Weekly Haul: October 10th

Black Summer #3 (Avatar) Oh man, The Authority are pissed at John Horus and the U.S. military, and are ready to go to war with them both! More hyper-detailed, violent-looking art from Juan Jose Ryp, more Warren Ellis technobabble in the middle of a story that could use less of it, plus more of that Oh my God things are going to get so cool…next issue feeling. The scene with the tank toss was great, but I think Ryp forgot to draw a soldier or someone on that last page, because I can’t figure out who they’re talking too and pointing their super-guns at…unless Dominic can see right through the Fourth Wall and he was threatening me.




Booster Gold #3 (DC Comics) That cover image is so absolutely perfect that it doesn’t even need dialogue and a logo (in the final version, Booster’s saying “I love you, man…” and Hex replies “Shaddup.”) As you can see, this issue involves Booster Gold drinking whiskey with Hex (for two consecutive issues now, Booster has drank with heroes who don’t know who he really is in bars), although the two don’t spend all that much time together. The only change from the last two issues is the mysterious abandonment of the 52 format datelines, and there’s a page repeating a scene from Infinite Crisis that I didn’t quite understand, but other than that, this was another fun romp through DCU history. I’m hard-pressed to pick a favorite bit: Skeets on (er, slightly above) horseback, Anthro getting that jacket he wanted last issue (now for some pants), or Supernova showering his foes with buffalo. Blue Beetle now has some serious competition for its designation as the most fun DC book, and there’s no more appropriate challenger to a Blue Beetle comic than a Booster Gold one.





Captain Carrot and the Final Ark! (DC) I completely missed Captain Carrot and his crew the first time around. I think I read maybe one issue as a wee one and it kind of freaked me out, as I preferred my talking funny animals on the TV screen and my comic books to have superheroes, giant space robots that turn into Earth vehicles and appliances or G.I. Joe guys in them. So I really can’t say how well original artist Scott Shaw (Sorry Shaw, we don’t honor avant-garde punctuation here at EDILW) and new writer Bill Morrison recapture the old Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew spirit. I will say that this book was an awful lot of fun, and probably the densest, most rewarding book of the week in terms of the time spent reading-to-cover price ratio.

Set sometime after that weird-ass Teen Titans two-parter that stopped making any sense at all in the second part (In the first part, Eddie was reading a Captain Carrot comic, in the second part, the CC sequence just randomly appeared in a Titans story), the story opens at the Sandy Eggo Comic-Con, where the Zoo Crew find themselves less-popular than all the fake heroes. When a fire-powered amphibian villain called The Salamandroid, strikes, they swing into action. There’s a lot of set-up given, mostly on the fly and around the edges of the panels, but apparently there’s a war between the animals of the sea and the animals of the land brewing, with some amphibians stoking the flames (This is but one way it echoes recent happenings in the Marvel Universe).

Shaw’s art is downright amazing, and he packs so many visual gags into each panel that many beg returning to and carefully scanning, if only to hunt down more (In this respect, his work is quite reminiscent of Sergio Aragones, who guest-stars…or, at least, Sergio Antelopes does). Morrison is pretty good at the constant animal puns, and while there’s nothing revolutionary about the humor (it’s basically like the Flintstones formula of adding the word “rock” or “stone” to all real world equivalents), I let loose a “heh” on just about every page. My favorites were the title of the Superdog and Bat-Hound team-up title, and Pig-Iron saying “I’m watchin’ Fox News. Er, I mean, the fox on the news.”





Fantastic Four #550 (Marvel Comics) Oh, so there’s where Dwayne McDuffie’s A-game is. I was so sure he was going to bring it to Justice League of America with him, but apparently he left it in Fantastic Four. Well, whatever, I’m just glad we found it. This issue is the surprisingly fleet wrap-up the surprisingly gigantic threat exposed in the previous issue. The Fantastic Six reel in a few uber-powerful guest-stars—Dr. Strange, Uatu the Wathcer, Silver Surfer and Gravity—to help them accomplish the sort of big, crazy task that is Kirby-esque in scope (Or Morrison-esque, which is another reason you’d think McDuffie could have come up with something better than all the villains team up again for his first JLoA arc). Paul Pelletier’s pencil art is slightly stronger every time I see it, and under Rick Magyar’s inks, is even sorta resembling Alan Davis’ in certain panels (That’s a good thing, by the way). The only thing I don’t like about Pelletier’s art is his sense of fashion; check out Storm’s top at the concluding dinner party, or Franklin’s hair. Ew.

Then there’s that Fucking Michael Turner cover. I’d previously said this was one of his better ones, because he got Thing’s face better than before, everyone seems to be standing on solid ground (except the dude flying) and you can’t mess up stretchy guy anatomy, but it still doesn’t reflect the interiors at all, the lack of background and mysterious point of reference for their eyes is still irritating, and I can’t even begin to make sense of Invisible Woman’s ass, or why it’s played up so big on the cover. Still, compare this Thing to his original Thing. Is it amazing that he’s improved so fast in the course of just six months? Or depressing that he apparently did so little work in the beginning figuring out how to draw a forty-plus year old character with such an easily defined look?



Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #24 (Marvel) Fun fact: This issue costs $3.99, a full dollar more than the cover price of your average 22-page Marvel book. And what do we get for that extra dollar? Three extra story pages, plus Mary Jane’s four-page Official Guide to the Marvel Universe entry, five reprinted pages from Amazing Spider-Man #259 by Tom Defalco and Ron Frenz, and four pages detailing how inks and overdone colors make artist/EIC Joe Quesada’s pencil work look even worse. In other words, readers get absolutely robbed with this issue.

As for the first two-thirds of the book, Spidey hangs out with Dr. Strange, magically seeking an antidote for bullets that sends him all over the Marvel Universe simultaneously (mainly to prevent fans from asking why Spidey didn’t ask Hank Pym or Beast or Dr. Doom for help at conventions) and into the past. The art is less awful than that in the previous chapter “One More Day,” perhaps in large part because there are fewer normal people doing normal things, and the script is also much less awful, but then, writer J. Michael Straczynski probably couldn’t have written worse lines than he opened the last chapter with even if he tried. The last page reveals a surprise guest-star: Dorothy from DC’s Doom Patrol. I think.





Green Lantern #24 (DC) I like how each succeeding chapter of “The Sinestro Corps War” gets a little more exciting, and I find myself shouting back “Oh snap!” “Dayumn!” and “Holy @#$%!” a little more each issue (Well, at least the half of it I’m following; I haven’t been reading GL’s sister book). In this issue, the Sinestro Corps bring the battle ground to Earth, which really ups the stakes (and my interest). For me, the thing about high space opera is that really, no matter how good it is, it’s still just a bunch of silly shit happening somewhere I can’t relate too. But when you start knocking down the statue of liberty and blowing up NYC taxi cabs, then things get real, you know? This chapter is classic, even formulaic Johns, with constantly upping stakes and surprise guest-stars/calvary or threats streaming onto the scene at key points. Someone even gets cut in half, and you may remember just last week someone got torn in half in a Johns-written title. He does change up the big cliff-hanging moment, so here it’s a fist-pumping “happy” big moment instead of an “Oh @#$%, how will they get out of that?” kind of thing.

But, like I said, it’s the little things I like most about this. Like the pained look on Sinestro’s face on page 3, which I like to think is his reaction to having to work alongside Superdouche-Prime, or Sd-P’s announcement of his arrival to the JSA, or the fact that Guy has a Michigan sticker slapped on the side of his Oan power lantern, or John Stewart’s Morgan Freeman paraphrase (the construction’s a tad awkward though; it would have been better if Parallax set him up with a “You have to die.”)

Yeah, it’s big dumb fun, but it’s well done big dumb fun, and that’s the best kind.

One last thing—Am I the only one who thinks lines like, “That means along with my partner, John Stewart, I serve and protect every planet in this designated quadrant” makes Hal and John sound like a couple?

I am?

Okay, just wondering.







New Avengers #35 (Marvel) Yes, that’s Wolverine, being possessed by a Venom-style symbiote—the birth of the most popular character Marvel could possibly produce? Perhaps. Does anything like this happen in the comic itself? God no. The Avengers only appear briefly on a TV screen, and if you look real close, as I am now that I’m writing about it, I see that the New Avengers have all been Venom-ized and are attacking the Republican Avengers. But the other twenty-one and a half pages are all D-List villains being talked at by The Hood, plus a brutal attack on Tigra. (Don’t worry Tigra fans and furry enthustiasts—or is that redundant?—she doesn’t die).

Now, a few years ago I might have complained about Brian Michael Decomprendis giving us twenty-one and a half pages of talking—particularly since the people doing the talking aren’t even the Avengers—but 35 issues in, I’ve learned to accept the curious pacing of the book. And besides, I’ve seen Bendis attempt action-packed issues of New Abengers before, and those tend to be much, much (much!) worse, so all-talk is a-ok with me at this point. Besides, we have Marvel Adventures Avengers and Avengers: The Initiative if we want to see Avengers using super-powers.

Anyway, this issue jumps back in time a bit, and shows us what happened between the events of a few of the past issues, only from the villains’ perspectives. The Hood is attempting to unite all of Marvel’s villains into some kind of union, or secret society or Injustice Gang, if you will. What I found most interesting about this is despite the fact that Bendis is having his characters do the same thing DC villains have been doing for sixty years, and which McDuffie had them doing again just two weeks ago, Bendis at least gives it an interesting angle. We at least get to hear Hood’s sales pitch, and see how he anticipates and smoothes over the normal villain team-up problems, and how he anticipates dealing with the heroes. It takes an idea Brad Meltzer expressed in his first round of Identity Crisis interviews (regarding the only thing you could do to superheroes that’s worse than kill them, which is old hat at this point anyway), but it Marvelizes it. In essence, The Hood plans on controlling people the way real criminals of all stripes control people in the real world—through money and violence.

I could really have used a key in the back instead of a recap page though, because I didn’t recognize most of these guys.




Runaways #28 (Marvel) Well, Joss Whedon has succeeded in doing for this title what he did for Astonishing X-Men—slowing the proceedings down so much with delays that I’ve not only ceased caring but actually forgotten what happened in the previous issue. And here he doesn’t even have John Cassaday’s art to blame! Now, I don’t know that it’s Whedon who’s causing the long-ass delays between issues of Runaways and not pencil artist Michael Ryan, but, if it’s Ryan, then man, what a coincidence that both of Whedon’s ongoing Marvel series have such slow-ass pencilers on them! How delayed is this issue? Well, #26 is dated July, #27 August and this one says December. Everything inside is good enough, but not so good that it’s worth the trouble of plopping down $2.99 to read a chapter whenever it manages to come out instead of just waiting until it’s a trade and reading it then. The brewing war between the various factions of turn of the (last) century wonders is pretty neat, but if the next chapter is as delayed as this one, it’s not like I’ll remember any of this by then anyway.

There's one incredibly weird moment in the story, in which Karolina and Molly meet a girl the latter's age who complains about her "marital duties." To be clear, it's a scene of a girl who, if she were living in the 21st century, would be called a "tween," forced to have sex with an adult man against her will. Okay, so perhaps that happend back then. But does Whedon need to put it in a comic book being published right now? And does he need to use it to construct a silly joke? It's basically used to set Molly up to deliver a punchline.

Oh, and Nightstick and Daystick? Worst. Batman and Robin analogues. Ever.




Suicide Squad #2 (DC) Having missed the vast majority of Jon Ostrander and company’s original Suicide Squad, I find myself at a loss as to what the hell’s going on in a lot of these flashbacks, and even what’s a flashback and what isn’t. I am quite certain that Rick Flag fights a velociraptor and a pterodactyl while trapped in Skartarsis with his mortal enemy with the magical fire scimitar though. So I know this is $2.99 well spent.





Superman #668 (DC) This issue kicks off with a special below the credits note: “Due to unforeseen delays, the finale of Camelot Falls will be seen in Superman Annual #13, later this year. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.” So, if you’re keeping score at home, this is the third DC storyline so woefully behind schedule that the editors decided to steam ahead without finishing it, shunting the conclusion off to be concluded in an annual sometime later (Following in the footsteps of “Who Is Wonder Woman?” and “Last Son of Krypton”) Obviously this isn’t the way to run a comic book company, especially one with a shared universe in which all the stories being told take place (this new story, for example, refers back to those stories that aren’t over yet), but once the mistake of hiring people incapable of a monthly schedule for monthly work has been committed, there’s really nothing to do but apologize, move on and not be so stupid the next time.

This is the first chapter of “The Third Kryptonian,” which will reveal that there’s actually a third Kryptonian on Earth besides Superman and Supergirl. And it’s not Krypto. Or Power Girl. Or Chris. And probably not any of the Phantom Zone criminals, whatever happens to them in the last chapter of that Action Comics story we haven’t been allowed to read yet.

It consists mostly of some evil-looking aliens talking ominously about the number of Kryptonians on Earth, and the World’s Finest team teaming-up to hunt down that third Kryptonian. Oh, and some of Superman being a dad to Chris. I think Chris is a pretty terrible, Cousin Oliver-esque idea personally, but writer Kurt Busiek makes it work as well as it possibly can, and it was actually quite cute to see Robin being all big brother look to the little super-moppet. Just as it was cute to see Superman and Batman in Best Friends mode, working on a little science project involving a red sunlight projector and Pig-Iron kids' watch together.





Wonder Girl #2 (DC) Okay, here’s the thing about this miniseries—it’s not really a story about anything other than its own backstory. Last issue was spent getting us caught up on the events of that stupid Amazons Attack mess and Wonder Girl’s convoluted past. This issue is all about getting us caught up to speed to on that stupid Amazons Attack story, letting us know what’s up with Diana and Donna not being there for Wonder Girl, telling us Hercules’ history right up until last week’s Wonder Woman Annual, and kinda sorta starting to get on with a story of it’s own, when who should appear but the Female fucking Furies, bringing with them more AA and Countdown baggage. It’s terribly frustrating, because J. Torres may have a good story to tell (I did enjoy Hercules’ attempts to convince Wonder Girl that they’re siblings and should help their dad Zeus) and Sandford Greene is a great artist, whose linework and character designs my eyes straight up drink right off the page. But as much as I like the art and Torres occasional light touches (and check it out, Empress and Arrowette meeting Cassie for coffee!), it would be nice if they were serving a story, and not just one more domino that needs to fall to get the DCU from point C to D. Right now, I’m buying this book just for the linework, and while that’s great and all, $18 seems like a lot to pay for some nice linework, doesn’t it?