who jump across parallel realities, but while Fraction’s Casanova is an unlikeable jerk in a world of moral grays, RASL’s hero — called RASL or Robert — is more human, more grounded, and more sympathetic. RASL is a thief who jumps from dimension to dimension to steal works of art, then tags the site of the theft with “RASL” and returns to his world with the help of a device of his own creation. This leaves him in pain; to recover, he boozes, smokes, and womanizes. Then, after one theft, he returns not to his own world but to a world where Bob Dylan kept his real name, and there’s a lizard-man assassin after him …

RASL’s plot is slower than Casanova’s. While Fraction bounces from idea to idea with the mad, aggravating energy of a five-year-old mainlining pixie sticks, Smith chooses a more leisurely look at RASL — who he was, who he is, his pains, his solaces. There are more than enough strange and weird ideas to keep readers interested, though. Smith sows superscience, alien creatures, large-scale conspiracy, and noir thriller at the reader, and he doesn’t come close to exhausting the ideas. RASL does feel a little thin because its dimensions are so much greater than its thickness and because of its leisurely pace.

And that pace fits his art. While Gabriel Ba was forced to keep up with Fraction’s frenetic ideas in Casanova’s first collection, Smith’s detailed, distinctive art is meant to be appreciated at a slower pace. It’s the same brushwork that made Bone so distinctive, and the larger format gives readers a better chance to enjoy the details. However, this isn’t an all-ages comic; some readers might be surprised to find those brushes drawing prostitutes and scantily clad strippers. The black-and-white printing also helps here; I can’t imagine how color would improve upon the detailed monochrome Smith uses.

When I read RASL, I didn’t actively compare it to Casanova, and I didn’t want to use this space to slam that series. RASL is fun and exciting and full of depth; to get that across, it isn’t necessary to compare it to a similar non-Marvel / DC series. RASL stands by itself as a series to wait for — and readers could wait a while. While issue #4 is due out April 29, #5 isn’t due until the summer. And the rest of the series? (If there is a rest?) Who knows?

Rating: (4 of 5)

Now I Am Sad

Chris Giarrusso will be doing no more Mini-Marvels, as he states in this interview with Comic Book Resources.

Marvel wants to make sure no one confuses Mini-Marvels with Super Hero Squad. Given that Mini-Marvels are funny, I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened. And I suppose selling out of a digest collection is something to avoid again. In any event, it makes me more eager for Giarrusso’s G-Man collection. You can see some his G-Man stuff at the interview; it looks as funny as his Mini-Marvels work.

X-Factor, v. 5: The Only Game in Town

Collects: X-Factor #28-32 and X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead (2008)

Released: February 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $15.99 / ISBN: 9780785128632

What is this?: X-Factor deals with losing Layla and Rahne as Mutant Town becomes the Middle East Side.

The culprits: Writer Peter David and pencilers Pablo Raimondi and Valentine de Landro

See, this is more like it.

I said in the previous review I generally like writer Peter David’s work, and then I proceeded to point to more negative than positive reviews. But X-Factor, v. 5: The Only Game in Town shows the form I enjoyed from David.

Despite David’s conflicts with editorial in his first X-Factor run, he plays well with continuity. When Marvel gives him a lemon of a storyline like M-Day — the number of mutants is reduced to 198, and no more are being born — David takes the idea and does something with it while other writers decide, you know, that’s not a very interesting idea.

But there is an interesting idea there, and David, who set X-Factor in the heart of the mutant population explosion, is ideally positioned to explore it. As the team tries to figure out how to get Layla back and Rahne is sent to X-Force by editorial (she leaves without explaining, both because X-Force is supposed to be secret and her joining is probably not a logical idea), the characters are forced to accept that the Grant Morrison-era “mutants are everywhere” stories are over, and Mutant Town dissolves into the Middle East Side. As everything falls apart, the team pulls together and battles … um, Arcade, which shows David still has a subtle touch with the absurd.

There’s humor aplenty, even as things get serious; I particularly enjoyed M’s remark about Three’s Company as a way to defuse an obvious misunderstanding between Siryn and Madrox. It never gets too silly, even with Arcade as a villain; the danger feels real throughout — and even at the end. The characters are sharp, well defined, and never confused with each other. There’s little decompression, and there’s enough action to keep the story from being a five-minute dash through talking heads. The subplots move forward and are dealt with as necessary; no one is forgotten, not even the dead.

Really, it’s pretty much what you want from a superhero comic. No, you’re not going to forget Alan Moore, but it’s good enough to inspire touchiness when someone says the phrase “just a superhero story.”

Two minor quibbles: First, I don’t like the cover for this one at all; M is almost unrecognizable, and Strong Guy looks like Zombie Guy. And two, the Quick and the Dead issue feels … not inconsequential, not padded — well, maybe padded or maybe oddly paced. After I read it, it seemed like a ten-page backup story, but re-reading it and counting the pages, it’s clearly a full-length story. An important one, as well, as Quicksilver’s story comes full circle.

Pablo Raimondi and Valentine de Landro each provide about half the art: Raimondi pencils and inks #28, 31, and Quick and the Dead, while de Landro pencils the rest. I slightly prefer Raimondi, but both are good despite the occasional shortcomings. Raimondi has a bit of stiffness to his figures that hampers the action scenes, but that’s not a major problem, and de Landro has a few twisted limbs and overexaggerated features in his art as well. I have to give editors Aubrey Sitterson and Will Panzo credit for teaming two artists whose work, while not exact duplicates, are similar enough not to clash in the collection.

Game holds the excitement of continuity handled well. (Perhaps that’s the problem with his run on She-Hulk; it’s largely separated from most of the Marvel Universe.) At the end, David seems to have freed himself of the baggage Marvel editorial has saddled him with, and the decks are mainly clear. But even if they aren’t, I’m sure David will be able to make fun new X-Factor stories. And I look forward to them.

Rating: (4 of 5)

She-Hulk, v. 7: Here Today ...

Collects: She-Hulk #28-30, She-Hulk: Cosmic Collision (2008-9)

Released: March 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 112 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785129660

What is this?: She-Hulk finally tracks down her tormentor from Peter David’s first arc and reveals why she was disbarred.

The culprits: Written by Peter David and Pencils by Val Semeiks and Mahmud Asrar

I like writer Peter David usually. His X-Factor was great in the ‘90s, as was his Incredible Hulk. Madrox and its current follow-up, X-Factor, v. 3, are excellent. Really, David is one of my favorite comics writers, great with characters and humor, and I consistently look forward to his work.

But there are times … there are times he seems to misfire. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, v. 1: Derailed was one of those times. I wasn’t wild about David’s first She-Hulk volume, She-Hulk, v. 6: Jaded, either. Unfortunately, She-Hulk, v. 7: Here Today... seems to be another misstep.

In Here Today, David finally lets slip why She-Hulk was disbarred before Jaded: she was goaded into attacking a client and revealing his guilt. On the surface, it makes sense; however, any criminal defense lawyer knows they will occasionally defend a guilty client and might even get them acquitted. None of her explanations — her “savage” nature getting loose or wanting to punish herself — are entirely convincing. Mind control might be convincing, but it’s not offered as a solution.

There seems a bit of laziness in the plotting, and because of that, the story in #28-30 mostly fails to engage. There’s a shadowy conspiracy behind She-Hulk’s torments; sure, there is. Why? I don’t know, and not only do I not care, I can’t summon the energy to tell you how little I care. She-Hulk goes back to the casual sex, this time with a passing Hercules, who happens to know how to take out the villain of the story most easily. (Who really doesn’t do much, despite being used as a plot device for a half-dozen issues.) And there are still jokes about Juggernaut, which should have been retired at the end of Dan Slott’s run.

(And a personal objection: I’m not sure there’s anyone who knows the Cleveland Browns were 4-12 in 2007 and doesn’t know about the Dog Pound and the loyalty of Browns fans, unless Jen is some secret fantasy football freak. I had no idea what Cleveland’s record was in any year, frankly, but Cleveland football fandom is easily remembered. It’s like knowing Oliver Twist was first published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 but never having heard of Fagin.)

Overall, I like the art from Val Semeiks, who pencils #28-30. There are the usual distortions of She-Hulk — one extremely peculiar one in which the reclining She-Hulk’s butt and shoulders seem to keep her waist about a foot from her cot — but his straightforward style fits the story and character. There’s some strange shift in style during #30 — a change in inkers, perhaps — that is less enjoyable, one that makes the Skrull Jazinda look like a half-plant creature when she transforms.

The last part issue of the collection, Cosmic Collision, comes out of nowhere. At the end of #30, Jazinda has a sudden flash about “the Talisman,” whatever that is, and then she and Jennifer are off. Then Collision skips to the pair tracking a minor superhuman in Milwaukee before they are whisked off by the Collector to battle the avatar of a cosmic force. I get the feeling this issue was shoehorned into the collection to make the collection book length; Collision was released several months after the other issues in Here Today and doesn’t seem to dovetail well in terms of continuity.

As for the content of Collision, I appreciate David’s attempt at humor, giving a light touch to Marvel’s space characters who could easily be taken too seriously, but the plot doesn’t engage me: gather together a bunch of heroes solely on the basis of being female, despite their differing shticks and temperaments. (It’s the only way you can stick Storm and Thundra on the same team, really.) Cosmic avatars bore me, especially when they rampage blindly and are nearly all powerful. The art, supplied by Mahmud Asrar, is compellingly simple while avoiding cartooniness and still telling the story; his faces are a little dodgy occasionally. However, I wonder whether he was in on the joke of giving the unfeminine female killing force, Unum, a stereotypical “sexy” costume, given some of his angles on She-Hulk, and the art on the “friendly fire” incident makes Quasar look like an idiot or malicious.

The disinterest inspired by Here Today essentially quashes any curiosity I had about the rest of David’s She-Hulk run, which goes for two more volumes. I can hold out hope that it improves, but since the title’s been cancelled, the apathy is overwhelming. Even if he does turn it around and develop something interesting, why should I care? She-Hulk, as I know it, is over.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Maus: A Survivor's Tale, v. 1: My Father Bleeds History

Collects: Maus stories from Raw #1-8 (1980-6)

Released: August 1986 (Pantheon)

Format: 160 pages / black and white / $14.95 / ISBN: 9780394747231

What is this?: Art Spiegelman uses not-so-funny funny animals to tell the story of his father, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Along with The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, Maus is one of the three pillars of the “greatest comic-book story” argument, the one comic book fans trot out to meet the argument that all comic books are are superhero stories. It is a story of the Holocaust and one family’s struggle to stay alive. In 1992, Maus won a special Pulitzer; it and author Art Spiegelman have drawn very high praise from Alan Moore. There is no doubting Maus is a formidable work.

So then: Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History is the first of two volumes of Maus. Spiegelman weaves two threads together: his father’s retelling of his family’s life in Poland in the late ‘30s / early ‘40s and Speigelman’s relationship to his father. The Spiegelmans’ story is a thoroughly crushing one; anyone who knows any history knows that no matter how bad Vladek and Anja Spiegelman have it, it will get worse. (Even if you don’t know history, the title of v. 2, And Here My Troubles Began, will give you a hint.) No hope is offered; the story is told in the voice of Vladek, Spiegelman’s father, a pessimistic old Jew who knows the depths his story will sink to even better than we do. Vladek doesn’t seem to understand or value the heroism he exhibits to keep himself and his wife alive. The reader must watch Vladek sell more and more possessions, take more and more chances, watch friends and family get captured and sent away, until the inevitable happens.

To break up this long march into atrocity, Spiegelman includes interludes with his adult self and his father. Their conflict begins as seemingly the standard generational struggle, amplified by the hardships Vladek endured, while Spiegelman has grown up in a relatively stable and secure environment. But as the story goes on, there is more; the reader begins to suspect there is something beyond Vladek’s stereotypical kvetching, parsimonious Jewish exterior, and Spiegelman reveals some of his true difficulties with his father. It is completely different type of story than Vladek’s Holocaust memoir, but since the Holocaust helped form Vladek’s relationship with his son, the two stories dovetail well.

All the characters, past and present, are depicted as anthropomorphic animals, with each race being a different species — Jews are mice, Germans are cats, and Poles are pigs (although cartoony pigs, not dirty farmyard swine). Spiegelman made this decision because the Germans referred to the Jews as “vermin” and the Poles as “swine”; the art shows the absurdity of the claim. When Vladek or another Jew attempts to pass himself off as a Pole, Spiegelman ties a simple pig mask around their face. The artifice is simple yet effective. The story is so human that the reader quickly forgets it is being told through animals; the symbol of the animals is understood while the inner humanity is remembered.

As I read v. 1, I always felt as if I were missing something. My mind kept going between two extremes: Maus is an absorbing tale told well, but haven’t I seen this somewhere before? It made me doubt my own maturity, and in the end, I felt Spiegelman’s style had thrown me. Whereas complexity and richness have made Watchmen one of the greatest comic-book stories, Maus excels with a story that is spare and bleak. There is no color — an artistic as well as a financial concern, certainly. Seeing simplicity, I searched for complexity in the wrong places: the story, the characters of Vladek and Anja. That’s not where the richness and reward are; they’re in the style, the artifice, and the fact that the story was told at all.

Rating: (5 of 5)

2009 Eisner Award Nominees

Via the Comics Reporter, here are the nominees for the Eisner Award. The awards, which are named after the late comics legend Will Eisner, will be given at the San Diego Comic Con, which takes place in late July. This will be the 21st year for the award; the Eisners were first awarded in 1988 as one of two replacements for the Jack Kirby Awards, but there were no awards given in 1990. (The other successor to the Kirbys were the Harveys, named for Harvey Kurtzman.)

Previous winners can be found at the the Eisner Wikipedia site.

The Marvel Comics Guide to New York City

Collects: Original content

Released: November 2007 (Pocket Books)

Format: 256 pages / black and white / $13 / ISBN: 9781416531418

What is this?: A travel guide to Marvel’s fictional New York and the places in real New York that fictional Marvel characters have traveled

The culprits: Writer Peter Sanderson

And now for something slightly different.

The Marvel Comics Guide to New York City is not a comic book or trade paperback. It is, as the title implies, a guide to the New York City inhabited by Marvel’s villains and supervillains, written by Peter Sanderson.

Comics fans who have read Marvel’s and DC’s own reference materials will recognize the name. Sanderson, a long-time historian of Marvel and DC stories, uses his knowledge to take readers on a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple, although it mostly features Manhattan. Each real site, be it a building, street, or neighborhood, is described with information an out-of towner might not know; the descriptions are followed a few events highlighting the locale’s Marvel history. Fictional sites are placed within the context of the city before their history is explored.

Sanderson has the unenviable task of mapping fictional structures to real-life buildings — such as Yancy Street with Delancy Street or Avengers Mansion with the Frick Museum — and trying to shoehorn the fictional places into New York real estate. Despite the carelessness of some of Marvel’s creators, Sanderson does this admirably, and as anyone who’s read his work might imagine, he’s meticulous about his references. But he also manages to avoid being pedantic. He lays out the conundrums before the reader with a shrug, as if to say, “What can you do?” As Marvel readers might guess, New York beyond Manhattan is given short shrift — Spider-Man was born in Queens; what else has happened outside Manhattan? — but the other four boroughs plus Long Island, Westchester, and upstate New York are mentioned.

Sanderson generally sticks to the comics, but there are several references to the Spider-Man movies. Sanderson mentions shooting locations as well as the places those locales were meant to stand in for. Sanderson walks a fine line here — the comics have a long history, and shoving them aside for the Johnny-come-lately movies could alienate comic fans, but given the movies’ larger overall audience, cutting the references to them would be dangerous. In the end, Sanderson manages to balance the two continuities well enough to satisfy both camps.

The book could have benefited from more pictures — or, failing that, color pictures. It isn’t bereft of illustrations, so that isn’t a total loss. But fictional locales are frequently unillustrated, even though they have to have been drawn in some Marvel comic; usually, an unhelpful cover image is substituted. More importantly, though, a map would have been extremely helpful, and the cartographic absence is a major mark against the book.

Despite my interest in Marvel history, this book failed to grab me. New York doesn’t interest me, and differentiating the places within the Big Apple enough for me to care is a challenge this book isn’t up to. A map is absolutely essential for keeping everything in context for people unfamiliar with New York, and the book misses that. Still, finding out about the fictional places and the real places that inspired Stan Lee and other Marvel creators does make for some interesting moments.

Rating: (2.5 of 5)

Spider-Girl, v. 10: Season of the Serpent

Collects: Spider-Girl #52-9 (2002-3)

Released: January 2009 (Marvel)

Format: 184 pages / color digest / $9.99 / ISBN: 9780785132134

What is this?: May makes a romantic choice, goes to an alternate universe, and fights a villain far more powerful than she is.

The culprits: Writers Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and pencilers Pat Olliffe and Ron Frenz

Some series you keep buying because of momentum. It hooked you in the beginning — characters, plot, writing, art, something — and you still want to find out how it ends. But you’re not excited any more. If you took a deep look at your buying habits, you’d probably be better off not spending the money on that series any more. Not that you’d want to admit that.

I have to admit, the Spider-Girl digest series was getting that way with me. It hadn’t found its way into that category yet, but if I was being honest with myself, it was only a matter of time. And then along came Spider-Girl, v. 10: Season of the Serpent, and I don’t have to worry about momentum being the only thing making me buy this series.

Finally, May makes a decision about her love life, instead of endlessly vacillating. Mary Jane’s pregnancy finally — finally — ends. May comes closer to making her peace with Kaine, Alison Mongrain, and Felicity Hardy. We finally see Blackie Drago again. In short, the background plots seem like they are moving for once, and that injects some interest into the story. It felt as if writer Tom DeFalco was going to let some of them simmer forever.

The main plot is above average, but it doesn’t generate as much interest as the side plots. The Sons of the Serpent, a hate group, are back, and this time they are backed by Seth, an Egyptian serpent god. Of course this means May is vastly overmatched, which makes the story a bit more entertaining, and it allows her to experience her own trapped-underwater / mother-figure-needs-medicine / won’t-give-up moment that Spider-Man gave us in Amazing Spider-Man #33. The Serpents and their hate-group activities get short shrift; they’re there simply as a bunch of goons you can safely hope get beaten up. Whatever time it might take to make them interesting is given over to an alternate universe story that takes up most of two issues. While those issues do provide some characterization, it seems mostly a vehicle to bring Captain America to the M2 universe. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it just seems to sap the narrative flow a bit.

The art is good, if not spectacular, once again. Pat Olliffe provides most of the pencils, with Ron Frenz, who co-wrote the issues he penciled, chipping in at the beginning and end of the volume. The two artists’ styles blend remarkably well, something that doesn’t seem to happen all that often. I have to give Frenz extra points for drawing May in a slightly different style of clothing while she was considering giving up the superheroing life.

The contents of Serpent takes some of the sting out of the new $9.99 digest price; for the first time I can remember, one of Marvel’s digests has more than six issues. In this case, it’s eight, and that seems like a fair deal for $10. The rumors have the next volume allegedly containing seven issues, which is not as good but doesn’t feel like Marvel’s trying to cheat me — unless the $12.99 price is also correct, and then I’m getting ripped off.

Still, even if I’m not looking forward to that price, Serpent has me looking forward to the next digest.

Rating: (4 of 5)

Promethea, Book 2

Collects: Promethea #7-12 (2000-1)

Released: February 2003 (DC / ABC)

Format: 176 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9781563899577

What is this?: In v. 2, Sophie learns more about Promethea and magic and strikes back at her tormentors.

The culprits: Writer Alan Moore and penciler J.H. Williams III

As much as I thought Promethea, Book 1, was an underappreciated part of the Alan Moore canon, I’m not sure what to make of Promethea, Book 2.

Ideas, for most writers, are easy. For Moore, they seem effortless. But continuing and developing the idea is often more difficult, and although I won’t say Moore ran into difficulties with Book 2, it’s not as enjoyable or effortless. Book 1 introduced Sophie Bangs, a college student, and Promethea, a fictional character who pops up in different fictional creations over the years. Sophie discovers that although Promethea is fictional, she can exist in the real world, and Sophie becomes the host for the most current version of the heroine. She learns from her predecessor and resists her enemies.

In Book 2, her training continues, and she strikes back at those who have attacked and threatened her — almost too quickly, too effectively. The idea of ubiquitous collections was new when Moore was writing, but this volume is paced oddly; the climax comes in the middle. I can’t complain about how that storyline plays out, which some might see as a letdown, but I thought the lack of a battle was a neat stroke by Moore, especially given Promethea’s fictional background.

The rest of Book 2 is more difficult. I’m not sure I can assume some parts of the book are brilliant just because of Moore’s reputation. Two of the final three issues deal directly with magic and as such are dialogues. One event takes up the first issue, and nothing happens in the second. The craftsmanship of these two issues are outstanding, both by Moore and artist J.H. Williams III (who I just noticed is co-creator of Promethea). Moore communicates his knowledge and passion for the subject. But the complexity of the discussion of an already recondite subject doesn’t make it easier for readers. I suspect that’s part of Moore’s point, that it’s not an easy subject and can’t be reduced to words — symbols and metaphors must be used. But sometimes that makes the writing come across as impenetrable or a waste of time, and all the Aleister Crowley jokes in the world aren’t going to change that. I may be alone with this opinion; Promethea #10, the first of these dialogues, won the 2001 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.

Sophie has to deal with a death of someone close to her; I don’t want to give it away, but those who have read Book 1 can probably make a good guess. It’s interesting how quickly the sorority of Prometheas seem to become family to Sophie, especially given how little family seems to play in her life.

More difficult to deal with is how Promethea and Sophie share Sophie’s body, especially in matters carnal; I found myself a little squeamish about some parts of Book 2 because of that. Moore has no trouble with writing about human sexuality, of course, and my squeamishness is my failing. Still, he has to deal with the implications of that sharing more definitively; I have confidence he will (or has, since Promethea is complete), though.

Once again, I’m impressed with Williams’s art. The issues about magic call for a high degree of imagination and skill to make two conversations interesting (although the sex scenes in the first probably helped), and I’m astonished by how many art styles Williams has to ape over the course of Book 2. Issue #7 has digital art from Jose Villarrubia, which is supposed to be the view inside one of the Promethea’s memories; the effect nicely marks off the section, but it seems a little off in its photorealistic zeal.

The ambition of this book makes me want to recommend it; it’s a difficult read at times, though, and I hate to tell others to read it without knowing there’s a payoff. My confusion makes me rate this one in the middle of the road, with the reservation that however confused I am, I was confused by people who are doing an excellent job.

Rating: (3 of 5)

June 2009 Solicitations

Every month they come out. Sometimes, I mention them. It’s the graphic novel solicitations for June 2009:

The Most Exciting News from DC is that the final volume of 100 Bullets, v. 13: Wilt, will be released July 8. This will wrap up the 100-issue run of the title, and despite containing twelve issues of the series, will only cost $19.99. For fans of the absurd, DC has Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves. No, really. There are two Showcase volumes for the month. The expected one is Batman, v. 4, which reprints Batman #202-15 and Detective Comics #376-90; this is still the ‘60s, so I’m not going to bother, but it’s coming closer to an era I’m interested in. The surprising title is Bat Lash, a 240-page volume for only $9.99. Still, that’s less than half a normal volume, for more than half the normal price; of course, if you’re a Bat Lash fan (honestly? huh), you’re not going to worry about the price. Those who have been waiting for the paperback of Astro City: The Dark Age, Book 1 will be able to stop waiting.

Marvel once again received the bulk of my attention. There are three Runaways volumes this month, not bad for a struggling title. The paperback of the beginning of Terry Moore’s run on the title, Dead Wrong, and a hardcover of his second arc, Rock Zombies, will be released, and those of you who have been waiting for the digest of Joss Whedon’s run, Dead End Kids, will find the wait over. I would argue that issuing the three titles in the same month would cause confusion or make readers choose one of the titles over the others because of budget reasons, but what do I know about marketing? Perhaps saturation is what the Runaways market calls for. The Essentials will be Dr. Strange, v. 4 (v. 2 #30-56), which I am eagerly awaiting, and Thor v. 4 (#167-95), which I am not. (Sorry, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby fans!) I’m also not excited about the price increase to $19.99, but there’s nothing to be done about that . For reasons I can’t understand, Irredeemable Ant-Man gets a complete-series compilation. Marvel’s take on Silver Age Superman, Sentry: The Age of the Sentry, will thrill fans of the stunning illogic of that era. The final TPB of Amazing Spider-Girl, v. 5: Maybreak, will give fans of the cancelled series something to absorb their tears. On a happier note, Marvel continues to put Walt Simonson’s Thor work back on the shelves with Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson, v. 3.

Image: Nothing caught my eye.

Dark Horse has Gigantic, a cross of monster movies and reality TV. Despite this being the June solicits, the Dark Horse Web site says Gigantic will be coming out in September. The other titles aren’t much better; DarkHorse.com claims these will be August releases. Myspace Dark Horse Presents, v. 3, has Usagi Yojimbo, Firefly, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer stories, as well as a story by Mike Mignola in the Hellboy universe; interesting, if you like that stuff. Dark Horse is also re-issuing several Usagi Yojimbo trade paperbacks, as they had allowed them, for some nefarious purpose, to go out of print. Savage Sword of Conan is up to