Comic Book Report - January

For some time now, I've been briefly reviewing weekly comic book purchases in email sent to friends, so I thought I'd transfer that to the blog. I have the difficulty, as mentioned in an earlier post, that the number of comics I am interested in reading is rapidly falling, and for some reason suddenly almost everything I buy is coming out at the end of the month. So these reports may become monthly and somewhat unwieldy. I think I will make very brief remarks and choose to review one or two books at more length each time I do this. Here we go:

Birds of Prey 126. This relatively long-running series about a variety of women adventurers loosely connected to the Batman storylines is about to be canceled - in fact, this is the penultimate issue. I've been buying it for some years, though not from the beginning, as long-time writer Gail Simone is a favorite. But her successors have not been quite as interesting, so if this weren't ending, I'd probably be dropping it. This issue is mostly about the travails of Oracle's opposite number, the Calculator, computer guy to the supervillains. It's not too bad, and sets up the final confrontation between the ladies and the bad guys. I can't really recommend it to anyone but long-time readers, under the circumstances.

Captain America 46. On the other hand, this was satisfying on every level. Art, script, cover, and the ongoing plot are all terrific. Indeed, it gets hard to say much about this series other than "buy it!" every month. This time around, the new Captain America, "Bucky" Barnes, is off to rescue an old ally, the android Human Torch from the clutches of an old enemy, while in company with another old ally, the Sub-Mariner. For this first blog review, I'll reiterate my principal observation about this book: I can't believe they killed Steve Rogers, the original Captain America (in issue 25) and yet this is a terrific story. Brubaker manages to do super-heroics and spy adventures with a noir feel all at once. Highly recommended.

Captain Britain and MI 13 9. This is another oddity: super-heroics merged with horror and fantasy; and like CA, successful. MI 13 is a British intelligence agency designed to cope with the supernatural, and our look at it has been delightful fun so far. This issue wraps up the current storyline, which included Captain Britain's nameless new team, with lots of interesting little twists, surprises and bits of characterization. I like the casual use of Dr. Strange story elements without having to bring the doctor himself into the action, and I'm looking forward to more of this. Highly recommended.

Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil 1. This is one of the Marvel all-ages books, but they've dropped the Marvel Adventures branding usually present. Wise, no doubt - the regular issues don't sell, as most collectors seem to regard them as strictly for children. The reputation is unfair - some of this is not only pretty good but refreshingly free of the doom and gloom so prevalent in many current Marvel titles. These stories exist in a mostly continuity-free zone where classic versions of the standard Marvel characters have adventures, almost always in one-off issues instead of the usual multi-issue storyline. In other words, they're well written, fairly well drawn, accessible and entertaining - all the things that many more popular comics are not. I don't read them all, but I buy them off and on when they look particularly interesting. This issue focuses on the villains, recruited by Dr. Doom to steal something from Tony Stark (Iron Man) and who have trouble with Dr. Strange, presented here as a competent foe, not Brian Bendis' troubled bozo. Anyway, this is the first all-ages issue, other than X-Men: First Class, (which I buy in trade paperback collections) with an overall thrust. Doom is up to something, and clearly we'll find out what in future issues. Mildly recommended.

Fantastic Four 563. Marvel's venerable flagship title, "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!", is presently being done for a lively spell by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitchens. I've been enjoying it much more than most of the Internet critics, it appears. The art is simply gorgeous, and I like Millar's willingness to go gonzo in this title and not simply give us "Dr. Doom tries to conquer the world" then "the Frightful Four attack the Baxter Building" then "Sue and Reed break up" and "Ben is angry and leaves the team", wash, rinse, repeat. I am troubled by the strange notion that Dr. Doom had mentors in evil; I would hardly think he would admit it. Doom famously has an out-sized ego, even for a comic book super-villain. But I'll go with it, as so far this run has been lavishly entertaining. Highly recommended.

Final Crisis 6 and 7 of 7. This the cap of DC's latest big crossover event. Written by Grant Morrison, this has been... well, confusing would be a good description. Morrison has written some of the best comics of the last ten years (All-Star Superman, New X-Men, JLA). But he has also written some wildly complex stories that seem to suffer from having too many ideas crammed in all at once. Final Crisis has been one of the latter. Now that it's done, it appears to be a giant reset button to enable DC editorial to clean up their increasingly murky continuity. I wouldn't venture to suggest that it worked, but if it was something of a train wreck, it was also worth watching. There have been some memorable scenes, and these last two issues include several:

* Superman arch-foe Lex Luthor and Captain Marvel arch-foe Dr. Sivana, forced to work for the big bad guy Darkseid, have not been at all enthused about it, and their interactions are surprisingly entertaining. Who would have thought Sivana would be so amusing? "Impress me, Sivana." Oh dear.

* All three of the Flashes, Golden Age Jay Garrick, Silver Age Barry Allen (long thought dead) and Bronze Age Wally West, gathered together with a problem. Solution? Outrun it, of course. Wally: "Barry, I think I met this guy before when he was called the Black Flash. I outran him." In the next panel, we see only Barry's slight smile and Jay's avuncular look of appreciation. Barry: "Heh. I bet you did." Little bit of a lump in the throat moment there.

* And then there's the confrontation between Batman and the big bad, Darkseid, who can naturally squash him like a bug. It doesn't exactly go that way. Wonderful scene.

A lot of what happens in these last two issues is difficult to sort out. DC keeps arranging these big events and claiming that they've made a fresh continuity start, but then nothing much changes. Editorial confusion, I think. But the new status quo would appear to suggest that everyone thinks Batman is dead, Hawkman and Hawkwoman appear to be dead... yet again. They're reincarnators from Ancient Egypt, of course, so I assume this is just another reboot. Aside from that, Superman saves the day in an interesting fashion, but again Morrison seems to have had about three ideas for how the climax works and chosen to use them all. I wouldn't think it was necessary to have all the Green Lanterns come to the rescue; and an army of alternate dimensional Supermen get recruited to come to the rescue; and for Superman to do two apparently inconsistent things at once to beat Darkseid. Furthermore, another big bad guy shows up at the end behind it all. Doesn't that diminish the role of Darkseid? Too many big ideas, not enough editorial discipline, I says. But it makes for fun reading, on the whole. Mildly recommended.

Incredible Hercules 125. This might be the weirdest thing being published right now. It was the Incredible Hulk until about a year ago, then mythic hero Hercules, who's never sustained his own series, took over, complete with sidekick, the brilliant youth Amadeus Cho. No part of this should interest me at all - I don't much care for the Hulk, Hercules was always an entertaining guest star in my opinion, at best, and Amadeus Cho? Really? But no, this stuff is brilliant, probably one of the two or three best things being published at the moment. Greek mythology is cleverly blended into Marvel continuity for a pleasureable reading experience every month. The current storyline wraps this issue, mostly taken up with a momentary alternate reality in which the women of the Marvel universe have taken over the world because of a magical artifact that Herc and Amadeus and Herc's current girlfriend Namora almost kept out of the bad gal's hands but not quite. Very highly recommended, and probably the best issue this month.

Knights of the Dinner Table 147. This is, for the uninitiated, a crudely drawn but hilariously scripted long-running storyline about five friends and their Hackmaster game (read D&D, obviously). There really is a Hackmaster game, along with various other gaming products produced by the publisher, Kenzer and Company. This issue, as usual, is splendid, with the players momentarily enjoying a respite in their current adventure, and a secondary gaming group having a raucous time playtesting a "Cattlepunk" scenario. Highly recommended.

Legion of Super-Heroes 50. The last issue, and this is the one that's going to get the full treatment, so I'll save it for a later post. Not going to be a good review, though.

Marvels: Eye of the Camera 2 and 3 of 6. Almost a decade and a half ago, Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross produced an exciting retrospective of the modern Marvel super-heroic age through the eyes of Daily Bugle photographer Phil Sheldon, called simply Marvels. It was a huge hit at the time, and made the reputations of both creators. Here, Busiek teams with artist Jay Anacleto to show some more of Sheldon's life, interspersed with events happening in the background from Marvel comics of the 70s. Busiek has done this before, in his own Astro City series, showing how superheroics would look to ordinary people to great effect. This is much the same. Not as impactful as those gorgeous Marvels issues - that street level scene of Giant-Man striding over buildings during an early Avengers battle as seen by Sheldon is perhaps the most memorable image of superhero comics in the 90s. At any rate, mildly recommended.

Mighty Avengers 21. The Avengers was always a favorite at Marvel for me. With rare exceptions, it was one of the most satisfyingly consistent titles for many decades. When Geoff Johns and then Brian Bendis took over a few years ago, however, they lost me. Mighty Avengers was an attempt by Bendis to satisfy the old school readers like me who didn't care for his New Avengers, but it was at best a cosmetic improvement, and that only for the first few issues. However, Dan Slott, himself apparently a more old-school writer, has now taken over this version of the Avengers (in addition to New Avengers, Bendis now writes Dark Avengers, in which all the classic heroes are replaced by evil counterparts - it gets worse and worse). While impressed with Slott, who wrote vastly entertaining sequences of The Thing and She-Hulk (of all things) a few years ago, I have not been thrilled with his more recent, more mainstream Marvel stuff. Nor were the reviews of this new endeavor very good. But I gave it a try. I think I'll save more extensive remarks for when this story arc has concluded, assuming I stick with it, but this is interesting. Mildly recommended.

Uncanny X-Men Annual 2. I'm not a huge X-Men fan, and I would have skipped this if I'd seen it on the stands for the first time, with its tiresome porn star expression and pose of the character principally featured, Emma Frost, better known as the White Queen. But I'd seen reviews, and the writer, Matt Fraction, is not to be entirely ignored, so I gave it a try. Speaking of pornography, X-Men has resembled what one might term "continuity porn" since the days of its great renaissance in the 70s and early 80s when written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. This is no exception - it is mostly a flashback to a hitherto unsuspected affair between the White Queen, originally a villainess from the kinky Hellfire Club, and Namor, the Sub-Mariner. They recently featured in a meeting among some of Marvel's villains and anti-heroes, which some Internet wags are referring to as the "Illumi-naughty", and here we get the backstory. Well, I'm not much interested in the "Dark Reign" proposed in the other book, but this tale of Emma and Namor is really quite entertaining. Although I'm amused at the fact that Emma, who waltzes around in a white dominatrix outfit and Namor, who wears bathing trunks - if that - pass for fully rounded characters. Ah well.