Comics in early July

I haven't had anything to say about comic books in a while. After the frustrations of early 2009, there have been a few decent things published, and I'm looking forward to Wednesday Comics from DC next week. Here are a few recent purchases of note:

Reborn 1 of 5. Captain America, famously, is dead, shot down on Manhattan courthouse steps two summers ago. And he's been replaced, to general satisfaction, by his old sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Now, no one has supposed, I would guess, that Steve Rogers wouldn't be back at some point, and any attentive and experienced super-hero comics reader couldn't have read the account of his death without picturing several ways for the writer to get out of it. Well, the method chosen surprised me a little... it's ok, and gives more opportunity for us to see Cap in WW II scenes, which has been a theme of Ed Brubaker's writing during this edition. I just expected something mind-blowing. This is good, though, and the Bryan Hitch art is fantastic. I really like Hitch, who combines a photo-realism style with great dynamism.

Mysterius the Unfathomable 2 of 5. This is way late, the book must have come out months ago, because I think the mini-series is complete. But I just saw the only copy I've seen at all on Wednesday, so I picked it up. Mysterius is a somewhat cranky, even rather sleazy, stage magician who now does investigations. The book is written by Jeff Parker, whom I like tremendously. He's written X-Men: First Class, Marvel Adventures: The Avengers and Agents of Atlas, all wonderful reads. I'd read that Mysterius was good, but wow. I haven't had this much fun reading a comic since All-Star Superman wrapped. The writing is witty, the story moves along briskly, intercut with interesting flashbacks from previous adventures, and the art is stylized and humorous in tone. I'll have to track down the rest of this.

Madame Xanadu 9-11. I first encountered Madame Xanadu in a one-shot by Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers many years ago. She was a fortune teller with real magical powers, and has appeared a few times since in various magic-themed DC books. But they weren't written by Englehart or drawn by Rogers, so I didn't pay much attention. The character recently got her own book, written by Matt Wagner. I bought the first couple of issues, which were handsome productions, but found the storytelling style frustrating; it was apparent that the series is tracing Xanadu from her origins (as Nimue) in Arthurian England, but without any editorial comment about what the pace was going to be like. My patience for that sort of thing is limited - serial fiction has some requirements to keep the reader coming back for the next issue, and I didn't think this version of Madame Xanadu was satisfying those requirements. I just happened to glance at a recent issue, however, and found that characters of greater interest, the Phantom Stranger and Zatara the magician (father of Zatanna) were appearing in a story set in the 1930s. Now that was fun. I do like the way Wagner allows Xanadu to be at odds with the other characters and even to make it clear that she's the one who's mistaken in the conflict, and yet sympathetic.