DC's October previewes reveiwed

So for the first time in memory, DC Comics released their solicitations for comics they plan to publish three months hence, and I didn't even notice until Thursday night, when I saw Tom Bondurant's column on Robot 6 (This despite visiting ComicsAlliance and Comic Book Resources daily). So, naturally, my monthly review of the previews is a few days later than usual this month. Sorry.

Why didn't I notice? I don't know. I hope it's not because of a growing, perhaps ever terminal apathy toward super-comics. I mean, if I quit super-comics, there are certainly enough reprints of old comics and manga out there that I'd never be in want of comics to read, but I really, really love superhero comics, and it seems like DC and Marvel (and Dynamite and Dark Horse and IDW) are just publishing fewer and fewer superhero comics for a price I can justify spending them on. That is, $2.99-$3.50.

Like, $3 is just a cup of coffee and a doughnut, but $4? That's a cafe mocha—a special treat for when I'm flush and wanna spurge on a sweet, caffeinated beverage, you know? That's not just most of a gallon of gas, it's more than a gallon of gas.

I thought this piece on The Beat about DC's quietly moving away from their "drawing the line at $2.99" pledge was interesting (and really, who can blame them for doing so quietly? It'd be weird to make a big deal about going back on a pledge, or even just saying you've changed your mind, or the pledge has expired).

In the comments, Kurt Busiek chimes in by noting that market research shows that the difference between a $3.50 book and a $3.99 book doesn't discourage anyone from buying the more expensive one, so of course the company is going to take the extra 49-cents if their audience wants to give it to them (Someone at Marvel once said something similar in response to a question from Newsarama or CBR, to the effect that they charge $3.99 for comics because their readers are willing to pay $3.99 for their books).

Now, I draw my personal line at $2.99 (but will make exceptions if the content warrants it; like I really, really, really wanna see a Ross Campbell Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comic even if it costs 33% more than I think it should, or if the $4 book has 30 pages worth of story or something), but I must be in the minority.

Anything over $3 I want to read, I can trade-wait, which means in some cases buying the trades, and, in others, borrowing them from the library.

DC's price hikes, and the fewer and fewer high quality series I feel I need to read serially rather than trade-waiting, has dwindles precipitously and, this round of solicitations indicates I'll be cutting the number of DC books I read serially in half, from two books to one (The print version of Batman '66, happily, will replace it, keeping the number of DC books I read serially at two).

Here's what my linen closet currently looks like:

I have a lot more comics than I do linen, so I keep the new books I'm reading serially in little stacks on the shelves of my linen closet (the top shelf, not pictured, contains towels and sheets).

You probably can't make out all the covers, but those stacks are for Adventures of Superman, Legends of the Dark Knight, Daredevil, Hawkeye, FF, Young Avengers, The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, Saga, Classic Popeye, SpongeBob Comics and then a little stack of random comics (Right now I think the last Empowered special and the last Multiple Warheads mini is in that pile). At this precise moment in time, those are the only comics I'm not trade-waiting (with the intent to either buy, like Batman, Batman Inc, Batwoman, Morrison's Action Comics, Red She-Hulk, maybe Hickman's Avengers stuff, etc) or intent to borrow (Wonder Woman, Geoff Johns' Aquaman and Justice League stuff, Indestructible Hulk, maybe Bendis' X-Men stuff, Brian Woods' boring Star Wars book and all-girl X-Men, all that Dynamite pulp stuff if I can ever find it in an Ohio library, etc).

The only reason I picked up Superior Foes was because it was a $2.99 book, and thus not something I felt was too expensive to gamble on; in fact, that same week I also tried out Avengers A.I. #1, which I didn't like enough to want to read another issue of, but $3 comics are the kinds of comics I feel I can sample, while $4 books just seem like too big an investment to impulse buy (So, super-specific anecdote, I know, but last week Marvel sold me two books I wouldn't have bought that week if they were at the other price point, and hooked me on one of them enough that I plan to keep buying it as long as they're publishing it). Like, I almost bought this book about army guys and dinosaurs this week—Chronos Commandos, maybe?—but it was $4, and I figured it would take me longer to drink and enjoy a cafe mocha some day then it would take me to read that comic.

My point—I think I had one, or thought I might have one when I started typing—was that perhaps my failure to notice a new round of solicitations had something to do with my increasing apathy for the the serially-published comic book-comics, as I reluctantly become more and more of a trade reader, due in equal parts to the unreasonably high price of so many comic books and my difficulty in finding ones so great I can't wait six-12 months to read 'em.

Anyway, what's DC got going on in October...?

AME-COMI GIRLS #8
Written by JUSTIN GRAY and JIMMY PALMIOTTI
Art by ADAM ARCHER and STEVEN CUMMINGS
Cover by EDUARDO FRANCISCO
On sale OCTOBER 16 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
FINAL ISSUE
Three new Ame-Comi Girls go on three separate solo missions to wrap up the series. Big Barda provokes a head-to-head confrontation with Darkseid, White Canary evens the odds in Vegas, and Mera defends Seattle from an attack by her evil half-sister, Black Manta.

ARROW #12
Written by MARC GUGGENHEIM
Art by VICTOR DRUJINIU, JUAN CASTRO, ALLAN JEFFERSON and JONAS TRINDADE
Photo cover
On sale OCTOBER 23 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
FINAL ISSUE
After the shocking events of the season one finale, Oliver reflects on the regrets of his past...and his course of action for the future. Plus, when a pilot gets in deep with the wrong kind of people, the Starling City vigilante becomes an unlikely ally in the fight to save his family.

LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #13
Written by PETER MILLIGAN and TIM SEELEY
Art by RICCARDO BURCHIELLI and FREDDIE WILLIAMS II
Cover by DAVID WILLIAMS
On sale OCTOBER 16 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST • FINAL ISSUE
Batman returns to his low-tech roots after years of counting on WayneTech gadgetry in “Return of Batman.” Then, when The Dark Knight takes one of Gotham City’s unluckiest criminals into protective custody, Thirteen forces him to reconsider in “Unlucky 13.”

So here are three of DC's digital first comic books that are being canceled; these were ones that you could apparently buy digital chapters of online and then, shortly afterward, DC would publish good old-fasioned paper-and-staples versions of 'em and then, later again, trade collections. Essentially, they were selling the material to three different audiences at three different times in three different ways, and the economics sure seemed to be working, based on how many of the series they have now.

These three are getting axed though, and I suppose in a few months Marc-Oliver Frisch  or someone will theorize as to what this means regarding the bottom line (like, exactly how few of these comic book versions they needed to sell to make the comic book versions worthwhile).

The only one that really annoys me is LDK as, it is one of only two comic book-comics I still buy and read from DC serially (and provided a nice "refuge" from the New 52, as Batman: Black and White will). I understand that they'll still do them digitally and go straight to trade, which kind of makes sense: Those trades, while a grab bag of subject matter and quality and even characters, will make fine gifts for random friend or family member that likes Batman but you don't know what books he already has, and are great for public library collections.

Me, I'm just personally bummed because after canceling Superman Family Adventures, it looks like someone from DC is breaking into my apartment, looking to see what DC comics I still buy as comic books, and then canceling out of spite. I don't expect Adventures of Superman to last much longer.

I'm not surprised to see Ame-Comi go, as that was a sort of confused and pointless endeavor from the beginning. The point of inspiration was manga/anime style reimaginging of DC characters as scantily-clad fan-service statues. The comics kept the basic costume designs, but the ever rotating art teams didn't draw in a manga/anime style, the storytelling wasn't manga/anime and the writers eschewed fan-service completely: I could find more of it any five pages of, say, Yasuhiro Kano's Pretty Face Vol. 2 (the last manga volume I read) then in any five issues of this series, which was basically just generic superhero stuff in a world with no male super-people (I was pretty put off and dropped the series around the time the writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray had a good guy character and a villain both call Harley Quinn retarded in roundabout ways ("special," and "short bus," if I recall corectly).

One virtue was that we got to see artists like Sandford Greene and Ted Naifeh draw some DC super-comics, even if their talents were kind of wasted here.

It is odd, however, that the book was just upgraded from a mini-series to an ongoing, and then canceled just a few issues into its ongoing statues.

(Given all that, I would probably be down with a Bombshells book based on their new line of super-ladies redesigned as 1940s-era pin-up girls and airplane nose art, if DC could secure a really good good-girl artist—Guillem March? Bruce Timm? Darwyn Cooke? J. Bone? Ronnie del Carmen, who they probably can't? Arthur Adams or Frank Cho, who they probably also can't? George Perez or Jerry Ordway would be good for this, as would Kevin Maguire, although he's got a pretty plum assignment...—and a good writer for a World War II era story (Maybe James Robinson?) of super-Rosie the Riveters kicking Axis ass).

As for Arrow, I have no experience with that book, and am as uninterested in it as I am in the TV show. I wonder if it's simply being canceled because the TV show is, or because, as the solicit says, it ties in to the end of a season, and thus maybe it will be relaunched in the near future with a new season...?

Suffering Shad! Is Aquaman growing out his beard again? Is this the beginning of the gradual Batman: The Brave and The Bold-ification of the King of the Seven Seas? Outrageous!


AQUAMAN ANNUAL #1
Written by JOHN OSTRANDER
Art by GERALDO BORGES and RUY JOSE
Cover by PAUL PELLETIER and DANNY MIKI
On sale OCTOBER 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Aquaman must reunite with The Others to investigate whether or not their recently deceased member Vostok has returned from the dead. If he has, he is definitely not the same Vostok they remember…

Hey everybody, look! It's veteran writer John Ostrander!

I'm sort surprised to see an The Others focused storyline, given how dull I found "The Others," and I don't recall hearing much excitement in the shops or online about those character (aside from disappointment that Johns introduced a female Iranian character just to have her murdered to move the plot along).

That said, I would totally buy an The Others Vs. The Justice Experience comic!

BATMAN AND TWO-FACE #24
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art and cover by PATRICK GLEASON and MICK GRAY
On sale OCTOBER 16 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
“The Big Burn” part one of five! Two-Face’s first epic in The New 52 sees Batman unraveling the mysterious connections between Harvey Dent’s life and the origin of Carrie Kelley!

Okay guys, if Damian's not really coming back to life and we're not getting a new Robin or a new/old Robin in Tim Drake, I think we can just go ahead and cancel Batman and Robin, rather than just changing it's title every couple of issues to reflect a different guest-star.

You still want Tomasi and Gleason to have their own Bat-book? That's fine. Give 'em TEC or Dark Knight or, hell, just launch a new book—you're not using Gotham Knights or Shadow of the Bat at the moment—and you can even have a new #1 and everything...!

Hey, that girl who looks exactly like Barbara Gordon isn't supposed to be Carrie Kelly is it? Because that would be kind of silly if there were two teenage girls hanging around Batman and they both looked the exact same, wouldn't it?


BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE #2
Written by RAFAEL GRANPA, DAN DIDIO, RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE, JEFF LEMIRE and MICHAEL USLAN
Art by RAFAEL GRAMPA, J.G. JONES, RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE, ALEX NINO and DAVE BULLOCK
Cover by JIM STERANKO
On sale OCTOBER 2 • 48 pg, B&W, 2 of 6, $4.99 US • RATED T
The Eisner Award-winning series continues with a second amazing issue! Don’t miss new takes on the Dark Knight from legendary creators including Rafael Grampá, Dan DiDio and J.G. Jones, Rafael Albuquerque, Jeff Lemire and Alex Niño, and Michael Uslan and Dave Bullock! Plus, a cover by the amazing Jim Steranko!

Let's pause a moment to look a little more closely at the credits of this comic, the second issue in the second series in which DC rounds up the world's greatest living comics artists and allows 'em to do pretty much whatever they want for the length of a short black-and-white comic book.: Jim Steranko, Rafael Grampa, Rafael Albuquerque, Alex Nino, Jeff Lemire, Michale Uslan, Dave Bullock, Rafael Albuquerque and Dan DiDio.

Tell me, does one of those names look just a little out of place?

I can appreciate DiDio's desire to write comics, and I imagine if he does write them, he feels he must do them for the company he's working for rather than, I don't know, self-publishing mini or webcomics or something. And I can see him taking on a special challenge like "None of the last 80 guys we hired to make an Outsiders series work? I guess I can take that challenge and see if I can do better," or to work on something by special request, like the Metal Men strip he did in Wednesday Comics (another series in which he was [one of] the odd creators out in terms of talent, acclaim and stature).

But to give yourself—or even accept an offer—on such a prestigious project as this? I don't know, guys; it seems like a basketball coach deciding to put himself in the game for a quarter or something.

I know appearances and perception of being stand-up, genteel, all-around admirable and cool guys isn't something DC management are overly concerned with these days (see Before Watchmen), but this just looks gauche.

Hey look, it's a Darwyn Cooke cover for an issue of Batwing! Is this the first time you've been tempted to consider purchasing an issue of Batwing? Sadly, even Cooke trying to minimalize the hell out of that image and that costume still can't make all those little lines work, which is probably a good indication that it's not a very good costume.

You know, if they lost all the little lines, that would rather pleasantly like a blue and black version of a the Batman from Batman Beyond, wouldn't it?

DC UNIVERSE VS. THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE #3
Written by KEITH GIFFEN
Art by DEXTER SOY
Cover by ED BENES
On sale OCTOBER 23 • 32 pg, FC, 3 of 6, $2.99 US • RATED T
After the shocking ending to issue #2, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe find themselves hunted by the Justice League. In the midst of the chaos, Skeletor’s plan moves into its next, dangerous phase!

I'd be a lot more interested in this series if they hadn't just redesigned all of the characters from both franchises to make them nigh-unrecognizable. Like, I suppose that lady on the right is supposed to be Teela, but I'm not sure why she's dressed like Man-At-Arms and shooting a laser gun at Wonder Woman, who has traded her magic lasso in for a sword.

FOREVER EVIL #2
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by DAVID FINCH and RICHARD FRIEND
...
On sale OCTOBER 2 • 32 pg, FC, 2 of 7, $3.99 US • RATED T
...
The villains have taken over the world! The Teen Titans fight back! Can the inexperienced teen heroes do what the adults could not? (Answer: Nope. It goes very poorly.)
This issue is also offered as a combo pack edition with a redemption code for a digital download of this issue.

Oh my God, DC has Batman appearing on so many covers now that he's got cover appearance fatigue, and whenever he sees two or more characters doing a cover shoot, she just assumes he's supposed to be on the cover too and just shows up and starts posing.

I believe Wolverine suffered from that for a while not too long ago...

You know, after watching that little promotional video DC made up for "Trinity War," this whole event is starting to feel kind of Marvel-ous, what with the hero vs. hero war leading to a take over of the DCU by the villains a la "Dark Reign"(And Brian Michael Bendis was basically just writing Norman Osborn like he was Lex Luthor with a toupee for much of that time period anyway, except for the parts where he was talking to his mask and being all Goblin-y, of course). See also DC's own Final Crisis for another "the heroes lose, the villains win" storyline.

FOREVER EVIL: ARKHAM WAR #1
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by SCOT EATON and JAIME MENDOZA
...
On sale OCTOBER 9 • 32 pg, FC, 1 of 6, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
As FOREVER EVIL hits the world, no corner of the DC Universe is in worse shape than Gotham City! Madness and mayhem hit the streets as both Arkham Asylum and Blackgate Prison unleash their prisoners upon the helpless citizens of Gotham. And with no Dark Knight to protect the city, what horrors will follow?

If that is the creative team for the series, it's not a bad one, and this would (pre-New 52) been right up my alley. Post-New 52? Well, as someone who hasn't read all that much New 52 Batman yet (like, relative to the amount they've published so far), I think it might be interesting to see who made the continuity cut and who didn't, how radically some of them have been transformed (Like Joker's Daughter; yeesh) and how the new guys (Emperor Penguin, and, what was it, Lingerie Bunny...?) fit in with the older villains.

The thing is, there's so little information in that solicitation that I have no idea what this is gonna be about. Are the villains gonna be fighting one another? Is it just going to be six issues of them murdering civilians? Are Alfred Pennyworth and Commissioner Gordon gonna team-up with Bat-Mite, Bat-Cow and Titus to kick the living shit out of all these bad guys What's the conflict here, exactly...?

Hey, why is Emperor Penguin called Emperor Penguin if he looks nothing at all like a penguin? Why isn't he just called, like Blue Face...? (I mean, aside from the obvious fact that it's a really stupid name).

GREEN LANTERN ANNUAL #2
Written by ROBERT VENDITTI
Art and cover by SEAN CHEN
On sale OCTOBER 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Don’t miss the stunning conclusion of “Lights Out!” Can Relic be defeated? Who lives? Who dies? The new status quo for the Lanterns is revealed here!

Wait a minute, didn't the new status quo for the Lanterns just get revealed, like, two issues ago? Three more issues and they'll be ready for a new new status quo...?

HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE #7
Written by DAN ABNETT
Art by RAFAEL KAYANAN
Cover by YILDIRAY CINAR
On sale OCTOBER 16 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US
A new adventure begins here! With Eternia still occupied by the Horde, He-Man and King Randor lead a small group of Masters on a quest to find the one object that might free Eternia! Join the new creative team of Dan Abnett and Drew Johnson as they take He-Man and the Masters of the Universe into their next great chapter!

He-Man's the one with the H, right? And I guess the bearded guy is supposed to be King Randor...? He's...changed. And Teela and Stratos? Is that you Stratos? Jeez, these redesigns are all headed in the wrong direction; rather than updating the original costumes with tweaks that made them look more cool, more detailed and more realistic, as they did for that cartoon a few years back, they seem to be moving everyone away from the medieval/barbarian look and towards something more superheroic and sc-fi; this feels more The New Adventures of He-Man than the 21st century version of He-Man and THe Masters of the Universe.

Hey, serious question: Have they shown the new Buzz-Off design anywhere? I really, reeaalllly wanna know what Buzz-Off looks like now.

Here's something I never expected to type: Man, I sure am glad there are variant covers for these comics.

(Hey, "Justice League Dark" isn't actually the team's name, right? No one "in story" calls them that; it's just the title of their comic book, right?)

JUSTICE LEAGUE 3000 #1
Written by KEITH GIFFEN and J.M. DeMATTEIS
Art and cover by KEVIN MAGUIRE
...
On sale OCTOBER 2 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
...
Don’t miss the debut of the new series starring the heroes of today—tomorrow! But what are they doing in the year 3000? And who (or what) brought them there? Get ready for a double dose of wonder as only the stellar creative team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire can deliver!

God knows I love this creative team, and I'm pretty much always up for Kevin Maguire art, but there is absolutely nothing on this cover that doesn't make me want to laugh at this book. And I think is is supposed to be a straight, serious super-comic, and not a "Bwa-ha-ha" parody of one, right?

Kind of surprised they're going with that title instead of some form of Justice Legion, given the setting...

Like Earth 2, this is a title I'm extremely curious about, but not necessarily interested in, if that makes any sense; I'll definitely check out the first trade in a year or so.


KATANA #8
Written by ANN NOCENTI
Art by ALEX SANCHEZ and ART THIBERT
Cover by FABRIZIO FIORENTINO
On sale OCTOBER 9 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Don’t miss this rematch with Coil! Plus: Who is the Mad Samurai, and what is his connection to the soultaker?

I don't know, he's mad at it...?


NIGHTWING ANNUAL #1
Written by KYLE HIGGINS
Art by JASON MASTERS
Cover by TONY S. DANIEL
On sale OCTOBER 30 • 48 pg, FC, $4.99 US • RATED T
Robin and Batgirl grew up fighting side by side…but with Dick Grayson about to embark on a new crimefighting quest and Barbara Gordon no longer fighting under the Bat, is there anything left between them? Following the “Batgirl: Wanted” epic, this is the story of a twosome with nothing left to lose, fighting for the only thing they can: each other!

They did? Then how come that Robin is now a grown-ass man while Batgirl is still Batgirl?

(Wait, they didn't grow up fighting side by side...I thought Dick Grayson was only Robin for like eight and a half months in this new continuity...?)

I would like to take a moment to extend my sincere sympathy to the very talented Mr. Guillem March for having had to draw...whoever that big guy on the cover of The Phantom Stranger is.

SUPERMAN/WONDER WOMAN #1
Written by CHARLES SOULE
Art by TONY S. DANIEL and BATT
Cover by TONY S. DANIEL
...
On sale OCTOBER 9 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
...
Beginning a bold new series that details the relationship between The Man of Steel and the Warrior Princess as rising star writer Charles Soule is joined by fan favorite artist Tony S. Daniel to tell the tale of a romance that will shake the stars themselves. These two super-beings love each other, but not everyone shares their joy. Some fear it, some test it—and some will try to kill for it. Some say love is a battlefield, but where Superman and Wonder Woman are concerned it spells Doomsday!
...

Well, they had me right up until the art credit...

(This would be an excellent book for Phil Jimenez to draw, as he draws both of those characters very, very well. Ditto George Perez).

It is well worth noting that this is the first time that Wonder Woman has been able to support two—well, one and a half—titles—since...well, in my life-time anyway. Odd to see Hermes and Zola on that cover too, as there has been such an incredibly rigid, impenetrable wall between Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman (which features those characters) and the rest of the DC Universe. Not only has Wondy's relationship with Superman never been referenced in the book, Superman's existence hasn't been referenced. If you were only reading Wonder Woman, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was set outside the DCU, in its own world where the only super-people are gods and demigods (and at least one New God).

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, of course. Wonder Woman works just fine as it is (even if it is glacial in its pacing) and doesn't need to constantly check in with the rest of the DCU line, but it's an outlier in that DC editorial seems to be letting Azzarello get away with ignoring the rest of the universe, whereas so many other writers have left their books complaining of constant interference, and that if you read both Wonder Woman and Justice League, it really does seem like there are two entirely different Wonder Women in those books.

Here we see DC attempting to appeal to the broad and natural audience for a superhero princess consisting of thousands of little girls, a YA-reading teenage girls and Bronies by putting a pony on the cover.

Naturally, they had to DC it up though, and so the pony is a big, scary, angry monster pony standing atop a mountain of skulls.

Meanwhile...

This week I spoke to both halves of the Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdika creative team for Good Comics For Kids in a pair of interviews. Here's one with writer Jim Ottaviani and here's one with artist Maris Wicks. I hope you guys check the book out. It's a pretty good one, and, thanks in large part to Wicks' art and the subject matter, maybe my favorite of Ottaviani's comics since Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards.

And over at Robot 6, I have a review of Persia Blues Vol. 1, by Ohio's own Dara Naraghi and Ohio's own Brent Bowman. Even if you don't feel like reading me babble on for a few hundred more words, do click on that link just to look at the image Bowman produced at the top of the piece. Wow, that's some nice drawing.

Comic shop comics: July 10th (Plus, Batwoman Vol. 1, because there were like no comics out this week)

Batwoman Vol. 1: Hydrology (DC Comics) It was a light week. A very, very light week so I bought a trade I had been meaning to buy for a while. Batwoman fell into that category of trades I wait for but then might not read for years and years, as it's one I know I'll like probably enough to own, and so I sit out the serially-published singles, waiting for the trade, and I refuse to borrow the eventual trade from the library, waiting until I have the money and inclination to pick up the trade for myself (In this case, I was somewhat hesitant as I don't think I finished all of the Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III Batwoman comics from their short 2010 run in Detective Comics, which have since been collected in a trade with no volume number, entitled Batwoman: Elegy.

So this trade, Hydrology, is interesting in that it collects an early 2011 Hey, remember Batwoman still exists and we're gonna publish a monthly series like we promised five years ago someday, we swear! #0 issue (and second #0 issue would follow the next year) from before the launch of "The New 52" line and universe, and then the first five issues of the series from after it's September 2011 launch as part of "The New 52."

It is written by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman, with Williams providing the bulk of the visuals (The #0 issue he splits art duties with Amy Redder and Richard Friend, and, for reasons unfathomable to me, letterer Todd Klein gives both Batman and Bruce Wayne their own, distinct narration box styles, even though the narration is presented as an investigation of Batwoman; Batman tails her in his costume, while Bruce Wayne tails her civilian identity in a variety of disguises).

As a story, it is remarkable in the degree to which it completely ignores the New 52 reboot. Even the the least rebooted franchises (Batman and Green Lantern) had some tweaks, like more lines in their costumes. The only changes here are this weird images where Williams or and/or colorist Dave Stewart alters a crowd scene of Batman, Inc members so that the costumes or characters that don't exist anymore look like they're being incinerated by lightning.

Otherwise? Kate Kane's wearing the exact same costume. She's still tangling with the were-people offshoot of the religion of crime from the weekly series 52 and Greg Rucka's millennial run on Detective Comics. Batman's still got Batman, Inc going (this would have been in the months between the cancellation of the first volume of the title and the launch of the second as a New 52 replacement series), Superman supporting character Maggie Sawyer is still around from back when Rucka was writing for the Bat-office, Renee Montoya still exists, fucking Flamebird still exists (despite their never having been a Teen Titans...?), Agent Chase Cameron and Director Bones from the DEO (seen in the short-lived 1998 series) are still around (although presumable Bones wouldn't have been part of an Infinity Inc team, which wouldn't have/shouldn't have existed in the New 52) and, of course, the plot of this graphic novel continues directly from the events of the Rucka/Williams TEC stories in Elegy.

As far as I've read then, this is the first of The New 52 comics to almost completely ignore the New 52 and pick up right where it left off, heavily reliant on the old continuity.

Oh wait, they made Stewart color Commissioner Gordon's hair and mustache red instead of gray; I guess that's a bow to the new continuity.

Is that a drawback? I don't know; it sure seems to run counter to the goal of the New 52, but it's not that hard to follow, and Williams' and Reeder's art is so goddam pretty—you can argue that a lot of the storytelling choices here are overly-byzantine and made more for baroque showiness than clarity, but you can't argue the images themselves aren't gorgeous—I think that more than makes up for it.

On the writing side, it's a little pedestrian, and a little far removed from a Gotham City Bat-story (When not dealing with were-creatures, Batwoman is pursuing a ghost that kidnaps children and drowns victims with her super-tears) but, again, art this good goes a long way. It's easy to imagine this same story being awful if drawn by, I don't know, Eddy Barrows or David Finch or Tony Daniel or whoever they've got drawing TEC this month, but Williams' solid character design and figure work and constant experimenting with lighting and texture keep each page exciting.

I was a little surprised—pleasantly so—how much female flesh there is in this book, as when in costume Kate is essentially naked, being maybe the only female heroine who looks like an anatomically correct female when she's wearing latex or spandex or black spray-paint or whatever her costume's made out of (Also surprising? The scene where Maggie Sawyer goes down on Kate while her sidekick is in the process of being brutally murdered...though she does pull through).

I also greatly enjoyed seeing Maggie Sawyer pursue Kate romantically while also trying to arrest Batwoman, all while she and Kate repeatedly talk about what a great detective Sawyer is. Batwoman and Kate Kane both have skin so white she seems more like a mime or a drowning victim than simply pale, and both have red hair (Batwoman's is a few inches longer). Not being suspicious that the two are one in the same is a lot like the people of Star City electing Oliver Queen mayor without being suspicious that he and Green Arrow are the only big, fit, blonds with goofy van dyke beards in the 21st century.

Anyway, this is good, great art elevating okay scripting to all-around good status. And, somewhat to my surprise, it looks like it's actually one of those "refuge" comics for folks leery of The New 52, along with Legends of the Dark Knight, Adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman and, um, and I missing any others...?

Hawkeye #12 (Marvel Entertainment) Another issue of Hawkeye, another issue in which Clint Barton barely appears. This is one of the sans-Aja issues, but, as with every time they've published and Aja-less issue, they've got a hell of a fill-in artist. Here, it's Francesco Francavilla.

This story follows Clint's older brother Barney, whom I had never heard of before the recap page, and who is apparently also really good at shooting bows and arrows, but is now a hobo. A hobo! I knew this book was missing something! (Shame on Francavilla for giving him a dufflebag instead of a bindle stick though).

Barney Barton is coming to visit his brother (who does own an apartment building, and Grills' place just opened up, so he really should hood a brother up) and runs afoul of those guys who say "bro." Along the way, we get flashbacks to the Barton boys' childhood, which apparently sucked. I didn't know that either.

But then, before reading this series, all I knew about Hawkeye was that he was kind of like Green Arrow in a purple costume with a loincloth and his initial on his forehead like an idiotic version of Captain America.

SpongeBob Comics #22 (United Plankton Pictures) Hey, did you know that artist Maris Wicks' day job is in programming at the New England Aquarium? It's true! That might explain her extra-long installment of the "Flotsam and Jetsam: Ocean Facts" in this issue, a four-page, full-color educational piece about coral reefs.

But don't worry, there is still plenty of silliness from some of the greatest cartoonists making comics today, including three strips written by Joey Weiser (one of which Weiser draws himself), a page from James Kochalka, another by Shane Houghton and Andy Rementer, and two-pages of art from Stephen DeStefano, one of my two favorite artists whose work I way to rarely get to see anywhere (The other? Ronnie del Carmen). Plus, some other stuff from other people too!

Young Avengers #7 (Marvel) So writer apparently Kieron Gillen jumps ahead a few months time with this issue, filling us in on what our heroes have been up to via a single, nine-panel-grid page in which text messages between several of the characters (ugh). I hate hate hate hate comics-told-through-the-premise/prism-of-social media, but I guess this was only one page, and it wasn't entirely necessary—a line of two or dialogue and a "three months later" text box does much the same thing—so I guess I'm willing to forgive him, based on how much I love Jamie McKelvie's designs, rendering and "acting."

So apparently this new group of Young Avengers have been having an on-again, off-again war with a group of shape-changing aliens they assume to be Skrulls, while kid Loki has been training Wiccan in the use of magic, and someone convinced him to get a new costume. Not quite sure how I feel about this new costume—not a fan of star-field patterns—but I didn't like the old one much either, so I think I'm going to end up being pretty okay with it.

Meanwhile, Prodigy finally tracks them down, and in two kind of cool/kind of dumb show-y for no real reason pages (for which I easily forgive them, given how fantastic the second to the last page featuring the characters breaking through to a different dimension is), and fills them in on what happened last issue, what with the Patriot-looking guy/thing abducting Speed and all.

(I do like that the Prodigy panels look Caleb-shaped, though)

It looks like Speed and Prodigy might end up joining the team after this story arc...? I don't know. I do wish the real Patriot would rejoin 'em at some point, as I kinda liked that character, but then, the way Gillen writes these guys, I kind of like all of 'em now.

On comics critics talking more about art

The other day on Robot 6, my fellow contributor Michael May published an interesting quote from artist Declan Shalvey about how reviewers should probably focus on the art—or at least the art as storytelling—when discussing comics, and then May used it as a sort of springboard to talk about how that very important component of comics-making often gets short shrift in comics criticism.

At the time, my thoughts were along the lines of "Hmm, maybe Shalvey just isn't reading the right critics," and "Yes, of course, most comics criticism you find on the Internet is horrible, horrible writing more interested in plot synopsis than actual criticism" and "But then, on the other hand, are there any real professional comics critics who make their entire living off of criticizing comics without having to hold down a day job, too? And, if so, do I need more than one hand to count them on?"

It's a big nebulous topic that's really hard to get into, as there are all sorts of different kinds of criticism, and different people read reviews for different reasons and, ultimately, I don't really care all that much about the state of comics criticism as a whole, beyond wanting mine to be as good as it can be and to keep getting better (I will say this, though; I would be a much, much, much worse reviewer-of-comics if I didn't draw, and nothing has helped me better appreciate comics art—both positively and negatively—as trying to draw my own little comics).

But if I'm to add anything to the conversation, I think it would simply be a deflection. The devaluing of the artist portion of the alchemy of comics—at least among the Big Five, direct market, genre stuff—doesn't stop and start with critics. I'm not sure when we went from superstar artists of the '90s ("Who cares who's writing it? Jim Lee or Rob Liefeld or Todd MacFarlane or Erik Larsen are drawing it!") to the superstar writers of today—I imagine it had a lot to do with folks like Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis, writers who weren't only very good at what they do, very popular with their audience and productive enough to write 3-8 books a month or so. If Bendis is writing a half-dozen books every month, while even the most productive Marvel artist is drawing one a month, well, it's easy to see how, just mathematically, Bendis becomes a bigger, more influential force at Marvel than Frank Cho or Mark Bagley or Stuart Immonen or whoever's he working with on those books.

I was just leafing through a trade paperback collection I have sitting here though, and looked at the credits.

There are only six comic books worth of material in it (that's 120 pages of DC Comics), but nevertheless there are two writers and—get this—seven artists. This being a trade, there isn't a title page with credits in each and every issue, they're just grouped together at the beginning, and, in this case, they aren't even separated into inkers and pencilers, they're all just "artists".

I know what Eddy Barrows pencil art looks like, but goddamn, how exactly am I going to talk in any great depth about the art when given a ball of yarn like that to try and make sense out of? I mean, I can and will discuss the art when I get to reviewing this book somewhere, but one can't give credit (or blame) where credit (or blame) is due when there's no way of telling who did what (I had a similar problem with Batman and Robin Vol. 2: Pearl which I just reviewed here this weekend; it had four pencil artist and five inkers all listed only on the credits page at the beginning of the book, and it was up to me to recognize/figure out who did what).

I hate to pick on DC, but unfortunately all the trades I have lying around the house with similar credits pages at the moment are from DC (I have The Punisher By Greg Rucka Vol. 1 here, but it is all by a single artist, save a back-up, which is clearly labeled with the appropriate art credit. And I have a bible-sized Avengers Vs. X-Men collection, with extremely meticulous crediting on a two-page table of contents/credits page).

Here's the credits for Earth 2 Vol. 1: The Gathering:

Only two pencillers and two inkers, and while I'm quite familiar with work of Nicola Scott (and Trevor Scott and Sean Parsons, now that I think about it), I don't know Eduardo Pansica), and wouldn't know what he did unless it was extremely different than what Nicola Scott drew (and maybe/hopefully, he's trying to draw in a similar style, if he's doing fill-in work, and the inkers will further mask the change in artists).

Or hey, here are the credits for the very first issue of Pandora, a very big new series DC just launched, one that leads directly into their much-hyped "Trinity War" (which kicks off today!) and ties in to the foundation of their whole "New 52" line and reboot:

Here the problem isn't who did what, but simply that a whole bunch of artists were needed to get this sucker out on time.

Again, I can and will talk artwork, but—and I realize this is an entirely different conversation—the publishers don't exactly go out of their way to emphasize (or, in some cases, even acknowledge) the importance of the art part of the comics-making or comics storytelling equation.

Review: Indestructible Hulk Vol. 1: Agent of SHIELD

You've got to give it to Mark Waid—the guy certainly knows how to relaunch a tired, stale, stuck-in-a-rut franchise in a new, fresh and immediately appealing way.

He did just that with Daredevil by simply breaking with the last few decades of characterization of the title character as a brooding, doomed super-ninja whose loved ones were always getting murdered and who was always in an understandably foul mood (and he did so there without rebooting or retconning the character or his history, but simply by building a recognition of a need for change in outlook directly into the character's understanding of himself). (It didn't hurt that Waid was working with some of the best drawers of superhero comics in the industry on Daredevil, with Marcos Martin, Paolo Rivera and Chris Samnee drawing a lot of those comics).

When Marvel announced their "NOW!" initiative, in which they were putting all-new creative teams on all of their books, relaunching them with new #1s and giving them new, easy-jumping-on-point directions, Waid got the Hulk, a character who has been more than a little unmoored for much of the past decade (They shot him into space for a while, had him come back as the end boss in a line-wide crossover event story, they paired Bruce Banner with The Hulk's son, they replaced Banner and the green Hulk with a Red Hulk and, in the last Hulk comics I read, they had Hulk and Banner surgically and magically separated into two distinct beings).

So here's what Waid came up with: Bruce Banner is a brilliant scientist with some issues who occasionally turns into a semi-mindless, indestructible engine of unfettered destruction (as per usual), only Waid has his Banner come to terms with this fate as a more-or-less eternal and inevitable state of affairs. Realizing that there just isn't a "cure" for The Hulk, that The Hulk is truly "indestructible" (hence the new I-word adjective replacing the more traditional "Incredible"), he needs to quit wasting his time trying to rid himself of The Hulk and wasting his life (and considerable brain power) on running from, hiding from and fighting against the military.

So he offers SHIELD Commander Maria Hill, who after her one-note introduction in Mark Millar's Civil War has become quite a fun supporting character thanks to folks like Matt Fraction in Invincible Iron Man, a deal: Give him the resources he needs to devote himself to making incredible inventions to benefit mankind a la Tony Stark and Reed Richards while he's himself and, when he's The Hulk, use him to smash stuff for SHIELD ("Stop thinking of Hulk as a bomb," Banner tells her, "Think of him as a cannon. On those occasions when I do go green, it will be SHEILDS's job to point Hulk in a suitable direction.")

Waid also gives Banner a new mission statement/mantra: Hulk destroys, Banner builds.

The first volume contains the first five issues of the new series, and as inspired and refreshing as Waid's new take is, and as efficiently as he presents it, he spends pretty much the entire first issue laying it out in a maybe over-obvious, telling-more-than-showing sort of way (although Waid has Banner arrange it so that he meets Hill and makes his offer just before she's about to initiate a SHIELD raid where having the Hulk go in first would prove immensely helpful—this, then, is a far cry from the old Bruce Jones version of the title. We've got a Hulk by page 12, and he sticks around for a six-page fight scene).

The bulk of the script-side of this volume is set-up of sorts, as Banner and The Hulk have their job interview with SHIELD in the first issue, and then we see Banner slowly set up a lab, recruit a staff, be given a new, rather ironic new home, meet with and try to convince Tony Stark that he's a no longer the sort of threat that should be shot off of Earth against his will, and then face an underwater army commanded by Attuma (sadly, there's no Namor guest-appearance). While it does seem like the book is still settling in to its premise by the last page, it's hardly decompressed: There are new villains, conflicts fights in just about every single issue (or two, in the case of Indestructible Hulk #4 and #5).

For an artist, Waid is teamed with penciler Leinil Francis Yu (inked by Gerry Alanguilan and colored by Sunny Gho), and while I like Yu's art quite a bit, he's lacks the clean, smooth style of most of Waid's Daredevil co-creators, and their superior story-telling skills. He draws nice, twisted, highly emotive faces, science-fiction stuff (functional and smashed into junk) and big, gnarled Hulk muscles—He's a good choice for the title, really, but perhaps not the ideal choice.

All in all, this is very good superhero comics, and it's the sort of comics I'd happily read serially were Marvel charging $2.99 a pop for it, but this is one of the $3.99 books, or part of their You'd Be A Fool To Buy This Monthly Instead of Waiting Six Months To Read the Trade For Free From the Library line.

One thing I wasn't sold on was the Hulk's new "costume." When Marvel first announced their "NOW!" initiative, in the wake of DC's "New 52" reboot and branding initiative, they did so with a Joe Quesada-drawn image of a bunch of their characters, many of them given change-for-change's sake design tweaks. For example, Iron Man was drawn in yellow and black armor instead of his standard yellow and red, Thor was wearing a couple of swords on his back and the Hulk was wearing shiny metal pants and some armor which, on the face of it, seems as silly as, say, giving Superman armor (You know, like Jime Lee and DC did with their New 52 redesign of Superman).

I've heard Waid say on Twitter (I think it was) that the armor isn't there to protect the Hulk, but to protect Banner. In these first five issues, I've seen little evidence of the armor serving any real practical function, save for in the last two issues (the ones dealing with Hulk's fight against Attuma), in which it apparently generates some kind of breathable air for The Hulk and Banner. After reading the first volume, it seems that the armor was thought up by someone else—perhaps Chief Creative Officer and occasional variant cover artist Joe Quesada—as simply something different for something different's sake, a big, obvious, in-your-face clue that something was different now.

If that is the case, they need hardly bothered. It's clear something is different now. The Hulk's main comic stars the original green Hulk again, in a premise that hews close to the original conception while also being something new and a logical evolution of that original premise and, most importantly, it's really rather good.

And those are the best sorts of differences of all.

Some not-terribly-organized thoughts on Batman and Robin Vol. 2: Pearl

—Yes, according to the cover and the fine print, this second collection of the New 52 iteration of writer Peter Tomasi and (nominal) artist Patrick Gleason's Batman and Robin series is just called Pearl rather than The Pearl or even A Pearl Sounds weird to me, too.

—I was really struck by how good the first volume of this new series, Born to Kill, turned out to be; it was one of the better of the New 52 books I had sampled, and seemed to fin in perfectly well with what was going on—in terms of plotting and overall quality—in the main, Batman A-books, Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham's Batman Inc and Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman.

I was therefore rather surprised with how relatively poor the quality of this second volume, which collects the next six issues of the series, plus September 2012's #0 issue. It was still mostly competent, mostly professional work, but the scripting lacked the tight thematic and plotting focus of the previous volume, and the by-committee art was rushed, slap-dash and poorly blended.

When I closed the back cover, I was having a hard time recalling the last time I had seen such a severe drop in quality between two volumes of the same book by the same creative team (although the art end of the creative team expanded quite a bit in this second volume).

—The most obvious change between the first and second volumes was, of course, in the art teams. Pencil artist Patrick Gleason manage to draw all eight of the issues collected in Born To Kill (with just two inkers involved, a feat perhaps accomplished because the Tomasi/Gleason team was announced to be taking over the title before the reboot was announced and, after a single story arc, disappeared for a bit while fill-in teams finished out the rest of the pre-New 52 run of the book, perhaps giving Gleason a lot of lead time to get art in the can).

This volume has three times as many artists involved: There are nine art credits. Four of them are pencil artists, with styles as diverse as that of Gleason, Andy Clarke and a Tomas Giorello, and there are a full five inkers, including Tom Nguyen and Mick Gray, who worked on the first volume, plus several others.

That's an awful lot of artists involved to draw just 140 pages over the course of seven months, and the book's editor didn't do a very good job of deploying them strategically or even finding artists who draw very similarly, or are willing or able to ape Gleason and Nguyen convincingly. The art styles just shift radically from page to page—not even scene to scene—like poorly edited sweatshop work.

—The other obvious difference between this volume and the first is that there are a lot of tie-ins to other Batman stories and other goings-on in the DC Universe, some as subtle to call-backs and references to events in Batman Inc (Damian being "grounded" from Robin-ing while there's a huge bounty on his head, for example), others official-type tie-ins where the issue serves as a non-essential chapter to a big, Snyder-inspired crossover with the flagship Batman title.

—So, for example, the book opens with the #0 issue (which was actually published fifth of the seven books collected here), the issue that came out during last year's "Zero Month," when each New 52 title presented a specially-labeled issue revealing the origin (or, in Batman's case, some aspect of the origin) of the lead character or characters. Tomasi and company give us Damian Wayne's origin, which is something Grant Morrison already covered about as clearly and thoroughly as it needed to be covered already, back when he first introduced Damian, but Tomasi at least finds a new angle for it, presents a lot of new information, and Gleason provides some fairly incredible images of giant Man-Bat monster men.

And these rather striking images, of course:

(Here's the infant Damian striking a pose similar to that of the baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind and already sporting a Bert-like crop of hair)

(And here's toddler Damian after discovering a cape and cowl in his mom's hope chest)

Curiously, Tomasi introduces the concept that once a year, on his birthday, Damian and his mother Talia would engage in a rather brutal sparring match and, if Damian won, she promised to reveal the identity of his father to her. We see six such birthday battles on-panel, and before the first, Damian's old enough to be talking, so much be either a very advanced four-year-old or an extremely advanced three-year-old. While he does gestate in some sort of sci-fi exterior womb thing, there's no mention of any kind of hyper-aging or anything, and even if there were, he ages naturally for six years, and Talia wouldn't have gotten any DNA from Batman until at least a few years into his career. The story, then, seems to pretty directly contradict DC's New 52 five-year-time line (plus maybe a few extra years for Batman).

I just can't figure out how this Batman hasn't been Batman for at least a good 14 or 15 years if he has a ten-year-old son.

—There's another single issue that ties into the "Night of the Owls" portion of Snyder's Batman run, in which The Court of Owls apparently activates their undead assassins—The Talons—and sends them after prominent Gotham citizens, with only Batman and his small army of 28 sidekicks to try and save the day.

In this one, Damian must save a general from a Talon, and does so. It's basically a context-less fight, with a weird portion near the end where the Talon gives a two-page, eight panel monologue to his intended victim about how he must kill him in order to remove any obstacles to a Revolutionary War Era land deal...? I'm still catching up on Snyder's Batman, but from the first volume (Batman Vol. 1: The Court of Owls), I got the impression that they had a much more sinister master plan that had nothing to do with real estate contracts.

—The last two issues of the collection tie-in to Snyder's Joker-centric "Death of The Family" story arc in Batman, but rather obliquely. After finally getting back to the business the first volume concerned itself with—Batman trying to be a good father to his son as well as a good mentor hero to his sidekick—the title characters run afoul of a mysterious plot involving cannibalism and behavior-modifying drugs, which ends up being the work of The Joker (The next issue, Batman and Robin #15, would be the first of the series labeled as a "Death of The Family" tie-in; this is more of a prelude to a tie-in, I guess).

—That then leaves just three issues of this collection not tying in to a a Batman story arc of DC promotional event. It's entitled "Terminus," and the villain conflict is that a character facing some sort of terminal illness he keeps at bay with super-science has recruited a bunch of not-very-interesting villains who have somehow had their bodies hideously altered by an encounter with Batman (Bootface, for example, was firing a blowtorch at Batman when the Dark Knight kicked him in the face, resulting with a permanent impression of Batman's sole on his face, and so on).

His master plan is to fire a WMD missile of some sort that will cover all of Gotham with some sort of ill-defined biological weapon. There were several evocations big and small to the Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies, from Batman firing the pointy-bits of his gauntlets, to buildings exploding and leaving flaming bat-symbols in them to Batman trying to direct a doomsday weapon out over the water instead of the city (curiously, the bomb goes off in the water—which should wreak absolute havoc with Gotham City, irreparably poisoning a huge portion of its harbor and doing God knows what to the Atlantic Ocean, right...?)

Oddly enough, it also reminded me a bit of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, as when Batman slides underneath the Batmobile and emerges on the other side, wearing a big robot battle-suit.

—The interesting part of this story arc isn't the villains or the threat, but the psychodrama involving Damian. He calls a meeting of the former Robins—Dick "Nightwing" Grayson, Jason "Red Hood" Todd and Tim "Red Robin" Drake—and announces that at some point in the future, he's going to attack each of them, kick their asses and take something of value from each of them as a trophy.

—Seeing all four characters in the same images at the same time really reinforced my belief that Nightwing should still be wearing blue, not red.

I understand why they put him in red, as he's a former Robin and that's a Robin color (and I imagine the reason George Perez originally put Nightwing in so much blue was because he had grown out of Robin and into a more Batman-like character, and blue was Batman's color back then), although the red, abstract bird shape calls to mind Chris O'Donnell's Robin costume from the Joel Schumacher Batman films, which is something that probably shouldn't ever be called to mind.

The main reason I think Nightwing should have kept his blue on black costume, however, is simply because there is so goddam much red and black between these characters now:

(The cover for Batman and Robin #10, sans the lettering and logos)

(A panel from Batman and Robin #12)

—Tie-ins to "Night of the Owls" and "Death of the Family" and participation in Zero Month and talk of the goings-on in Batman Inc aren't the only references to other titles seen in this volume, however. There's also quite a bit of discussion of some plot from Teen Titans, which was probably the saddest and most unfortunate part of the entire volume, as it forced poor Patrick Gleason (and or whichever of the other eight artists involved with this volume) to have to draw that hideous Red Robin costume for several pages, and it forced poor Tomasi to have to use the name "Fist Point" repeatedly.

Apparently, there is a bad guy in the pages of the New 52 Teen Titans named Fist Point, which is an even dumber name than Nightfist, a character Garth Ennis and John McCrea created in the '90s to make fun of stupid '90s characters (Joke character Nightfist boasts a character design some 10,000 times better than that of serious character Fist Point, too).

Comic shop comics: July 3

Adventures of Superman #2 (DC Comics) This actually came out last week, but didn't make it into my pull-file, so I didn't pick it up until this Wednesday. It includes a trio of shorts, a cover slug billing them as "Timeless Tales of the Man of Steel!," which essentially means it's Classic Coke Superman rather than New Coke Superman: Spandex and red shorts rather than armor and a metal diaper or that mesh and gauntlet combo movie Superman wears while destroying Metropolis and killing dudes.

These stories are "The Bottle City of Metropolis" by J.M. DeMatteis, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Sal Buscema (a so-so short with a twist ending that gives Buscema the opportunity to draw Titano); "Slow News Day" by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Joelle Jones (the sharpest, funniest, most fun and best-drawn in the book, featuring Clark Kent trying to cover a dog show with Lois but constantly being interrupted by Superman crisis after Superman crisis, climaxing with an off-panel trip to the future with Rip Hunter and Kamandi); and, finally, "Best Intent" by Michael Avon Oemin and Brian J.L. Glass (which coulda used another ten pages to de-compress a bit, but is carried through the super-packed, event-filled story by Oeming's quirky artwork, the likes of which The New 52 could use some of).

Avengers A.I. #1 (Marvel Entertainment) I mentioned the various strikes against this book in Tuesday night's preview column, and expressed my desire to check it out anyway, which I did. I don't think I'll check out #2, though.

The 19-page story apparently spins out of Age of Ultron, but not in any way so meaningful that it couldn't simply be summarized in a few lines of dialogue: In the future, a war between organic and machine life is coming, and human Avenger and Ultron creator Hank Pym is going to assemble a team to stop the conflict and save both sides of it from annihilation.

Pym, who here appears as just Doctor Pym rather than in one of his costumed identities (he's the one in the jacket on the cover), recruits android Avenger The Vision (given a simple, stripped-down redesign I don't really care for, but then, it's not any worse than his previous terrible costumes), former Runaway Victor Mancha (who isn't introduced very well; I only knew him because of Runaways), a slightly re-programmed Doombot (who thankfully retains Doom's attitude and vocabulary, and thus provides the only really intentionally funny parts of the book; I wish his design were closer to Doom's though, as he looks like a pretty generic robot wearing a Doom mask and green hood and green bathing suit) and two completely new characters to me: SHIELD Agent Monica Chang (who I got the sense I was supposed to recognize from somewhere), and a character that I think is brand-new, seen only in the last panel of the book.

Writer Sam Humphries sure hits the ground running, assembling his Avengers—whose Avengers-ocity seems even more strained than that of the new New Avengers, who are actually just The Illuminati borrowing the name for their comic—quickly and efficiently (if not all that thoroughly) and throwing them into their first big action scene before book's end. That's a lot of ground to cover for such an incredibly short comic (on the plus side, even if it's three pages shorter than the standard comic, it's also $1 cheaper than many Marvel comics).

The artwork is from relative newcomer André Lima Araújo, whose figures have a big chunkiness to them—particularly his Vision, who looks like the only real superhero in the book—and a vaguely Humberto Ramos/Mike Wieringo/Chis Bachalo style to many of the figures, faces and expressions. I also got a Jim Cheung-vibe from some of the linework on the characters. It's not really as tight as I'd like though, and the characters can look distracting similar to one another—Pym and Mancha look like they could have been in the same class at high school, for example.

And, as I said, I'm not crazy about most of the designs, particularly whatever the hell Mancha's wearing in this—one of the many virtues of Runaways was always that the characters generally wore real clothes of the sort real teenagers might wear.

Basically, there's a lot of room for improvement here, but since this is the, I don't know, tenth or twelfth Avengers title on the stands...wait; Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, Avengers Assemble, New Avengers, Secret Avengers, Avengers Arena, the soon-to-launch Mighty Avengers...okay, I guess it's only the eigth Avengers title, but still! If this is the seventh or eighth Avengers title in order to importance and/or Avengers-ness, I can't imagine it will get too much time to grow to meet its potential.

And hey, by the way, where's Machine Man? I'd trade any of these guys out for Machine Man.

Catalyst Comix #1 (Dark Horse Comics) You know what this world needs? More superhero comics!

That was the thinking that lead early-nineties Dark Horse to flirt with the creation of their own DCU/Marvel Universe style super-verse brand, the awkwardly-named Comics' Greatest World, which gave us the likes of X, Barb Wire, Ghost and others. And that, apparently, is the thinking that leads us to this year's revival of sorts, Catalyst Comix, an Action Comics Weekly-style anthology (in which the back-ups and feature trade places) featuring a handful of the lesser-known characters—Frank Wells/Titan, Grace and The Agents of Change—all written by Joe Casey and drawn by a trio of talented, quirky and under-appreciated artists.

These are Dan McCaid (on "The Ballad of Frank Wells), Paul Maybury (on "Amazing Grace") and Ulises Farinas (on "Agents of Change").

Casey throws a bit of a gauntlet and talks a lot of smack about Big Two superheroes, and how his revitalization of the CGW characters will be different, in tone, art and approach, during a two-page prose afterword of sorts.

And credit where credit's due, these comics are different, and perhaps better than the bulk of the Big Two's output, but I found 'em awfully derivative, rather confusing and not that much fun—they're better than the worst and the mediocre among corporate superhero comics, but not as good as the better among them.

Casey's writing is extremely wordy and somewhat hyperactive, the copious narration—particularly in the Frank Wells piece—reading like over-exclamation pointed, Stan Lee-inspired poetry. It reminded me of '70s Marvel era Steve Gerber.

All of the art is quirky, but only Farinas' really struck me as beautiful and weird enough to really stand-out as worth hunting down.

Personally, I could have used more context, and was disappointed with the lack of credit to the original creators, which seemed awfully Big Two to me (Barbara Kesel gets credit for creating Grace and the characters mentioned in "Agents of Change," while no one gets credit for Frank Wells), and Casey doesn't really contextualize the characters' real-world origins, even given the space in that prose piece.

For now, I'm gonna put this down as an interesting failure, but one worth keeping one eye on for a while.

But hey, it is 25 story pages, completely interrupted by ads of any kind (save a single house-ad, and then a few more after the story pages have all run), for $2.99, making for a hell of a value.

Legends of the Dark Knight #10 (DC) This issue of the Batman anthology features a full-length story, by a team of fairly prominent creators I'm somewhat surprised to see here, given that this book seems to be, in-part anyway, a sort of try-out book. It's written by David Tischman, pencilled by Chris Sprouse (!) aand inked by Karl Story (!).

It's a fairly standard Batman done-in-one, with the Dark Knight hot on the trail of a brand-new serial killer (assigned the recycled name Abattoir by the press) who is a very special kind of cannibal: He somehow takes on the memories, skills and abilities of the people whose flesh he consumes.

Tischman really strips Batman down to his basics, in terms of cast and gadgetry and the scope and scale of the story. Interestingly, he gives Bruce Wayne a particularly large role in the story, as he uses himself for bait, and Tischman's Bruce Wayne is a smart, snarky, smart-ass how seems more like Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark than Christian Bale's Wayne.

Sprouse's art is particularly gorgeous, and while it was a treat seeing it here, it does make me wonder why he's drawing a digital-first, out-of-continuity book like this instead of a regular gig; his Batman story sure looks a hell of a lot better than a lot of the New 52 Batman and family stories.

The Superior Foes of Spider-Man (Marvel) This was the surprise best comic of the week for me, a new miniseries* starring the latest version of the Sinister Six—Boomerang, The Shocker, Overdrive, Speed Demon and a new, female version of The Beetle—after their boss Doctor Octopus "died," his soul taking over the body of Spider-Man, as seen in the pages of Superior Spider-Man. That explains why this isn't called The Sinister Six or The Superior Six then (there is a sixth villain involved, though), although the title is somewhat ironic: These aren't Spidey's A- or even B-List villains; if they aren't the bottom of the barrel, they're close to it.

The series is written by Nick Spencer and drawn by the great Steve Lieber whose presence, along with the great Marcos Martin cover, convinced me to pick this up, despite not really knowing or caring all that much about any of these characters or the state of the Spider-Man corner of the Marvel Universe at the moment. I'm certainly glad I did.

Boomerang, whose stupid costumes are both still better than DC's Captain Boomerang's post-resurrection redesign, narrates the issue, relating his sad-sack origin story and how he fell into with his new crew and how he ended up in jail. With a favor from one of Spidey's B- or C-lister villains, he secures his release and reunites his team for a job, which they apparently need fairly badly, as Speed Demon (Hey, a speedster should be able to kick Spidey's ass, shouldn't he?) and Shocker are reduced to robbing a pet store and Beetle and Overdrive to robbing a comic shop ("I didn't even know they still made these things," Overdrive says).

The plot is more-or-less secondary here though, as the real pleasure of the book is Spencer's writing, the voice and character of Boomerang that emerges, and those of the various loser villains who are all more-or-less just trying to get by, despite the handicaps of not being very bright or very powerful or very evil. There's something incredibly Silver Age-y about all these guys, in that they are essentially just stick-up men with costumes, and this is therefore a crime comic comedy in superhero drag.

Lieber's art is perfect for the premise, as it's highly realistic, but he draws classic super-costumes in a very smooth, clean, comic book-y way, so that the villains seems like real people, real characters, when they're out of costume, and then transform into comic book characters when they put their masks on.

This looks to be one of the ever-increasing number of Marvel Comics that are extremely-well made explorations of different avenues, alleys and corners of the expansive universe of super-star superheroes they publish.

Trinity of Sin: The Phantom Stranger #10 (DC) Well, this sure wasn't an easy movie to walk into the middle of...

One of the several issues I picked up this week out of curiosity and a desire to cast about for more super-comics to read serially (the appearance of New 52 Zauriel, a favorite character of mine, sealed the deal), the tenth issue of series obviously isn't the ideal place to give a try.

The title character, who just recently had "Trinity of Sin" added to his title, isn't as strange as he was in the old continuity. From what I've read in reviews, the shroud of mystery dissolved to reveal that he is in actuality Judas Iscariot, cursed by a mysterious cabal of powerful figures (including the Wizard Shazam) to walk the earth, atoning for his sin of betraying Jesus Christ (the rest of the Trinity, as was seen in this week's Trinity of Sin: Pandora, are Pandora and The Question).

In this issue, he finds himself outside the gates of heaven, talking to a powerful little Scottie dog who is presumably God himself ("The being by my side wears the form of an ordinary dog," the Stranger narrates, "Worn, I assume, for its own amusement. To this day i"m not certain if the entity behind the cloak is God himself...or one of his servants.")

The dog/God assigns him a spirit guide in Zauriel, who has shed his costume and alien/avian look from Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's late-nineties conception of a science-fiction heaven in JLA—here he's a big bald guy with glowing tattoos and pupil-less eyes: Sometimes he looks like a black man, at other times his skin seems gray, depending on the lighting.

(This heaven is more or less a traditional one, the only innovation being many doors—one for each soul that will ever enter it) He also assigns him a supernatural Sophie's Choice: He can bring one soul back to earth with him, even though he has three dead family members (a wife and two kids; presumably from some point after Biblical times...?)

There's also one-page check-in scene featuring The Question, who looks like the old, pre-52 version, and Dr. Thirteen, who seems pretty far removed from either the original or the Brian Azzarello/Cliff Chiang Architecture and Mortality version.

As with a lot of the New 52 books I've sampled and abandoned, this was a particularly strange reading experience, featuring names and characters I recognized, but reorganized in new and strange ways: A little like if a TV show you watched suddenly recast half the characters, and changed its premises and changed the character arcs of most of the characters, regardless of whether a new or the original actor were still playing them.

Fernando Blanco's art is fairly nice throughout, and a great improvement over the last comics I've read that he drew. It's sort of a shame he's not given anything more interesting to draw, though, as this heaven seems pretty pedestrian. The book is now being written solo by J.M. DeMatteis, and it reminded me quite a bit of his work on the short-lived Spectre series starring Hal Jordan, which similarly featured a rather uncomfortable mix of superheroics and bland spirituality (In fact, the last issue of that series I read also featured Zauriel in a generic angel role).


*Actually, looking at the cover, fine-print and next issue box, I don't see any indication that this is a miniseries, but it certainly doesn't seem like an ongoing either. Huh.

Meanwhile...

This week at ComicsAlliance, I took a look at the Big Two's proud tradition of kicking off their modern major intra-company crossover event stories by killing off one of their characters, in light of Catwoman's recent "murder" and the promise of the death of a hero setting off next week's "Trinity War" (I did so with an assist from Andy Khouri).

And at Robot 6, I have a column of mini-reviews of all the June grahpic novel releases I didn't devote full reviews to elsewhere: Karl Stevens' Failure, Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks' Primates (on which I'll have much more later; that's where the above image is from though), Guy Delisle's A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting and Ian Doeschler's not-comics book William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope.

'Twas the Night Before Wednesday...

AVENGERS AI #1
I didn't read past the first issue of Age of Ultron yet, I don't know most of the characters in this (and of those I do know, I only really like one of 'em) and the goofy title seems to be setting a new standard in brand dilution and I'm not terribly familiar with the work of either writer Sam Humphries or artist Andre Araujo, but I kinda don't care about any of that—This is a Marvel team book in which the whole team is comprised of robots, it's only $2.99 and I'd really like to read more superhero comics than the small handful I'm reading serially now. Oh, and there's that sweet variant cover. So I'm giving this a shot. I hope it's good.

AXE COP TP VOL 04 PRESIDENT WORLD
Hey, I'm waaaaayyyy behind on this one now. I'm really curious about what will happen to this series in the future, because it's selling point—"written by a five-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother"—has a built-in expiration point. Like, will the writer be as good when he's eight? Or 12? Or 16?

DISNEY MICKEY MOUSE COLOR SUNDAYS HC VOL 01 CALL WILD
Of Fantagraphics' two Disney reprint projects, I'm enjoying the Carl Barks library of duck comics to Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips (in large part because the former were comic book stories and the latter were comic strip stories, and the flow of the former reads better in large chunks than that of the latter), but I'm really curious to see what these look like in color and to see how they read when they're not part of a daily continuity (At lest, I assume most of these won't be part of the weekly continuity, but instead are standalone stories.

Plus, I love how crazy and off-model that Donald Duck on the cover looks, compared to the "final" version of the character we see most often.

JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY NANCY HC VOL 04
And hey, speaking of ambitious collection projects focused on the works of all-time comics masters...

PAUL JOINS THE SCOUTS GN
I love Michel Rabagliati's Paul comics. This is another one. It's coming from Conundrum Press rather than Drawn and Quartley, who published the previous Paul books I've read. Conundrum is apparently also publishing a new graphic novel by Joe Ollmann (of Mid-Life fame), with the bland title of Science Fiction. I liked that previous Ollmann book I read a whole lot, and would sure like to see what he's doing now.

PERSIA BLUES SC VOL 01
They had me at "written by Dara Naraghi." Look for a review of this by me...somewhere. Soon.

SATELLITE SAM #1 (MR)
A collaboration between Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin has got to be interesting, whether it's any good or not. Although I imagine it will be good. Fraction writes good, right? And Chaykin draws good, right? Especially ladies' undergarments, which I see are on the cover of this comic. It's probably worth noting that this new series written by Matt Fraction, who is currently writing Hawkeye, Fantastic Four, FF and probably a few more books I'm blanking on for Marvel Entertainment, is not being published by Marvel, but is instead being published by Image Comics. So here's one more example of an established-as-you-can-get writer with a healthy relationship with one of the Big Two comics taking a new or original idea to Image Comics for publication. Seems like we've been seeing an awful lot of that lately.

TRINITY OF SIN PANDORA #1
TRINITY OF SIN THE PHANTOM STRANGER #10
The former stars the hooded lady character from the final issue of Flashpoint, the person assigned in-story responsibility for creating "The New 52" and who DC placed in the backgrounds of all 52 #1's that were released in August and September of 2011, starring in what seems like a somewhat belated new series that has something to do with ...the state of the DC Universe, I guess...?

The Phantom Stranger comic is interesting in that its title recently changed from just plain old Phantom Stranger to Trinity of Sin The Phantom Stranger to suggest a stronger correlation to whatever important stuff is supposedly going to be goin on in Pandora and the upcoming "Trinity War" crossover story, but Pandora #1 is the prelude to "Trinity War," while ToStPS #10 doesn't make the list of tie-ins on the house ad or on this little flier from my comic shop listing all of the books that are a part of "The Epic Event That Will Destroy The World's Greatest Heroes!"

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine's Revenge

As far as story mechanics go, writer Jason Aaron rather beggars belief with the planning he attributes to the antagonists of this collection, The Red Right Hand. This is the same group that sent Wolverine's soul to hell and filled his body with demons that then set about trying to kill off all of Wolvie's loved ones in the previous two volumes (Wolverine Goes To Hell and Wolverines Vs. The X-Men), but as bad as that fate might seem, it wasn't even the Red Right Hand's endgame. Apparently they—or at least their leader—knew Wolverine would escape from hell and reclaim his body, which is why they've engineered this particularly insidious revenge against the character. The whole literally sending him to literal hell was just the means to the end of getting him good and pissed off enough to come at them.

The title is somewhat subversive, then. While Wolverine is hunting these people and is hunting them down seeking his righteous vengeance, they are busy enacting their real plan, and his revenge fizzles, as they get theirs during what should be our hero's moment of triumph.

The structure is fairly repetetive, with each of the first five issues collected here (drawn by pencil artist Renato Guedes and inker Jose Wilson Magalhaes) featuring Wolverine entering a room to battle a member of the weird-ass group The Mongerels to the death (Like Cannonfoot, the gorilla-looking guy who kicks rocks super-hard at his opponents using special, rock-throwing shoes), while a member of the Red Right Hand flashbacks to their experiences with Wolverine, and which of their loved ones he killed (The group isn't really one of supervillains so much as ordinary civilian types who have a reason to want revenge against Wolverine, who killed one or more of their loved ones—sometimes because they were bad guys, sometimes because he was mind-controlled or whatever).

When Wolvie's killed the last of the Mongerels and entered the room where all the members of the Red Right Hand await him, he gets a triple-whammy of emotional assaults, one rather prosaic one that barely effects him, another that frustrates him in a coitus interruptus kinda way, if we view Wolverine stabbing people with his fist-knives as a form of coitus for the character and another particularly tragic and Shakespearean (or at least Greek tragic) existential gut-punch to the invincible hero's psyche.

Props to Aaron, then. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief regarding the whole counting on Wolverine to beat up the devil himself in hell aspect of the plan, but the final stages are truly creatively evil and, to some degree, unexpected.

It sends Wolverine on a sort of self-destructive spiral during the last two issues collected herein, which Goran Sudzuka illustrates, in a flatter, sparser but ultimately more emotive and comic book-y style than that of Guedes.

Wolvie completes a few tasks of repentance, completely withdraws from girlfriend Melita and the two superhero teams he runs with, and resorts to two extremely unusual coping methods. The first is unusual for him, at leas to my limited Wolverine knowledge: He keeps climbing a mountain and then jumping off the top of it: His healing factor won't let him actually die in this manner, but his brain dies for a few moments each time, giving him complete, death-like peace. And then he starts over.

The second method is only unusual for people who aren't Wolverine: He grows a beard, takes off all his clothes and runs with a wolf pack for a while, until some evil-ass humans remind him he can do some good in the world, and Melita manages to hunt him down...after interviewing all of Wolvie's peers in the superhero community (This last chapter of the trade nicely echoes the ".1" issue in the previous collection, in which Melita tries to throw a surprise party for Wolverine, and invites all the X-Men and Avengers).

(As usual, Namor knows the truest measure of a man)

Best of all, this gives Sudzuka the opportunity to draw a large chunk of the Marvel Universe, and given his skills, that's certainly a welcome opportunity to see him taking advantage of.

Curiously, this story really reads like an end not only to this cycle of stories (Goes To Hell, Vs. The X-Men and Wolverine's Revenge), but like Aaron's final words on the character. The series would keep going for several more story arcs, though, including the previously reviewed Goodbye, China Town and Back In Japan.

Jae Lee provided the cover images for all of the issues that are contained in this collection, and while they are generally nice cover illustrations with a high degree of theatricality, I was quite amused by the cover of Wolverine #15, which seems to indicate that Lee has never in his life seen a picture of a wolf, but was just going by second-hand descriptions from people who have seen wolves: