Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

Today at Robot 6, I reviewed the first issue of two highly-anticipated new series, both of which are the result of the work of large creative teams: Batman Eternal (a sequence of which is above) and Lumberjanes.

The former is a pretty disappointing start to a pretty promising series, and while I'm not ready to give up on it yet, I was sort of galled by the weakness in the art, which falls down a few times in the whole telling-a-story side of things (I'm not a huge fan of Jason Fabok's work in general, but if that's a style you like, then he's pretty good at it). I really, really, really like weekly comics, and I like Batman, and I like the DC Universe (although not as much today as I did in early 2011), so I'm going to give it another couple of issues to be better than the first issue was (Otherwise, there's always the library trades down the road...but I do so enjoy knowing there's something new I read every single Wednesday at the shop).

Lumberjanes is an all-around more polished, more accomplished book...and I feel pretty conflicted about it, as a consumer. As regular readers know, because I so rarely shut up about it, I don't like to buy $3.99 comics if they're only 20-22 pages long, and, when comics I want to read hit that price point, I generally just wait for the trade.

Now, the last Boom series I trade-waited was Adventure Time, and I was uncomfortable with the final package of the first volume collecting the main series. It did include all of the variant covers of the issues included in the trade, all 578 or so of 'em, but, because there was so many goddam pages devoted to the variants, the comic "ended" about two-thirds or so through the page count.

The overall design of Lumberjanes is pretty great, though, and it seems like Boom gives you a merit badge for it (Near the end of the story, the girl female scouts are told by their camp director that they've earned their "Up All Night" badge and, before the story actually kicks off, on the credits page, there's an image of a badge with a moon, stars and a cup of coffee (Kate Leth gets a credit for "Badge Designs").

It's a little, silly thing, yes, but...it's a neat, little, silly thing, and it kinda makes me want to read the book monthly (that and avoiding the over-stuffed variant trades). I...guess I'll have to think about whether I want to make an exception to my No $4 Comics rule for a few weeks...