365 Comics...194: Smallville Season 11 #15 (2013)

Well of course I'm excited about this week's comics, it's a Smallville week with the concluding chapters of Argo, where, in the 31st Century Kara and Clark fight over future politics, the Legion of Super Heroes assembles to quell a looming war between humans and Kryptonians, Doomsday attacks New k Krypton and Booster Gold is around too.  If anything it all happens at too compressed a clip.  The heart of the story lies in the feelings of Kara and Clark as they weigh their allegiances to two worlds and two peoples (centering on the fact that it is a series still about Clark's journey as a hero), but the story, just for fun could use more Legion and make Booster a little more integral to the plot.

As well, I thought the battle with Doomsday was a little too quick but it only means that Clark learned his lesson last time and that ending the fight needs to happen quickly no matter the cost to himself or else people will die.  His heroic improvisational skills start to show some real growth.

365 Comics...193: Batman #22 (2013)

After a few days of travelling and intensive extended family time I came back home to a new release pile of 13 books and two trades... or maybe that's 12 books and 3 trades... I'm not quite sure if one to a trade or a floppy or an OGN ... but we'll get to that, later, maybe.

I got a lot of great ones this week, some of my favourites but the first read was Batman #22, Scott Snyder's continuation of "Year Zero" and it was a stinkin' delight, just a whole lot of damn fun.  There's a young Bruce Wayne trying to find his groove as a crusader for justice (or vengeance or whatever allows him to crack some bad guys skulls) but while he has the technical know how, he's still raw when it comes to using it all together.  Clearly Bruce has studied well and Snyder makes it clear that Bruce is intellectually very smart as well as gifted with mechanics and technology, but he's still thinking too much about himself which gets him into trouble at every turn.  Poor Alfred.

The question here is: is Red Hood One going to become the Joker?  It seems quite obvious that it should work out that way, as not only history but all the story signs pave that pathway, and I hate that "the fake out" has become so prevailent that I even need to second guess that.  Let's enjoy about the journey even though we should know the destination.  This "Year Zero" seems to be stitching a somewhat elaborate quilt that will showcase the baby steps Gotham and Batman and Bruce Wayne and the Joker and the Riddler and I'm sure many other surprises took to getting the characters to where they are today (and pretty much have been for nearly 40 years).

Snyder nails Bruce Wayne so well his dialogue reads in Kevin Conroy's legendary voice.  And Greg Capullo is killing it.  His Red Hood is so vibrant and charismatic it underplays his dangerousness, while the first encounter between Edward Nigma and Bruce Wayne was a visual marvel as the two spar in a word of wars designed in an Egyptian board game.  Beautiful.

365 Comics...192: Thor: God of Thunder #1 (2012)

Holy mother... that was incredible.

I've only ever heard good things (great things actually) about Jason Aaron, from back when Scalped first slarted at Vertigo to when he started working at Marvel. I've been curious, given the acclaim (Scalped is like the Wire of comics, one of the most praised things that I've had no exposure to but constantly meaning to) but given that Aaron has largely only worked on characters I don't give a lick about (Ghost Rider, Wolverine, and, yes Thor) I just haven't had an opening.

The Marvel 1 project with Comixology earlier this year (where they offered up 700 #1 issues for free) afforded me the opportunity, but still there wasn't whole lot of Aaron's work available, nor that even for free I was all that interested in.  His "Marveel Now" relaunch of Thor though his sparked my interest primarily from one word: "Godbomb" the name of the current arc running in the series.  That word, atop Esad Ribic's uniquely epic imagery has turned my disinterest into heavy curiosity.  I want to know what a Godbomb is...badly.

I have put off reading this fist issue knowing that it's not the Godbomb arc and also because it's Thor, a character that quite literally puts me to sleep with his Norse mythos tedium.  But this, this is something special.

It starts deep in the past with warrior Thor celebrating a battle won with wine and women when a scream brings forth the revelation of a dead God in the water.

Tn present day, Thor answers the prayers of an alien child to bring rain.  Upon learning they area Godless culture Thor goes searching for the planets' missing Gods only to find what's left of them.

Deep into the future Thor sits atop Asgard's throne ruler of a deserted kingdom when an attack of the Godkiller and his fierce bipedal hounds home attacking.

I love Thor in space and Aarons' use of both mythology and Sci-Fi as well exploring the Marvel Universe's concept of what Gods are is Fascinating.  Beyond that it is and awesome three-era story structure that just tweaks the pleasure centers of my writerly brain. 

Then there's Ribic's art which just feels Big through and through.  He gets the scope and he provides the pages with a structure to represent it.  Equally his Thor, brawny and beautiful, is given a specific body language that casts him above the average person.  Color artist Dean White amplifies the epic tone with soft digital watercolors that seem weathered and otherworldly. Beautiful stuff all around.

The last thing I need is to start picking up new series or find myself enthralled with new writers or artists but I need to read this story (and don't forget Godbomb). 

365 Comics...191: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #l (2012)

Of all the Before Watchmen titles this one appears to be the frontrunner for best of the lot.  At the same time if you lined up all the books in the series and asked me in which order I'd like to read this would probably be towards the back of the pack.  I like Darwyn Cooke well enough as a creator, though I'm no devotee, and his often prickly personality causes one to incite the old "separate the person from their art" scenario.  Amanda Connor I really should love more than I do.  I have a deep appreciation for her work and one of these days I just know I'm going to fall madly for what she does and start digging up all her past works.  But I'm just not there yet.  I've seen a lot of her work but it's just not been tied to a series that inspires fervent fandom, at least not in me, not yet.  She needs something epic like a Y The Last Man or something utterly endearing like a Hawkeye or Justice League (seriously, she sometimes out Kevin Maguires Kevin Maguire) to really set her in the upper esehelon (some I'm sure think Power Girl was that), because she's ready.  But Silk Spectre is just not a character I key into at all.  She has the most intricate ties to the heroic legacy of the Watchmen universe, her Mother and Dr. Manhattan and the eventual reveal of her father but she always seemed a character defined by her connections, Night Owl included.  There's an absence there in Moore's original script regarding Laurie  (an intentional one, mind) that leaves the character open for such a prequel exploration... but she was still left too vacant and largely ineffectual in Watchmen form to care.

This "early years" series tries exceptionally hard to get me to care, and comes closer than I ever could have predicted, but even with a Freaks and Geeks- level quality script about teenage angst and unusual living situations and some of Connors' best work (and Paul Mounts' colouring, wow!), toying expertly with the 9-panel grid, it still didn't bring me in from the cold.  To be honest I would probably like it countless times more were it not a Watchmen book and just something brought up from scratch.

365 Comics...190: Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1 (2012)

If there were any logical extension to The Watchmen, Minutemen would be it.  Moore's original work naturally delves into the characters of the Watchmen superhero collective, but only really got to touching upon the Minutemen as they related back to their successors.  The characters of Night Owl and Silk Spectre had a larger role due to the fact that they were second generation versions of the Minutemen iterations, and the Comedian was a nada of both groups, but the rest were only minimally touched upon and have always been ripe for further exploration. Heck, the Minutemen even got their own entry in Who's Who, almost as if there was the expectation of more to come out of it.  l haven't done my homework so I can't say offhand one way or the other if Moore had more in mind, but unlike the rest of Before Watchmen, this one feels okay, less interested in connecting with the source material than in broadening it.  Cooke doesn't do a whole lot here beyond a 1-3 page introduction to each member of the team, through the narration/memoirs of the original Night Owl Hollis Mason.  It's truly not much but it is effective and, moreover, interesting on its own terms.  I've only peeked into 3 of these books so far but I think of all of them I might see this one through.

365 Comics... 189: Think Tank #8 (2013)

I've been cleaning up our unfinished basement, slowly but surely, as the time is drawing near to finally turn it into liveable space. The old bookshelves we have in the basement currently have, for the past four years, housed about half our comic collection with the other half living in a little over a dozen long boxes out in the hermetically sealed shed in the backyard (don't ask about how they were organized...).  It took 15 more boxes to remove the floppies from underground to out of doors and I'm worried the shed is going to sink under the weight... and we still have a bookshelf of trades to more in there (at least 5 more long boxes worth).  While packing up the comics into my new, still vintage white long boxes ("Made in Canada" emblazoned on the insides, a proud heritage moment) I was seeing books I hadn't touched in years, many of which I've yet to even read and it dawned on me... I have a problem. Still.  I've had this revelation before. Last time I moved all those books onto those shelves and again when I last made room on those shelves.  I love comics...l love buying then and reading them and looking at them and thinking about them and reading about them and talking about them... I take comfort in knowing that they are there for me to get to, hopefully, at some point.  There's no rush, or urgency once I've acquired a comic to read it, though my weekly pull books tend to be a little more demanding staring me in the face in a pile beside the bed.  But then, the satisfaction I get from having a comic is doubled when I look at the cover, like a Think Tank #8 sitting atop my read-and-to-be-sorted pile, and know I have a book I not only own and read but also enjoyed and would like to come back to someday... in this case if only to see how the world has caught up or surpassed Matt Hawkins great use of theoretical, speculative, in-development and fringe sciences and technologies.  Hey science, we need Tesseract long boxes.

365 Comics...188: Lazarus #1 (2013)

The growing disparity between the have-nots and the have-it-alls is depressing and infuriating and naturally going to become more and more a part of our science-fiction dialogue if not come to dominate our pop culture in general...that's if the haves will let us have nots have an honest conversation about our society's shocking state via their media empires . I suppose as long as we're being entertained, the less inclined we are to do anything about it.  After all isn't getting mildly ill-informed of social issues through comic books and crime procedurals on tele the same as, you know, doing something?

Lazarus is a solid SF-tinged book from the great Greg Rucka and Michael Lark that takes place deep into the century where society is run no longer by governments but by a new era of monarchs, the uber-rich who control pretty much everything.

My wife's more the expert on historical monarchies (moreover historical fictional monarchies) so it'll be interesting to feed her the title in a few issues time to see if Rucka's making any paralels to old timey royal family feuds and the way this future-ish society resembles that of old.