Wednesday Comics

I have been looking forward for months to the debut of Wednesday Comics, a 12 issue weekly anthology series from DC. The gimmick is that it isn't a conventional comic book pamphlet... it is a tabloid-sized newsprint publication meant to resemble the old-fashioned Sunday newspaper comics. Not the modern ones with the miniscule strips, but the glorious old full-page strips.

The price is $3.99, which is wince-inducing, but I can't say I'm not getting my moneys worth. If any comic is worth four bucks, this is.

Weekly comics are not strictly new. DC ran Action Comics Weekly for a while a couple of decades ago, and they've been publishing three year long weeklies over the past three years: 52 (which was wonderful), Countdown (which was not), and Trinity (which was not to my taste). And Amazing Spider-Man is published almost weekly, about three weeks every month. So it's not unheard of.

But the comic strip style is new. Each strip gets only one page, strange pacing by superhero conventions, but perfectly conventional by comic strip standards. And they've recruited a remarkable lineup of talented artists and writers to do this.

My favorites were Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook (they went for a Prince Valiant narration style that suits the strip); Green Lantern by Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones (most of the strip involves drink orders in a bar in the "Jet Age", which I found a nice contrast to the space action in the last panel); Metamorpho The Element Man, with writing by Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred (they fully embraced the Silver Age feel of the original strip, and it's glorious); Strange Adventures, with stunning work by Paul Pope, a big favorite of mine (again, full embrace of the Silver Age original Adam Strange); and Hawkman by Kyle Baker (gorgeous art and unusual narration).

The only real disappointment was the Teen Titans page. Unwisely, the confusing current continuity is apparently being used, which means no one but current readers will know who most of the characters are. I haven't the faintest. The art is the least impressive, and the writer chose to do exposition instead of story... and I didn't get anything from the exposition, either.

The Batman strip was ok; the Superman strip blah; the Flash page, interestingly called Flash Comics with a Flash strip paired with an Iris West strip, was interesting. And the Wonder Woman strip might be brilliant, even with pretty but confusing art, but I'm not sure yet. (If they really do it in Little Nemo dream segments each week, I'll be very impressed; also, I really like the new logo.)

I'm looking forward very much to more of this.