Someone Somewhere Must Have Covered This Already, But...

 ...we got in a collection of comics at the store yesterday that was just plain all over the place--a lot of beat-up Silver Age DC, some Marvel movie adaptations (Dune, etc.) and things that seemed like toy tie-ins that I don't remember any toys for (Animax, anybody?), and weird crap I'd never seen before, like a comic that taught kids all about...moving. Like, moving to a different house. It was no Moving with Richard Pryor, lemme tell ya. Anyway, one comic that I knew of, but really hadn't devoted much thought to since I was ten, was in there, and it got me thinking:

Hey, wasn't there a more recent comic with a similar title that also featured a white-haired protagonist with two sidekicks, one male, one female?

Be sure to tune in next week, when I blow the lid off the whole Get Along Gang/Authority connection.

John Buys Comics, Has Snacks

Ides of Blood No. 1

I knew it! I knew that Wildstorm would fulfill its obligation to have at least one series that I want to buy in print at all times. As soon as Sparta, USA ended then this saga of vampire-infested Rome stepped to the fore.

You may have already seen the preview for this, as it’s been floating around for the last couple of weeks. If so, you know the basics: when Rome conquered the Balkan state of Dacia it found vampires running around, and so it enslaved them all and hauled them home, where they became the new underclass. So: a conceptual mashup, but an interesting one. What you DON’T know if you’ve only seen that preview is that this is also basically a police procedural, as Praetorian/vampire/former slave Valens attempts to solve a series of murders before the his enemy Brutus can do so. And that is awesome. There is seriously a scene where Valens does the equivalent of a ballistics test on some bite marks so that he can trace the vampire who did the biting. If he fires a werewolf into a barrel of water next issue then my reading experience will be complete.

I guess a part of me does cry out about historical inaccuracies and such, but then another part of me reminds the first part that it’s reading a comic about vampires in Ancient Rome and maybe it should shut up and let the rest of the brain enjoy itself if it knows what’s good for it.

Seedless Vol. 1

Man, I almost didn’t flip through this, which means that I wouldn’t have bought it, which means that my life would have had just a bit less joy in it.

I have no idea how to describe the plot of this book to you without making you cock an eyebrow and question my judgement, because it’s very weird. Check it: a trio of alien grapes (Dash, Funky and Pulse), having driven an evil grape mastermind (Crazy) off of their grape planet, pursue him to Earth, where they befriend a girl named Harmony and together try to stop Crazy (and his minion Fajita) from rebuilding his army using Terran grapes.

This book is like nothing so much as a late 80s/ early 90s Saturday morning cartoon: new characters and new powers are constantly being introduced, at a rate of about one per battle. What could get tiresome very quickly in a TV series, though, is here a source of pure joy, because Corey S. Lewis isn’t trying to sell you an ever-increasing stable of toys and accessories, he's just trying to draw an action-packed thrill ride. 

Usagi Yojimbo No. 1 – Will this be the thing that finally gets me to start buying the Usagi Yojimbo collections? Probably. These Dark Horse reprints are a great idea on that front, though it looks like they’ve already done a pretty good job on me, as this is the first one that I didn’t already have in some form. My bookshelf runneth over.

A Skeleton Story No. 1 - I seem to have frittered my evening away on chores and errands, so it's terse from here on out. I will be watching this series carefully, because my new catch phrase, as of now, is "Skeletons are the thinking man's zombies." I can only hope that it will make me wildly popular.

Streets of Gotham No. 15 – Good lord is Two-Face a great character when written well. Rounds of applause for this comic!

Oops, I ran out of time and there is a guacamole-based snack being offered to me! Away!

John Buys Comics. Boy, Does He Ever.

It was another heavy week for me, folks. Literally, I mean. I had a hard(er) time carrying my comic bag home. What terrible scheduling spirits conspired to have Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour and Rasl come on the same week as my copies of The More Than Complete Action Philosophers! and the second Agents of Atlas trade came in, I'll never know. Mean ones, they are - I was listing sideways all the way home.

Wait, that doesn't sound very heavy at all. Perhaps I should explain something about my bag: It's already very heavy, because I must carry a ridiculous amount of stuff around with me for my own peace of mind. Four more books made it think seriously about gravitational collapse.

Curiously, the fact that my stack of comics contained fewer items this week did not make me any more productive, review-wise. Quite the contrary, in fact - evidently the height of the pile is the thing that'll really kick my procrastination circuits into gear, not the number of items it is composed of.

Which is all a way of saying that I don't have much to say this week. Oh, Action Philosophers! and Rasl are terrific, and it's about time that I got around to reading them, but you probably already knew that. I'm going to confine myself to the two exciting brand new things of the week, Scott Pilgrim and Welcome to Tranquility. I'll save Scott Pilgrim until the end, just to give you ample warning: much as I try I might spoil something or influence your experience or something, so don't read to the end if you need to keep your thoughts pure to derive pleasure from a comic.

Welcome to Tranquility: One Foot in the Grave No 1

Speaking of series that I waited way too long to get into, I didn't pick up on this one until the second trade came out, despite Rachelle's insistence that it was rilly, rilly good. And it is!

If you're not in the know, Welcome to Tranquility (Gail Simone - Writer, Horacio Domingues - Art, Jonny Rench - Colours) is about a small town where a large number of Golden and Silver Age super-heroes retired, settled down and raised their families and got on with small-town life. I keep wanting to make a comparison to Neopolis in Alan Moore's Top Ten, but it's not a perfect fit. Where Top Ten is about a city full of people who have no place in the outside world any more and thus have recreated the wold in microcosm, complete with all the crime and vice that they fought on the outside, Welcome to Tranquility features larger-than-life figures trying to recreate what they imagine that everyday folks have. Of course, there would be no story in that if everything didn't go wrong, so the series is really about non-super-powered Sheriff Tommy Lindo having to solve small-town murders and conspiracies. Only think Hot Fuzz, rather than Agatha Christie. Because of the super-powers.

If you've ever read anything by Gail Simone, you know that she can write characters, and this is a book full of 'em, ones that she created herself, and complimented by Domingues' art and Rench's colours. You've probably seen the preview for this if you read any Wildstorm books at all, and let me tell you, I don't know what the hell is going on. In a good way. Mayor Fury is getting out of prison! My mind is blown! His lawyer wore a suit and cape! That was awesome!

So. As I recall, the first two trades were pretty reasonably priced, so if you check this out and like it but have no idea what the hell's going on I most heartily recommend them. I can't remember if there are gorillas, but basically every other excellent thing from comics shows up at one point or another, including robots and really fun mysteries. 

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour

Or should I write that Scott Pilgrim Book 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour? Or Scott Pilgrim Book 6: 's Finest Hour? Damn you, O'Malley! Oh wait, book one was Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, wasn't it? i guess consistency gets you off the hook. This time.

First off, I have some bad news. My theory about Ramona being a fictional stand-in for Kim Pine and the whole fighting evil exes thing being Scott's penance for how poorly he treated her in high school totally didn't pan out. I repeat: Scott and Kim don't end up together at the end. So sad. Why do my crackpot theories never pan out?

Other than that, though, totally awesome. As is required of any Scott Pilgrim epic, this had crazy fight scenes and video game references and callbacks to prior volumes and sappy twentysomething romance. All of my favourite characters got some facetime and there was resolution without absolute certainly. An ending completely in keeping with the quality fun and pure joy that the series has been for me.

Here's where you really, really want to stop reading if having my reading experience taint yours would make you sad. Seriously, I'm going to talk about themes and stuff.

Aside from the straightforward joys of watching Scott Pilgrim fightin' and lovin', this was an extremely satisfying read because it managed to cast the entire series in a new light. My guess wasn't that far off in one respect - Scott Pilgrim has been on a voyage of redemption and redefinition. In light of what happens in this final volume one can look back and see it: Scott Pilgrim making the transition between the selfish world of high school love and the hard-to-attain adult relationship that isn't just high school love with a new face. He's trying to grow up without becoming an asshole (the assholes are represented by the evil ex-boyfriends). Or something like that. What this really means is that Bryan Lee O"Malley has given me a really solid excuse to read the series again. Thanks, man!

And now I must go. Good night!

"John Buys Comics!" he exclaimed.

Hellboy in Mexico

Ahhhh…

I have no idea when I first encountered the idea of Hellboy spending some time fighting monsters in Mexico with three luchadore brothers. It may have been as recently as last year in the Hellboy Companion or it might have been hinted at in a letters page back in 2002. The exact date is, in fact, immaterial because I have been craving this so hard since whenever it was that it felt like forever ago.

And now it’s here! And it’s good, as all Hellboy one-shots are. I think that it’s a natural law, as-yet unquantified by our science. It’s not terrifically deep, of course, but who needs deep, especially when the other series in the Hellboy universe are concerned with portents of doom and the deferral of monstrous destiny. As much as I love all of that, sometimes it’s nice to sit down with some old-school monster-punching action.

That’s not to say that this book is only about punching. There’s enough abridged exploration of loyalty, friendship and vengeance here that it could have made a fair-sized miniseries. But it didn't have to be: everything is there and everything is fantastic. The punching and assorted moves that I no longer know the names of (early 90s Johnathan is slightly ashamed of this) are executed with admirable skill, even when not compared to books in which fight scenes are mere bundles of unresolvable limbs. It is wonderfully and abundantly clear what each character is up to in this book.

izombie No. 1

There’s a pretty good chance that you caught the preview for this that was floating around the last month or so but just in case, here’s the skinny: it’s written by Chris Robeson and drawn by Michael Allred, and it’s about a girl who is a zombie, but not the corpse-lookin’-lurch-around-the-countryside type, just a bit pale, a bit dead. The catch is that unless she eats a fresh human brain each month, she will become the lurching and mindless sort of zombie. To facilitate her pursuit of brains, Gwen (that’s her name) works as a gravedigger.

The preview also set up the fact that there would be mystery-solving in this comic, as Gwen must placate the echos of the people whose brains she eats, absorbed during that super-gross process. What I did not know ahead of time was that this was going to be a girl detective kind of story, complete with Sixties-era ghost sidekick, nerdy were-dog love interest and crypt HQ! Even if I hadn’t read old Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon adventures throughout my formative years, I would be all over this.

I don't really know what else to say. If fun writing, Allred art and plucky supernatural girls solving mysteries isn't enough to get you interested in this one then I guess that we're very different people.

Superf*ckers

How happy was I to see this collection? SO HAPPY. I used to have access to the individual issues of this comic but then lost them in what can only be described as a messy roommate divorce. What fun to have them again!

Superf*ckers is an incredibly satisfying book, essentially about what a group of super-powered teenagers would probably really be like, and while it’s certainly not what I want to encounter when I pick up an issue of Legion of Super-Heroes it’s nonetheless very cathartic to read about over-indulgence, petty politicking, mind games and misfiring hormones in a similar context. I was a pretty innocuous teen, but I'm pretty certain that given the chance and the powers I'd have been smoking grote and engaging in ethically questionable behaviour just as readily as Jack Krak or Orange Lightning.

All the old clichés get illustrated, Kochalka-style: tryouts, super-romance, disgusting sidekicks, too many rules. I think that it gains a lot by being adorable and brightly-coloured as well - not having to waste energy on being grossed out and offended leaves a lot more for delighted clapping and squeals of glee.

Sparta U.S.A. No. 3

THIRD ISSUE RECAP: Sparta is a town in… another dimension or a fantasy land or the future, I’m not sure. Or maybe someplace else. Wherever it is located, it appears to be a football-obsessed small American town. Look a little closer, though, and there are a lot of strange things about the place, like the fact that its citizens are encouraged to get ahead by any means necessary, up to and including murder, as long as they don’t get caught. The people of Sparta don’t know anything about sexual reproduction - their babies are delivered on a semi-annual basis by the Maestro, their sinister blue Governor. And nobody leaves town because they’ll probably be eaten by yeti.

The hero of the book, Godfrey McLaine, has left town and learned about the birds and the bees and so forth, and now he's come back in order to free the people from the Maestro. So far this has involved getting his ass handed to him by the entire town (who just wanted to watch football, dammit), but he subsequently formed a militia out of the only people in town willing to have more faith in him than the Maestro: all of his former lovers.

Having written this out I now realize that it is all very strange. I assure you, however, that it is strange in a good way. Every issue has more yeti than the last!

Brightest Day No. 1 - Nobody said "Brightest Day", so one point to them.  

Batman and Robin No. 12 - Good job, Grant Morrison. You caught me completely off-guard.

Astro City: Dark Age Book Four No. 4 - Holy poo! Dark Age is done! Not that I didn’t enjoy it but it must be said: I am incredibly excited to read some

Orc Stain No. 3 - Fully half of this issue reads like a video game, in the best possible sense. That is, not like most comics based on video games. It’s like… like when you’ve been playing a game for a while and you’re on a level that’s giving you some trouble and then suddenly you just nail it. You fly through the level like it was nothing. That is exactly what the action in this book felt like to me. Astonishingly good.

Secret Six No. 21 - Hey, Dwarfstar! Always good to see someone keep on being a super-villain even after the series they started out in was cancelled. Also: there is a joke in this issue that is so good/bad that I guffawed, though subsequently I learned that it was impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t read comics, no matter how fast you talk or how many times you assure them that what you're talking about makes sense.

Batman Confidential No 44 - My, but that Sam Keith story was interminable. It’s good to get back to reading short, unconnected Batman stories. Hey, check it out, it's the second-best zombie from Return of the Living Dead!

John Buys Comics. Compulsively.

Stumptown No. 3

THIRD ISSUE RECAP!

Actually, I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this comic before. If I haven’t, shame on me - I am a bounder and a cad of the highest order.

Stumptown is a classic detective story, in the “protagonist just keeps following up leads no matter how beat up they get or how many people they piss off until they get their man/woman” mode, and we’ve just gotten to the point where our hero Dex has met all of the characters but still has no sweet clue what’s going on. I was going to make a crack about it being hard to follow the mystery because the books come out so far apart, but I just read the piece at the back and it turns out that they come out far apart because Matthew Southworth is adding extra pages, and now I feel like a jerk.

Speaking of Southworth, he’s been doing a heck of a job on this book, and the text pieces that he’s been putting in the back have really been showcasing just how much design goes into a project like this. Likewise, Greg Rucka has been writing some terrific characters, which is good because that’s how you make a detective book shine. It’s clear that aside from being a damage-prone but ultimately indestructible private investigator with a cool car and some bad habits, Dex is a genuinely interesting person who loves her brother and has complicated relationships and so on. Ever since I stopped working in libraries I’ve had a really hard time finding decent detective fiction among the sea of mediocre, so this is a very welcome book.

Random Acts of Violence

So… I buy a lot of comics on impulse. I figure that since I’m doing these reviews I might as well spread my net wide and so I’ll pick up a lot of first issues and small trades that look even marginally interesting. And hey, Palmiotti and Gray! Dude in a welding outfit! Okay title! Could be all right! Was not, actually all right!

In a nutshell, Random Acts of Violence is about two guys who make a comic in the torture porn style, become immensely popular and inadvertently inspire people to commit heinous murders, until the whole thing loops around and they themselves are in the sort of situations that they’ve been writing about.

And surprisingly, it’s meh. Unlike the Eighties-style horror movies that seem to have inspired Last Resort, I have no real interest in Saw and Hostel and the rest of the subgenre that’s being referenced here, mostly because they have no joy in them. So I can’t revel in the tropes of a form that I love, and I certainly can’t celebrate the fact that they’re being transcended, because they aren’t. I can’t even get too worked up about the weird misogyny of the whole thing, because the characters manage to talk it to death round about page 30 or so. I mean, that doesn’t make it go away but now I’m kind of bored when I think of it.

Most of the entertainment value that I managed to wring from this came from speculating about the aspects of comics culture that crop up in the course of the story: do Palmiotti and Gray have a super low opinion of fans? Being as this is a book made by two guys (okay, four guys. Leave me alone!) about a book made by two guys, are there analogies being drawn here? Does that make the unfortunate girlfriend Amanda Connor? Is that as disturbing as I think it is? And my number 1 speculation: would we (that's you and me) really embrace an over-written torture porn comic book hard enough to make it as popular as depicted here - one issue and its indie creators are being flown all over the country to massive acclaim? I guess we'll see.

Husk No. 1

Maybe I should start keeping up on upcoming comics, because I didn’t know what the hell this was and so almost missed it. I was almost a fool.

Just in case you haven’t been reading up on this stuff either, Husk is the first (I think? I really do need to keep up on the news) part of a team-up between Marvel and French comics publisher Soleil, the goal of which is to introduce some fine Gallic comics to North American audiences and presumably make everyone scads of money.

This is very exciting! France - heck, Europe - has an incredibly rich comics culture that we only see in dribs and drabs, and any concerted effort to bring some of it over here so that I can read it without, you know, having to have retroactively paid attention in all of those French classes is fine by me.

As for the book itself, it’s concerned with Sarah, the devil-may-care pilot of an Arnold M5 Husk, a biomechanical exosuit used by police, military and industry. There’s a lot of philosophizing about the interface of man and machine, punctuated by wicked action and big explosions. As you may have inferred from that last sentence, it has a lot in common with Ghost in the Shell, even down to the fact that there’s a brain-hacker on the loose. I have to say though: this looks a heck of a lot prettier and the philosophy is either translated better or is less impenetrable to begin with.

Garrison No. 1

It’s the near future and the US government’s obsession with security has blossomed into full-fledged paranoia, making it the “most surveilled nation in the history of the world”. Our heroine, Jillian Bracewell, works for the National Bureau of Surveillance, and organization that is getting seriously irked by title character Garrison. Why? Because Garrison has been appearing on-camera long enough to murder people - more than 150 people - and then disappearing again, all over the country that's why.

So far, so good - a perfectly fun first issue, interesting character potential, nice art. It could go any number of ways, plot-wise, so I’m going to wait a month and do a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT, just in case.

Okay, mostly because I haven't done one in a while.

Detective Comics No. 864

I’m ignoring the fact that Batwoman is no longer in this comic, because it would unduly prejudice me against it... Okay, done.

Hey, this is a good time!

I didn’t actually read the book (presumably Batman) that had the big “Black Mask is Jeremiah Arkham” reveal, but no matter: it’s pretty satisfying to me. The idea that Arkham was just as crazy as the people under his care has been floating around for a long time now, and while it’s a concept that could comfortably exist on the periphery of the Batman mythos forever, it has in fact been the focus of way too many stories for nothing to eventually come of it.

I mean, Alfred has been made into a super-villain. Robin has (kinda). How long could an insane asylum director reasonably hold out?

The Great Unknown No. 3

MINIATURE THIRD ISSUE RECAP: I’m sorry that it can’t be full-size, but it’s been about a year and my memory ain’t quite good enough. So: Zach Feld is an inventive genius, but every time he comes close to patenting something, someone else gets it to market first. He’s become paranoid and secretive, to the point that his family has called in a reality show intervention on him. And then, round about the middle of issue two, he discovers that someone actually has been stealing his ideas right out of his head and selling them on an online auction site called imind. Now he's teaming up with a group of funny-headed Objectivists who have also been exploited by the idea-thieves and things are presumably going to get science-awesome and possibly also science-violent.

Gah. Are there no comics that I can rag on for being slow? How can I take issue with Duncan Rouleau taking a while to write and draw and presumably colour this, especially when it looks so good? And issue four comes out next month, so I can just shut my mouth.

Usagi Yojimbo No. 128 - I’d been reading the older stories in this series as per my usual compulsive-need-to-catch-up modus operandi but I just couldn’t resist the sweet sweet samurai action any longer. I’m kind of glad I did, because the fifty-issue jump made me realize that Stan Sakai is actually getting better. That’s crazy! He was already astonishingly good! But yes: check out Usagi’s facial expression, stance and movement while he’s fighting in this issue - damn that magnificent man.

Green Lantern Corps No. 47 - Things calm down on the Lantern front, for one issue, at least. A nice little epilogue issue, with two points of excitement: Firstly: Kilowog’s assertion that he just wants to be a space cop is very encouraging because that’s what I want to read about. Secondly, the “Coming this year…” splash at the end looks very promising - a whole lot of the pictured events could fit snugly into an action-packed cosmic cop adventure. I am preparing for glee, particularly if that one guy with the flaming sword is related to the space genie that the Legion had to fight that one time.

John Buys Comics: Stone Age Edition

Okay, not quite Stone Age, but my Internet connection has become something akin to dialup. So: no fancy images on this post, kiddies, as I kind of want to go to bed tonight.  

Batman and Robin No. 11 

There’s an incredibly high chance that Oberon “Gravedigger” Sexton is a red herring, right? He’s just such an obvious candidate that he simply can’t be Bruce Wayne, back from caveman days and living in disguise. Or has Grant Morrison double-guessed me and brought him back in the most obvious way possible, just to fake me out for a month? Oh, this game of cat and mouse that we have, what chaos it leaves in its wake. Frankly, I kind of hope that he’s not – the DC Universe could use more guys who dress like Victorian hearse drivers and hit people with shovels, and Sexton does so with aplomb.

 

It’s probably not to be, though. If Oberon Sexton isn’t Bruce Wayne then he’s likely either some tertiary character extracted from the Bat-past for new duty (the head of the Batmaniacs, one of the Gotham Mystery Analysts, Batman Jones) or a brand-new character written as though he were of ancient provenance. Either way, I’ll put my money on him being motivated by some sort of instructions or clues that time-traveling Batman has left behind. I’ll also bank on the next few issues of this comic being totally awesome.

 

Man, I really hope it’s Batman Jones.

 

Re: the cover:  that’s a really nice shovel.

 

Red Robin No. 11

 

I’m really enjoying both Red Robin and Batman and Robin, but it’s getting pretty weird to read them both in the same week. Two stories in which two different members of the al Ghul family use what are presumably two different branches of the League of Assassins to try to kill Batman and Robin? It’s not like they’re at all alike in any but the superficial ways that I just pointed out, but it’s still enough to give one déjà vu. I wonder which of these is happening first, official continuity-wise? Which Batman should be rolling his eyes and going “Oh nertz, not again.” before socking some noggin? I guess it’s all contingent on whether “the Return of Bruce Wayne” means the end of Dick Grayson as Batman, doesn’t it?

 

Superman: Secret Origin No 5 (of 6)

 

I’ve been enjoying this series. It might not be strictly necessary, but I understand the need to realign the origin of a character as integral to the DCU as Superman is once in a while, as the Legion of Super-Heroes or Final Crisis or what have you alter how things have happened in general, so too do they alter how things have happened in Superman’s past. Heck, just the fact that Superman was Superboy again works well enough for me.

 

And this series has done a lot of things that I really liked: young Clark Kent finding his first peer group in the Legion worked just as well here as in the LSH cartoon, for example. Or the fact that Metropolis was a hellhole before Superman appeared, say. Plus, this is the best depiction of mild-mannered Clark Kent as a distinct, not-exactly-like-Superman person since All-Star Superman.

 

That said, have I mentioned how bored I am with the current General Sam Lane v. Superman plotline that has now evidently been incorporated into this origin story? I have? Well, let me reiterate: Mistrustful Secret Government or Military Group Targets Super-humans And Tries to Turn the Public Against Them is so damn played out that reading a comic book in which that is the main story element is like… it’s like when you were a kid and some terrible show is on television but there’s something that you really want to see on afterward and you have no concept of time being precious yet, so you just sit and watch the terrible show that you’ve already seen before at least twice. The world goes gray around the edges and you are so bored that it’s palpable. THAT IS WHAT THIS TYPE OF STORY FEELS LIKE TO ME.

 

At least the next issue is going to have the bit where everything looks really bad but then Metropolis embraces Superman and there’s an inspirational splash page.

 

Sparta USA No. 2

 

I think that I can safely bump up the RECAP on this book without violating my personal values and spoiling anything.

 

Sparta is a small town that believes itself to be a part of the United States. All Spartans are a) obsessed with football, b) dedicated to their family and its public image and c) capable of doing anything up to and including murdering one another in order to advance their agendas regarding a) and b).

 

The people of Sparta answer to the Maestro, a blue man visits town sporadically and who claims to speak for the President and dictates who gets married to who, who is allowed to have children – children that he brings with him from somewhere outside of town. No Spartan, by the way, is allowed to leave Sparta, and believes the outside world to be virtually uninhabitable.

 

Enter Godfrey McLaine, legendary former quarterback and the only person to have ever left town. He’s come back huge and red and looking to free the people of Sparta from the influence of the Maestro. Based on what he’s said and what we’ve seen through his eyes, Sparta is nowhere in the US, but rather in the midst of some sort of fantastical wonderland full of yeti and hags and fairy-types and the like. I am intensely interested in finding out what the deal is with this town.

 

Invincible Returns No. 1 – Okay, wait. The story picks up directly from Invincible No. 69 and the letters page text treats this like No. 70 but the cover and indicia disagree. I’m so confused, not least by why I’m spending this much mental energy on trying to figure things out (yet not, say, looking it up on Images website). Eh. What’s certain is that the yellow costume is much more visibly interesting than the all-blue was and it’s good to have it back.

 

King City No. 7 – I tell you what: I’m glad that I got into King City the second time around. This marks the first all-new issue of the book since early 2007 and I reckon that I’d have spent the past three years pining away if I’d been reading it back then. For all of you poor fools who’ve been doing just that, this issue features brain-theft, a look at the farm that Joe learned cat mastery at and a backup by James “Orc Stain” Stokoe! Hot damn!

 

Sweet Tooth No. 8 – Good gravy. It is almost physically hard to read parts of this book. Jeppard’s collapse is so complete in this issue that it’s painful. RECAP next issue.

 

Doom Patrol No. 9 – I have a good feeling about this thing where Giffen brings back Doom Patrol characters that I never thought I’d see again in a million years. Granted, Crazy Jane and Danny the Street Brick haven’t really had the facetime necessary for a full nerdnalysis, but my Cautious Optimism Sense is tingling. Of course, one must then wonder: who’s next? Coagula? Imaginary Robotman? Beard Hunter? Beard Hunter, please.

 

Speaking of characters that haven’t been around in a while, is Oberon’s bi-coloured hair freaking anyone else out?