The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: Pardon Our Brevity, We're Still Recovering From That Thing With Madonna Singing All Our Childhood Favorites

Blazing Combat #3
Art by Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Eugene Colan, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood, Gray Morrow, John Severin
Written by Archie Goodwin, Alex Toth, Wallace Wood
Published by Warren

This is excellent, of course. These issues (as well as others) were collected by Fantagraphics a few years ago, but there's something to be said for cracking open the yellowing pages behind Frank Frazetta's somber illustration of an American soldier standing knee deep in a pile of dead Vietnamese soldiers, the faint sky blue smoke rising from his rifle. Anti-war war comics are tough work--you're basically saying that you're planning to be entertaining, but this is the kind of entertainment that should leave you stroking your chin and looking off into the middle distance--and it would be impossible for all of those attempts to stick the landing. But if you take a second look at the line-up of talent this one bears, it's no surprise that so much of it does work. Severin's story is a nasty piece of EC style "surprise, asshole!", delightfully stocked with the same kinds of expression heavy faces you'd find in a Maguire Justice League. Toth's is pure post-apocalyptic lechery, with a climax that will appear doubly insane to modern readers. For my money though, the best thing in this package is Reed Crandall's "Foragers". A classic slice of that war comics staple--fragging the lunatic in charge--blessed with the sort of caricature style art that nowadays only shows up in movie parodies, if it shows up at all, and its reliance on brevity only ups the savagery with which it delivers that most classic of messages: Don't Be a Fucking Asshole.

Animal Man #6
Art by John Paul Leon, Travel Foreman, Jeff Huet, Lovern Kindzierski
Written by Jeff Lemire
Published by DC Comics

This issue of Animal Man is taken up with a comic length presentation of a super-serious film version of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass by way of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, (in the comic it is credited to "Ryan Daranovsky" which is just adorgahhh), which, in the DC Universe, features the Buddy Baker character in the starring role. As this is a standard super-hero comic in 2012, there's only enough room to show what would probably be the first 8 minutes of a movie, and the best thing one can say about it is that it's an incredibly accurate depiction of how fucking mealy mouthed and boring a super-serious film version of Kick-Ass would be; that is also, unsurprisingly, the worst thing one could say about it. The comic drones on for a while in this fashion, and whether you think it's being pretentious by choice (as a way to comment on the disgusting immaturity of a man who chooses ego validation over doing things like "pay child support") or not will be determined by whether or not you actually read the comic in question. Theoretically, there's probably an argument to be made here, but when you put the whole thing under the lens of working human eyes, it becomes rapidly apparent that "being a super-hero" is something that non-pieces of shit stop doing the second some girl barfs their kid out of her vagina.

The Punisher #8
Art by Marco Checchetto & Matt Hollingsworth
Written by Greg Rucka
Published by Marvel Comics

Although this leans so heavily on film tricks that half the reading experience consists of pages of Checchetto drawing zoom effects on dead bodies and plugging up the page with "establishing" shots, it's actually a pretty engaging comic, almost like it's being so in spite of the way everyone involved would apparently be happier storyboarding David Fincher movies. Rucka's take on the Punisher is still an unwelcome return to the stories that get told whenever the character is being written by people who can't shut the fuck up about their own personal disagreements with Frank's horrible (and yet still fictional) worldview--and in this case, it's the old "make the surrounding situational ethics unassailably in Frank's favor, and then spend as much of the comic's page count as possible amongst other characters"--but the comic is still so deeply immersed in that professionals-only landscape that Rucka tends to do best in, and it all sort of works. As long as they keep the Spider-Man types and wistful grandmothers at arm's length, this book has actually gotten pretty decent.

Justice League International #6
Art by Marco Castiello, Dan Jurgens, Vincenzo Acunzo, Hi-Fi
Written by Dan Jurgens
Published by DC Comics

This is probably the purest mediocrity that DC has, a comic so boring that its ideal audience would be found in a locked room containing a Rubbermaid tub of semen with a Tupperware container of ova floating in it, as that way you'd be at an absolute Ground Zero, surrounded on all sides by something that has never had the opportunity to know any better. Even trying to find something in the story to point to as evidence deserving of cruelty is a pain in the ass, this comic, such a slippery eel of banality. Near the end, there's an exciting tease of a moment when a woman in the UN's "Security Group" is depicted wearing a dress seemingly cut from the exact same design that one sees on the United Nations flag, but then there's a close-up drawing and you see that it's just a bunch of little white palm trees (?) on a blue background--still without class, but not as hilarious as one could have hoped for. That sequence also features the funniest part of the comic's script, although it isn't legendary or anything--just a bunch of mid-grade super-heroes making excuses and playing victim for multiple pages. It brings up one of those intermittent questions that arise following the reading of too many super-hero comics: don't regular civilians despise these fucking clowns? Wouldn't they despise them further, to see them whining and passing the buck? Comics or real world, it's the same old song, the reason that girls don't like "nice guys": because desperation and pleading are the ugliest things on the planet, and we've been bred, correctly, to treat weakness with the virulent contempt it very much deserves. Failure is nothing more than that, its failure, and you better hurry up and get married if you want anybody to care that you have a cold and cry sometimes, Booster Gold. Because if there's one thing we've got plenty of, it's another clown with a self-esteem problem and a bunch of fucking gadgets.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Don't Call It A Beefcake, He's Been Here For Years

Justice League #5
Art by Jim Lee & Scott Williams
Written by Geoff Johns
Published by DC Comics

Such a miserable experience, reading this comic. It's the narrative equivalent of watching the first episode of that Justice League cartoon in three minute bursts over the course of five months--there's just no way to enjoy that, it's fucking absurd. When you're a kid and you want to hold a boner longer, they tell you to do that exercise where you drape a wet washrag on your shaft and flex it up and down, but they never go so far as to say that you're going to enjoy doing that, or that it's as fun as jerking off, or that you better watch out because you might prefer washrag flexing to putting the thing inside a lady. DC doesn't seem to have ever understood the difference. It's not a surprise that they don't--take a look at the Beat or the Journal's current comment sections, you'll get a plaster cast of what's wrong with comics on both sides--but that doesn't change how tepid and unsatisfying this whole exercise of the Johns/Lee combine has become. Anyway. The Internet says you shouldn't hope people get fired, but honestly, if you just went down the list and got rid of every single person who believes that this comic is worth the four dollars they're asking for it, there's no possible way you wouldn't see an increase in the intelligence average the next time everybody at the staff table pools their "resources" and pours them, like warm oatmeal, into Eddie Berganza's beckoning gullet.

Jennifer Blood #8
Art by Kewber Baal
Written by Al Ewing
Published by Dynamite

Nasty stuff, pretty poorly illustrated for the most part. You can make sense of the art pretty easily, but there's nothing that jumps out as good, the best it ever hopes for is just serviceable. Written relatively well, with some nice Ennis impersonation stuff evenly mixed with what seems to be Ewing's own voice (the "panda" dialog is an excellent line). It's disappointing that one of the most well-regarded of the "new" British writers has to make his entrance into the American market via Dynamite, which is about as good at being a comics publisher as Natalee Holloway is at swimming, but that's just the way of the world in 2012. At least he's got 2000AD--which is currently on a pretty hot streak--to fall back on.

Lone Wolf And Cub: The Message of the Geese & Tale of the Winter Crane
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

"Message of the Geese" is a minor tale, a brief glimpse of the Wolf in battle. It's one of the "features shitting" stories interspersed in the entire saga, a claim to fame that actually isn't all that rare. But beyond the sight of a somewhat constipated Cub forcing out some magic, what sticks in memory most in this brief tale is the momentary compliment paid by the Wolf following his slaughter of a few Yagyu assassins. Upon realizing that one of the Yagyu had sacrificed himself by rushing the Wolf, throwing down his life in hopes that his body might serve as a better launch pad for his partner's attack, the Wolf stops to acknowledge how much like himself the two men were--total dedictation, at less than a moment's notice, to pin all hope, mortal and otherwise, on the missioin, relying on the honor that can only be earned through years of service. It's an excellent moment, one that speaks to one of the saga's greatest strengths: its willingness to embrace the villain.

"Tale of the Winter Crane" is a sneakier story, one whose ending seems always hazily around the corner, only to stop dead with the Wolf (essentially) delivering a "do you know who the fuck I am" speech to a couple of people who don't get it and never will. It's reminscient of that great line at the end of "Mother Russia", when Frank Castle teaches a Delta boy the meaning of the phrase "whatever it takes", made better by the fact that it's delivered with impeccable class by a man who just killed five people with a sword. It's a brief stopover, but a pleasant one.

SFSF2C
By Ryan Cecil Smith

Somewhat reminscient of that Black Jack story where he's brought in to treat a crazy computer, this final installment in Smith's cover version of Matsumoto Leiji's Queen Emeraldas concludes the story the same way it began, with our protagonist musing on a life lived in motion. There's something fascinating about the way the comic depicts space travel as being so empty and "boundless" that it seems as much a philosophical exercise in not going crazy as it is an exercise in just going, anywhere. At the end, this little excursion seems like something that belongs most to its creator (not Matsumoto, but Smith) than it does the audience, and while that isn't a criticism--if anything, this sort of openness to allow an audience inside an obsession should be met with praise--it does underline how exciting it will be to get back to SF proper, a story where the viewing hole is more distinctly made clear.

The Flash #5
By Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato
Published by DC Comics

In the same way that it's hard not to overpraise Snyder and Capullo's Batman for being the fastest cripple in the polio race, it's hard to ignore that all these current installments of the Flash certainly are a pleasure to look at. There's a delightful strain of homoeroticism running through the current storyline, which is all about contemporary male relationships and great haircuts (without Geoff Johns around to champion conservatism, Manapul has been free to jettison Barry Allen's godawful Right Stuff flattop for a brighter, more pomaded, future). It never feels amatuerish, but one's still left with the nagging feeling that, just maybe, it would if it didn't look so consistently great. For now though, let's just be optimistic and raise a glass to future team-ups with cardigans and soulful brown eyes. That's my kind of rogue's gallery: the kind where the rogues are just some dudes who fuck some other dudes with easily replicatable fashion choices.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: You Can't Work Off A Fat Personality, Buster Brown

Prophet #21
Art by Simon Roy and Richard Hope His Name Really Is Ballerman
Written by Brandon Graham
Published by Image Comics

A nice mix-up of Rip Van Winkle, Prison Pit and Conan (easier version: a French sci-fi comic), with guest appearances by the horrorshow that the dog becomes in The Thing, Prophet #21 does exactly what it had to do to meet up with the pre-show hype: it works. Delivering tone and building its world, skipping the corny character signifiers and logos that stand in for personalities and motives in the rest of the Image universe was the best move Graham could have made, forcing the reader to move closer to Simon Roy, an artist finished with his Otomo/Gipi phase and setting up shop in the "how would Jesse Marsh draw manga" school of obsesion. It's fun, and it's weird. If that's not your thing, there's plenty of the alternative available.

Wonder Woman #5
Art by Tony Akins & Matthew Wilson
Written by Brian Azzarello
Published by DC Comics

Now that Wonder Woman has successfully made it over the "hope it doesn't get cancelled" hump, isn't it time we address the fact that Hermes is wearing the ugliest sunglasses ever made, sunglasses that are second only to a backwards baseball cap in making a man look like a total toolbag? Even if we ignore his Woodstock '99 era rain poncho--and we really shouldn't ignore that thing, because that's as much a sign of the unfunny side of perversion as it would be if he was driving a white panel van with no windows--we're still five issues into a relationship where the most happening broad in the land has yet to tell her own brother that, oh, you know, he's wearing the same fucking sunglasses that Jerry Sandusky wore everytime he wanted to hide his tired eyes from the harsh light of a world where the rest of us don't fuck children in showers.

Daredevil #8
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Kano & Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

If any title is going to survive Marvel's bizarre creative tailspin, the smart money has to be on Daredevil, a book that's almost quaint with its slow-burn long tale plotting, most of which circles around the possession of a high end flash drive, packed to the gills with evil secrets. Even a tie-in with the Amazing Spider-Man (a series that is taking a short break from one piece of shit story arc so that it can rest its weary, shit-filled bones before it delivers what looks to be another piece of shit story arc) didn't slow it down that much, which comes as a surprise when you consider how little anyone, fictional or otherwise, wants to be around Peter Parker for a length of time more extensive than it would take to stab him in his stupid, stupid whining eyes.

Usagi Yojimbo Volume 6
By Stan Sakai
Published by Fantagraphcis

About half this volume of Usagi is taken up with stories where the samurai rabbit deals with the supernatural, while the other half--a multi part story called "Circles"--concerns itself with the warrior's past, albeit with a supernatural villian thrown in. There's also a quick, predictable one-shot involving a couple of conmen, but don't let the implication of shittiness that the word "predictable" brings with it take hold: there's enough great comic-stuff going on in the story to make up for the fact that you can chart every strand of plot the thing has after reading the first five--maybe four--pages. Sakai's ability to draw a character's motives into their facial features is one of his weirdest and most fascinating talents. It's easy to spot the bad guys in most funny animal comics, and that's why Usagi Yojimbo is a cut above the rest--the complexity on display here in the face of the depressed, one-more-scam swordsmen goes beyond the simple "he's a fox, and foxes are tricky".

"The Duel" is excellent preparation for "Circles", which is all about motives and revelations. Usagi decides to return to his former home, only to walk into another one of those hard-working townspeople versus rapacious bandits settings so popular in samurai fiction. He discovers an old friend and old enemy, both still alive, checks in on his estranged lover (who packs a revelation of her own), the friend-turned-rival that married her, and then there's a nice, long battle that lasts multiple pages without ever seeming the slightest bit self-indulgent. It's a lovely story, and what it lacks in humor (Usagi just isn't funny without Gen or that detective character around) it makes up for in earnest sincerity.

Lone Wolf and Cub: The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

If someone were to make a graph of the types of Lone Wolf & Cub stories, they'd first break them down into two major categories--the one-off ones where he earns money by killing people, and the ones where the ongoing narrative is pushed towards conclusion. Eventually, the entire book focuses entirely on that second category, all of which build to the most satisfying conclusion to any genre comic book ever published. That's not intended to be hyperbole: it's a statement of fact, albeit one that's only seen meager research. The greats of American genre comics--Eisner and Kirby--never got a chance (some quarters might word that "never took a chance", but not this one, and fuck those people) to play around with conclusions and finality anymore than Shultz, King and Herriman (a few of the greats of the newspaper strip) did. Leaving the question of whether genre requires an ending aside for a moment (a moment that could last an eternity, for how little I care to probe it), "The Inn of the Last Chrysanthemum" rests firmly in that first category described above: this one's all about the money.

One of Koike's most consistent methods of story construction is to focus the reader's attention entirely on the point of view of some new, as of yet unknown to us character. We follow that character through their (often depressing) life, they experience a few flashbacks that explain their current situation, at some point the Wolf and Cub arrive in their orbit, and then the story leads up to an (often violent) conclusion. In many cases, the story takes on an intense sense of danger and heightening panic after the appearance of the Wolf, because while this structure of story often appears in the overall saga, there's never any promise that the story will conclude happily for all we might hope it will. Sometimes the best the Wolf can do is mete out revenge for abuses suffered, other times he can only acknowledge them in word, and on a few occasions (not few enough to where the sting is ever lessened), he can only provide a quick, honorable passing for those whose long-term victimization leaves them unable to find any way forward in the mortal realm. "Chrysanthemum" is on the bleak end of the scale--the only bottom left for its guest protagonist, the "forlorn maiden, forced into a life of shame" is found in a blood drenched garden, and the only satisfaction found is in the bodies that the Wolf piles alongside her own. There's no pretense that it will be enough, but in keeping with Koike's plan, it's made clear: what matters is that debts get paid. What happens next is never our concern.

King-Cat #72
By John Porcellino
Published by John Porcellino

Even if you don't read the opening letter, where Porcellino admits that most of what you're about to read stems from a time period when, busted up by heartbreak and economic collapse, he "didn't do so good", you'd have to be one cold ass son of a bitch--or a non-Porcellino fan out scraping scabs--not to pick up on the general dourness of the whole enterprise. The crippling impact of a Faith Hill song? An out of nowhere "I don't want to be alive anymore" response to a Porcellino-standard observation of natural beauty and the change of seasons? It's not that these sorts of emote-heavy moments are a strange appearance in the guy's work--this is King-Creamballs-Cat we're talking about, feelings are what these little bastards always traffic in, occasionally to an embarrassing degree usually reserved for Thomas Kinkade--it's that they're being delivered in such a raw, unkempt fashion. There's no lesson at the end of this issue, no explanation given, just the implication that survival is the game, the only thing that Porcellino was going for. Each of these documents--even the moment of nostalgia that sees the guy flashing back to the irritating dopiness of youth--concludes on the same note: he made it when everything was coming at him knives out. Not every struggle has a t-shirt phrase to go along with it.

Batman #5
Art by Greg Capullo
Written by Scott Snyder
Published by DC Comics

There's some serious self-indulgence going on here--landscape two page spreads for no purpose beyond the ability to say "hey, look, big", coupled with the demanding notion that you're reading about a secret society of owl-obsessed maze-building super-killers, and yeah, sorry, "owls" IS tougher to swallow than "bats", anybody who tells you different doesn't like super-hero shit in the first place--but that aside, this is actually a good little Batman comic. It doesn't deserve the over-the-top praise that it's gotten, but at the same time, it's totally understandable why that praise has been so hyperbolic: this has been the shittiest group of Batman titles in a long time. Having a decent issue show up, an issue that sees a plot humming forward with solid illustration to boot--that's going to get some knees buckling, especially amongst those who have been plugging their quarters into the super-hero slot machine since this New 52 thing started. But don't get too worked up: you've never met anyone who is going to read this thing twice, and you never will.

Thunderbolts #169
Art by Kev Walker, Tery Pallot & Frank Martin Jr.
Written by Jeff Parker
Published by Marvel Comics

Time traveling away from Marvel's bone dry continuity and hanging out amongst King Arthur, violence, Merlin, and lots and lots of titties--if you're using the word breasts to describe what Kev Walker's drawing, you really don't fucking get it and probably never will--Thunderbolts #169 (god bless them for keeping the inane numbering of this series) is one of those totally enjoyable comics that probably shouldn't get mentioned on a blog, because that's a sure fire way to see the thing get cancelled the next time Marvel wants to do one of their periodical "how can we fuck up the thing that people like and want to buy" (see the Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Force for examples, look under the paragraph heading "Really Shitty Art"). But hey, why not tempt fate?

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Playing Totally For Type

Lone Wolf and Cub: Dragon Tiger Cloud Wind
Art by Goseki Kojima
Written by Kazuo Koike
Published by First Comics

In this chapter of the greatest comic ever, the Wolf comes upon one of the men he left behind, a former samurai still living in the exact place where he last saw the Wolf: the day the Wolf seconded the samurai's former lord's seppuku. There's no hatred or ill feelings to be found on either side, and while the conclusion is totally foregone, it's delivered with a sense of respect for the ideals the story promotes. It isn't the first time that Koike plays a scene with that kind of emotion, but that doesn't make it any less lovely. The action is, of coruse, a demented pleasure to witness, with the most graphic violence handed off to the Wolf's shadow. The opening ten pages--silent but for a few cries of death--is a masterful depiction of slaughter that introduces the man far better than any dialog ever could.

Plastic Man Archives Volume 4
By Jack Cole
Published by DC Comics

While this volume has some of the best covers you'll see (if you're reading these things in order, which is totally pointless but probably the only way people are reading them, because they have numbers on them, see: assholes like me), there's a limit to how long you can stare at Woozy WInks believing an Eskimo woman is pawing at him when, in reality, he's being sexually harassed by a lusty polar bear, and that limit is probably the same amount of time it's taking you to parse this description. If you hold out until the last story--that's 180 pages of holding out, by the way--you'll be rewarded by the sight of Plastic Man turning into a gigantic whale for the purposes of seduction. Your mileage may vary, or whatever that asshole phrase is, but it's a sight that is totally worth your time. He turns into a horny red whale!

Amazing Spider-Man #677
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Emma Rios and Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

There's no better statement on the question of whether super-hero comics is in a weird, stupid place regarding their business state of affairs then the fourth page of this comic, which is an advertisement for a goddamned wax museum in Hollywood. Deal with that one for a second: an advertisement for something that's only interesting to the most antisocial deviant tourists on God's green Earth, a location that has no appeal other than the fact that, if it burned down to the ground, absolutely every warring group on the planet could come together and hold hands under the banner of not giving the remotest fuck. That's the absolute best thing that somebody at Marvel Comics--which is owned by a gigantic multinational entertainment conglomerate--could come up with to plaster into this comic. Spin some huckster positivity out of that, Sergeant Pepper. (The comic is excellent, if that still matters.)

Fatale #1
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips and Dave Stewart
Published by Icon Image, hey maybe things are getting fun again

Containing some of Philips finest panels yet--first up that car flip, second the street scene--and adding another accomplished notch in the belt of the best colorist working, Fatale is a reward on a purely visual front. But the area where it might be even more interesting is on the writing front. Horror--if that's what you call the dreck currently ladled out by the shit merchants at IDW--is the prize pet of the low rent High Concept Kids, a loosely descriptive term I just came up with to define people who come up with 4 to 6 issue mini-series that are usually based around plot construction methods learned from Lego, i.e. taking Jack Bauer or Dexter clones and shuffling them together with bang up ideas like "zombies with ties" or "vampires with clits", plus a heaping dash of BBC references, cuz it's classy. Brubaker's the first real writer in a while to fuck with this stuff, unless you count Alan Moore's really weird rape sequel to Fish Police.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Every Good Boy Does Okay

Gantz Vol 20
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Gantz stopped being good not too long after it stopped featuring hardcore sex, but that's no excuse for opening up to the cast to include a bunch of uninspired vampires (most of whom seem to be operating at a heightened state of arousal that is never explained, acknowledged and worse, never capitalized on) and having these vampires behave as if the Gantz-ian regulars are some long standing mortal vampire enemy. It's not a huge surprise that things have gone down the always treacherous road of "let's explain this shit"--that's pretty much par for the course in science fiction stuff that goes on to long--remember when Star Wars tried to explain the Force?--but the fact that you know why something is a bad idea doesn't make it any less tedious to wade through. That being said, the portion in this volume where the spree-killing sociopath (let it never go long forgotten that one of this series main heroes is a sexed up version of Anders Breivik, with all that pesky racism firmly intact) puts on the Predator's chameleon suit and kills 40 people with a samurai sword in the streets of suburban Japan is as irresponsibly compelling as the violence in Gantz always is. If Oku could stand to return to his other obsession--ridiculously oversized breasts, and the heavy panting obsessives who would storm Hell to motorboat betwixt them--he'd quickly find that all would be forgiven.

SF Supplementary File #2A-2B
By Ryan Cecil Smith
Self Published

While the previous SF Supplementary File was a brief mini-comic exploring one of SF's many team members, this issue--split into three limited edition minis, two of which have been released--looks connected to its parent series in theme only. Described by its creator as a "hand-drawn....hand-written reproduction" of a Japanese work by Matsumoto Leiji published in 1979, the comic sees Smith hewing pretty respectfully towards the original work in the same way that he does with his Two Eyes of The Beautiful comics, a similarly designed take on Kazuo Umezu's horror work. And while it seems like a limited exercise--in some ways, it's a heavily choreographed edition of one of those theme sketchbooks people used to not be able to shut the fuck up about--Smith's sincere approach and formidable design skills lift the experience safely into the realm of honest-to-goodness art.

Godland #35
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Tom Scioli & Bill Crabtree
Published by Image Comics

While there's way, way too much talking here for this to be anything more than a tolerable issue of Godland---in all seriousness, anyone who thinks the most exciting thing for Tom Scioli to draw is pointed fingers and turns of phrase should have their nuts stapled directly to their tongue, sack still intact--the final pages, where Adam Archer (our personality deficient hero) has his official team-up with Friedrich Nickelhead (our Joe Casey stand-in, dial turned three degrees north of Extreme) come as close to redemption as one could hope for.

Spaceman #3
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Eduardo Risso & Patricia Mulvihill
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Although the body screams for more of the violence that closed the last installment, the head understands: for death to mean something, it is best if the audience cares about the living. And while we're completely down that road for the detectives, exasperated and estranged as they may be, as well as with our victim heroes (an ape man bearing our national failure and the orphan girl who heralds the cultural demise), the rest loll like meat in the butcher's window. That's fine, actually: it's only the cheap optimism of the dumb and enslaved to theorize that pop celebrities are more than the shallow face they wear, and it's a mark in Azzarello's favor that he honestly depicts them as the frauds they'll forever be. If anything rings false--and little does--it might be the hint of a heart of gold heard in the hooker's final cry. But even that could play by Queensberry; she is still naked, after all.

Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes!
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham & Cameron Stewart
Published by DC Comics

There's something kind of unnerving about reading a DC comic that has all the requisite trappings of a photoshoot in Penthouse magazine, and yet decides to go completely sexless. (Schoolgirls, locker rooms, a latex skirt wearing headmistress and that "watch your rear" closer--ask any 14 year old what story that's telling.) It's almost as if Stewart and Morrison are making some weird comment about the state of geek culture today, the way it wishes to advance its backwards sexual attitudes by loudly proclaiming that sexual attitudes need not exist at all in any form, along with the even more disturbing pretense that the highest art should go should be a place where the smallest hands can still reach it. All this tolerance is cute, goes the rejoinder, but maturity dictates that the language of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was never meant to cover the hurt feelings of 40 year olds obsessed with the My Little Pony franchise: intended or not, the big message of the Morrison/Stewart exercise in Stephanie Brown-ing is that some comics should just grow the fuck up.

It's after that first story that the comic actually gets going, though. There, Morrison and Chris Burnham continue the weird amalgamation of candied violence and neon exploration that's been their beat for a while now; call it Joker comics, his absence makes more sense that way. With the weight of continuity having been abandoned--like Marvel's hands off approach to Uncanny X-Force, Batman Incorporated stories now are free to operate without any of the "help" that produced prizewinners like Countdown, Trinity and Superman: The Gigantic Pussy That Everybody Can't Stand--Morrison is freed of expectation or responsibility. It's a refreshing feeling, and while the Incorporated recap that closes the issue serves mostly as a reminder of how messy and ill-thought Incorporated seemed at the time, it's difficult to fend off the sensation that somebody decided they might still have something to prove, after all.

Wonder Woman #4
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Published by DC Comics

While this issue is primarily the conclusion of the new "origin" of Wonder Woman (short version: a penis was involved this time), it's also the issue where her new personality is completely introduced. The short version of that is that she's sullen, pissed off and based off the final pages, probably guilt-ridden as well. We'll have to see if that personality shift is here to stay, but for now, it's a welcome one. As Dave Sim decisively proved, women are inherently angry creatures; petulant and cold beings who wander the land ruining everything fun. It would only stand to reason that the "Wonder" of women would be the worst version imaginable, a hellish, screaming harpy addicted to the genocide of joy. This is also the issue where Cliff Chiang draws Brian Azzarello into the comic, playing the part of Ares, which only cost him a blow job.

which him did i mean

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Comics Of The Weak: Just Saving Myself Til I Get Raped

Thunderbolts #165-6
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker, Declan Shalvey Terry Pallot & Chris Sotomayor
Published by Marvel Comics

Part of this is the last issue of the time-travel story arc (otherwise known as the get-us-the-fuck-away-from-Fear-Itself story arc to everybody except the one guy I know online who liked Fear Itself), and it is as pleasant as any well-drawn comic about...these people...who are super-villains....pretending to be heroes in World War 2...can be. It's fine. No, it's pretty good! Okay, it's just what it is. Then, you know, like a week or something later, there's another fucking issue and it's like--this book is like assplay. You dig it for a while, you sort of get really into it, but then it becomes an expectation, and sex becomes this thing involving lots of plunging fingers and dirty talk that's getting too edgy along with the most cursory and ill considered handjob one thought possible, and handjobs are already the closest thing to a dictionary definition of "cursory" as you can get. Nobody is saying stop! There's no reason to get like that about it, you want feelings and honesty, sometimes feelings and honesty aren't going to be like cold ice cream. They're going be about how I feel like you're treating me like i'm only good if i'm a dirty whore who always wants fingers in the ass, and Melody Beattie be damned to hell with her churlish grin: sometimes you're responsible for my feelings.

Amazing Spider-Man #674
Written by Dan Slott
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Klaus Janson & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

Giuseppe Camuncoli is a guy that DC wasn't able to provide with a super-hero comic to draw, which is pretty funny when you consider that DC will probably publish a comic book that looks like it was drawn by that four year old who writes Axe Cop at some point in the next two weeks. Of course, Camuncoli has to go through the necessary hazing that occurs with the bump in pay (going from Daken Dark Wolverine to ASM is the equivalent of going from being a Wal-Mart greeter to being that girl that Leatherface hangs on a hook). In this case, the hazing is in the form of being colored by Frank D'Armata, and if there was an award given to people who hate super-hero comics for their ability to hate super-hero comics, there would be absolutely no contest, because Frank D'Armata has dedicated his entire career to making super-hero comics the ugliest thing on the planet, and all the rest of us just sit around talking shit about Geoff Johns outside conventions. That motherfucker punches the hate card everyday. You left your guns at home.

Incredible Hulk #2
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio, Billy Tan, Michael Broussard, Eric Basaldua, Scott Hanna, Joe Weems, Jay Leisten, Don Ho, Crimelab Syndicate & Sunny Gho
Published by Marvel Comics

This comic isn't even that horrible--it's got some really tough art moments, but it's really just mediocre shit at the worst--but man, this is one major clusterfuck of a publication. Beyond all the names listed above for the art, there's two people on a "production" team, there's a credited "special production thanks" to Top Cow...hell, as much as there's an urge to point out the shittiness of the comic, it can't be ignored that this thing is employing way more people than just about anything else on the market. If one third of the comic's being published today employed whatever lopsided method of production is being employed here, the American economy could right itself in a scant few months.

BPRD Hell On Earth Russia #2-3
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Tyler Crook & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

While this year has seen the worst happen to the BPRD series (the loss of Guy Davis), Tyler Crook and Dave Stewart have ably plowed forward and done the best they can with an obviously thankless task. And it's worked fine--the two parter that got Crook's feet wet won't be remembered for anything beyond that one part where the guy's guts got ripped out so he could hold candles instead, and that image was a good one--and Russia has been a rapidly paced get-it-done story that plays well to Tyler's previous experience. This is still a good comic, and while it's unlikely to survive too many more shitty spin-offs written by people other than Mignola & Arcudi, it'll still be...i don't know. It'll be good. It won't give you AIDS or barf on your mother at your dad's funeral. It's still a comic. It won't get you pregnant.

Wolverine & The X-Men #1-2
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Chris Bachalo, Tim Townsend, Al Vey & Jaime Mendoza
Published by Marvel Comics

The truth of the X-Men is that what once made them so necessary to people--the fact that they were the most well-honed version of the soap operatic spandex continuity porn that replaced standard super-hero comic entertainment--has now made them toxic to the rest of humanity who lack the required background knowledge to make sense of their intense convolution. Everybody on this television show has fucked someone else on this television show, everyone has died, quit, changed politics and personalities and in some cases entire flesh, and the best jokes that can now be made are graphically off-putting smug meta references to bodies of history: all of which are delivered at the loudest possible volume in the hopes that "being startled" will be confused in the reader's mind as "being entertained." And while Marvel's choice to attach Bachalo to the project means there's a chance we shall once again see the hideous midget Wolverine, it's also attached to Jason Aaron on script: and his solid run on Ghost Rider aside, Jason Aaron has written more Wolverine-is-crying stories than every other Wolverine writer combined. And while comics are all about--well, they're supposed to be about--inclusion, the truth is that people who enjoy or want to read Wolverine crying stories should be put on a fucking watch list, along with Catholic priests, assistant football coaches, corpulent meat wheelbarrows, guys who live off an allowance given to them by their wives, old racist drunks who use ex-Zuda creators instead of anti-depressants, people who have sex while watching Family Guy, and anybody that has a tiered system of email addresses.

Captain America & Bucky #624
Written by Ed Brubaker & Marc Andreyko
Art by Chris Samnee & Bettie Breitweiser
Published by Marvel Comics

The previous issue of this comic was the weird "let's go to concentration camps" issue that Marvel makes all of its writers do every six months (hey, you come up with an explanation), and who can get into concentration camps anymore after that episode of Human Giant where the Shutterbugs talk about Kidcentration Camp? Or Maus. You know, that's the problem with Ed Brubaker, actually. Because of his past as an Ignatz-swilling Porcellino-balling dude with chest hair, everybody knows he's read Maus, and so you keep hoping that Bucky is going to have an adventure with Art Spiegelman's dad, and Art Spiegelman's dad knew how to party, even in pajamas.

Bowman
By Pat Aulisio
Published by Retrofit Comics

Anytime comics have jokes in them about pot brownies, they should come with a signed affidavit that says The Person Who Made This Comic Is Young Enough That It's Okay That They Still Think That Pot Brownies Make For Good Comedy, because otherwise the reader will spend the whole rest of the time--which could have been kind of enjoyable, since there's that whole Kirby's Kubrick (by way of Panter's creeps and Ryan's blacks)--sneering so hard that the muscle starts to spasm. (This rules also applies to the fucking Asshole only phrase "nom nom", but since that showed up on the same page as the pot brownies, some bit of amnesty is allowed.)

Fantastic Four #600 & FF #12
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mike Epting, Juan Bobillo, and 800 other people
Published by Marvel Comics

When they come, and they're gonna come, they're gonna ask you why you liked Jonathan Hickman comics right before they take you away. And truthfully, no more secrets, we know why you like 'em. But they're gonna come anyway, and when they ask, they're also gonna ask why you didn't just call your dad on the phone, because that's how far away he was the whole time. You didn't need this pacifier. You just needed the courage to tell that man you loved him.

Dude, he loves you too. He just loves football more.

Butcher Baker The Righteous Maker #7
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Mike Huddleston
Published by Image Comics

While this really is the smash 'em up genre comic that all arts comic people should be fucking around with (the coloring in this comic alone is a gigantic rebuke, a challenge that few seem to realize is directed right at them), it's still a book that's weirdly paced and somewhat half-cocked--really, the best way to explain it would be to say "imagine you've only read one comic, and that comic was Elektra Assassin". Sure, there's Godland characters in other garb, and there's the Liquid Television does gag stuff, but this is mostly thought experiment and binge drinking. Don't be surprised if you open the 40th issue and it's just a bunch of rants about peak oil, followed by a couple of panels of a pornographic mustache.

Gantz Volume 19
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse

One of the plot threads from previous volumes--the one where a certain amount of points will allow one of the Gantz fighters their freedom--finally winds its way towards a sort of conclusion, with the big reveal that, on top of escape, points can be redeemed for the resurrection of the dead. While there's definitely a bit of philosophy 101 to be played with here--think the question of whether a boat remains real when years of repair and replacement have given you a boat with none of its original parts--it looks like the story will skip right through that and just play video game logic. In keeping with the Gantz Method (which is way hornier than the Socratic), our lead watches as the entire room use all their points to resurrect his friends, his girlfriend, and then he goes home to masturbate some more. This comic is never going to end.

Wonder Woman #3
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Published by DC Comics

This is an okay remix of the Wonder Woman origin, but don't lie: when you heard (if you heard) that the Wonder Woman origin story was "being changed" in such a way that certain Wonder Woman fans were chapped off, weren't you secretly hoping that Azzarello was going to write a comic where it turned out that Wonder Woman's secret origin was that she was dead, and he was writing a straight up military action thriller about how Steve Trevor flew around the world in a stolen fighter jet getting revenge on God?

It would have been like this:
What's Wonder Woman's secret origin?
That she's DEAD.
DUDE THAT'S AWESOME

Red Hood and the Outlaws #2
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Kenneth Rocafort
Published by DC Comics

Beyond the boilerplate Starfire-as-cum-receptacle stuff (as Dan Didio once said, that girl's got an ass is like a wet bucket), the other main problem with Red Hood and the Outlaws is that it's way, way more interesting a comic than most of DC's 52 output. It doesn't achieve actual comics quality the way something like Wonder Woman does, and it doesn't bleed with Continuity Based Importance the way Justice League does, but it does make very specific choices, have unusual (because it's flashy Top Cow shit, or so I've been told) art, and, because of Lobdell, it doesn't read like the last five years of DC's output. You know why the New 52 thing is failing, already? I mean--you already know, unless you're crazy person. It's failing because it's the same guys who were making the comics you didn't like before. They didn't change. Magically restarting DC Comics didn't make Tony Daniel a more interesting writer, they didn't make Frank Quitely's schedule more open, they didn't cure Rags Morales addiction to draining all of the fluid out of the human form. Didio still can't write a comic. Johns can still only write one. Putting Lobdell on a book--even one as fucking wack-metal as this, which is an attempt to combine the movie Threesome with a children's cartoon, plus cults, gigantic swords and a Dream Whore--means, for the first time in years, that DC has a comic that isn't like every single other DC Comic they publish.

Well, except for the fact that it's still pretty shitty.

Deadpool Max II #2
Written by David Lapham
Art by Kyle Baker
Published by Marvel Comics

Now that the Disney/Marvel meet-those-quarterly-projection heads are making themselves heard, there's no question that books like Deadpool Max II are heading for that place Judge Dredd sends the mentally handicapped in Mega City One. The only question now is whether or not David Lapham and Baker are aware of that, because if they are, we just might be entering the final stretch of let's-fuck-around comics. This is so much a better comic than all of those things by Eisner where people try to solve their familial problems. For instance, when somebody in this comic has a problem with the women in their lives, they take those anti-boner pills they give to child molesters. Have you read A Family Affair? It's a good 30 pages of fucking dialog, and nobody gets to screw anybody. And it certainly doesn't have Cable in it.

Haunt #19
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Nathan Fox
Published by Image Comics

The highest point in this comic is the beginning, when it seems like Joe Casey is doing a riff on that part in Cobra where it turns out that there's an axe-cult killing motherfuckers, and the second high point is when it seems like Nathan Fox is picking up on that Cobra reference by drawing the female sex lead so hideously that she almost looks to have replaced her human flesh with a garbage bag painted in human flesh colors, because if there's one thing that's way too intense for 8 year olds, it's Brigitte Nielsen as a romantic lead, she's essentially Dolph Lundgren with breasts, that's why Rocky IV has such an impact. (Everybody likes it when robots fuck themselves.) And yet: if there's one thing the Haunt character isn't, it's interesting enough to make you forget about Sylvester Stallone's performance in Cobra, which--while not the generally accepted definition of good--is still more striking than this.

Punishermax #19
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Steve Dillon
Published by Marvel Comics

Check this out:

Steve Dillon has drawn more comic books than most people have read, and while few people regard him with the same amount of respect they give to the 40-something father of four who just took their bagel order, and Steve Dillon has drawn pornography, and Steve Dillon has drawn Judge Dredd, and yet Steve Dillon has somehow managed to never draw panels like the one above. That is a new thing. It's not a great thing. But it's new, and it is all his.

Uncanny X-Force #16-17
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Jerome Opena & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

Outside of Daredevil, what super-hero book can go dick to dick with Uncanny X-Force? Hell, outside of the Hernandez/Woodring/Marti level shit, what any comic can? It's not Remender on his own--it's not even Remender plus Opena, because these same dudes did Punisher comics, and that shit worked about as well as JT Krul's initial run on Green Arrow. It sucks to say it, but truth-to-truth, smash-to-smash: character counts, and Deadpool/Wolverine/Fantomex are 2011's equivalent of an engorged vulva knocking on your door right after your girlfriend dies of a miscarriage in your arms. Answer it, my moist friend. It's the Lord's own sustenance.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: New York Convention Edition

Back Issue Hunting

Despite the fantastic selection that Lone Star, Time Machine and Joe Koch's place has to offer, there's still a couple of comics that I've always got an eye out for. It isn't a physical list that gets adjusted, just a mental one consisting of the various back issues I've long told myself I'd buy on sight if they happen to cross my path. One is the "Joke Book" issues of the Acme Novelty Library, either of the first two Rubber Blankets, and then there's Panter: Panter, Panter, Panter. As witnessed in the picture above, I was able to track some of those down--lazier still, it was all from one guy, who it turns out I had already dealt with once before: at the last New York Comic Con, when he sold me some a Rocco Vargas hardcover and some magazine called "Voyager". Schizo was just something of accidental interest that I'd wanted to pick up mostly to see the infamous letter's column, which totally lived up to the hype. Fast Forward is an old Pirahna (DC) comic, an anthology issue featuring a stellar zombie story by Kyle Baker. There's also a short piece by Stephen DeStefano and Bob Rozakis in there that I really liked. Take a look at this, it's the very beginning:

I love the way the picture's appearance changes in that third panel, and I love the way the changes work in relation to the one in the middle, making the pictures themselves comics as well, but only to us, the reader. Neat stuff.

Wonder Woman came up right before the con, a preview issue kind of thing. I feel the same way about Wonder Woman as my wife did, actually. The only other Wonder Woman comic I've ever bought was when the series crossed over with Superman during that Sacrifice story, and I thought those were terrible comics. (Because they are terrible comics.) This current thing that Azzarello and Cliff are doing is, in fact, pretty  great. I like reading the book not because it's better than DC's other books by comparison (although it is) but  because it's just a smartly written and extremely well drawn comic book, regardless of what surrounds it. Both of these guys deserve a win, too--Azzarello got completely fucked by whatever Rags and DC did to the First Wave stuff, and Cliff's been out there in the covers only hinterland for too long now. As long as the comic stays this good, I'm sure the pangs of what should have been will pass before long.

Bumping

Right after I saw those Rubber Blankets I was soon to buy, I saw Jared Lewis. I knew that meant Sean and Katie Witzke were not far behind, and I was thusly treated to a fine conversation with one of comic's most valuable squadrons of influence. We departed outside to talk shit, which we do better than most. It was a glorious, glorious collection of moments, interspersed with public proclamations of support for Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, who had by then announced the greatest announcement this Comic Con was to deliver. (The Prophet thing.) I also had the latest in a multi-year stretch of pleasant con conversations with Tim Callahan. He's smart, funny and capable of having a disagreement about Scalped's level of quality (still sticking up for the "it's not a complete piece of shit" camp) without turning into a big red faced crybaby, and that's so rare a feat that I might petition the Harveys to start a category for it.

Get Your Shit Together

I bumped into Tim right after my first failed attempt to use the convention for a few of the primary things I would expect it to be explicitly for, which is to find out A) what a publisher is publishing and B) how to get those things so they can be sold in a store or at the very least C) get some contact information for the magical geniuses who can answer those super difficult questions. Because why have that? Why have a catalog, or a release list, or even a business card? Why do any of that shit? What are you, some kind of pedophile?

Anyway, that first experience was, hopefully, just a freak occurrence. The rest of the time, the smaller pubs seemed pretty excited to extol their various wares. (Abrams especially. I like those people a lot.) Still. In an environment where kid's comics are less of a priority to almost everyone concerned, who doesn't have their shit together enough to have a schedule of releases, a business card, a catalog, or at least somebody with a basic understanding of what their company does (or how their products are distributed) manning their booth? More and more, the supremacy of Graphix comics seems to not only rest on their aesthetic quality, but also on the simple fact that they hired actual grown ups to man the phones.

Everybody Is A Liar Except _____

Last year, there was this one comic that got canceled and it's cancellation turned into this ridiculous Tea Party event where everybody and their mother chimed in to pretend that they'd secretly preferred gushy romantic comedies over action films all along, when in reality this was just the latest opportunity in the 900th episode of "I'm going to tell you how fucking much I hate you personally for not liking the things I like, because that's how I exorcise my personal sense of shame over the amount of my fiscal solvency I have dedicated to things that I have only a base emotional connection towards, things which are for some reason still continually failing to fill the gaping void in my black, black heart, i mean holy shit i even got some bitch pregnant and it didn't slow the pain down even one bit". Everybody wrote blog posts about the comic, it stayed canceled, a bunch of made up "new readers" (some of whom were fictionally female as well as fictionally existent) all died in a big omg-who-will-buy-the-comics-now fictional bonfire, and then we all moved on. And so hey, it turns out that the sales on the fucking thing were just fine, and it got canceled just because the publisher wanted to move the artist onto a different book, and the artist wouldn't budge until he was reminded that, hey, this is fucking comics, and artists are allowed to have one vote and that vote is always YES SIR. The only choice you get is how loud you want to yell it.

I Would Have Walked 5000 Miles

My favorite story out of the con is the one that may not even be true, so devoid as it is of any corroboration outside of everybody who got tanked on Saturday night and then said that yes, it was totally true. But yes, IF Ron Marz really did grab Rich Johnston in a headlock and then proceed to punch his head and face multiple times on the con floor, I believe that might even be the best convention story of the decade. It's the kind of fight that everybody wins, especially America. (Rich Johnston is not American.) Awesome.

The Only Thing I Have To Say About Sexism Is That I'm Not it

I used to think it was some kind of latent sexism, but every time i've ever seen an attractive woman dressed up in some kind of fantasy/super-hero costume, I've always immediately thought to myself: "You don't need to do that. You're pretty." (I've never had the reaction to a picture of a woman playing dress up, just when I see them in real life.) I just assumed it was some ingrained bit of white male hookum, not the sort of thing I would explore, just a thought I didn't need to worry about as long as I didn't act on it. It's just a barnacle. But then, on Saturday, I saw a good looking man...in a costume! It was some kind of Jedi/cyberpunk thing where you could see his abs. And I had the thought! I looked right at him and immediately thought: "Come on, buddy! There's no need for you to do that!" So I guess I'm not sexist after all. I just think cosplaying should be left to people who are plain and/or unattractive. Who knew!

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: Generally Speaking, There's No Learning Curve To Intercourse

Gangsta Rap Posse #2
By Benjamin Marra
Published by Traditional Comics

While it would be an argument worth having, let's go all in on some off-the-cuff hyperbole: this issue of Gangsta Rap Posse features one of the top five best Ben Marra drawings of all time. It's not the one where the Bootsy Collins lookalike gets his knife-throwing chest blown apart, and it's not the one where a Wile E. Coyote-mimicking George Clinton catches a four-way golden shower, all of which are awesome. No, it's the one after the mayor gets mildly chided for his incredibly racist langauage, that panel where he cranes his head back and, open-handed, holds out his palms. It's a perfect piece of concise storytelling, the sort of choice that you see everytime a tale needs to describe a character completely but has zero time within which to do so. More than any line of dialog, that dual movement--the head craning back, mouth closed, while the hands go up in exasperation: it's the equivalent of somebody injecting a syringe of understanding directly into your cerebellum. You know without a shadow of a doubt that this guy is one weak, piece-of-shit motherfucker, and that whatever happens to him is going to be fully deserved and yet will still probably not be enough. And even though you have to read through the rest of the comic to get to the panel where his brain beckons three lazer guided bullets (thwmp,thwmp,thwmp) on an express trip right through his skull seconds after he's finished ejaculating all over himself, it's only the extremity of the violence that come as a surprise. Who are you fooling, guy? You knew where that cat's story was heading the second his chin went up.

Red Lanterns #2
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Ed Benes
Published by DC Comics

This is the one that's about the super-people (they aren't really heroes or villains) who vomit acidic blood and count a cat amongst their members. Their leader, Atrocitus, spent a solid portion of the first issue soliloquizing to the corpse of Krona, who is a member of that race called the Guardians that look exactly like what Smurfs would look like if they decided to make hyper realistic movies about Smurfs. His soliloquy was pretty awesome, the sort of purple prose that seems to have been born out of a cross between Stan Lee, Alan Moore and the break-up diary of a 15-year-old Zola Jesus fan. This issue includes more of that monologue, but this time, it's being used to set up the upcoming plot instead of detailing the status quo, and as a result is far less entertaining to read. In the middle of the monologuing, the comic takes a quick break to remind you of the A-Team nature of the Red Lanterns (if your rage is "worthy", and you can find them, you too can have vengeance wreaked on your behalf--just scream!), and then it goes on back to the talking to a dead body thing. It's weird how all of that is so much better than Swamp Thing, but it totally is.

X-Men Schism #5
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Adam Kubert, Mark Roslan & Jason Keith
Published by Marvel Comics

I've been doing physical therapy for the last couple of weeks to recover from a broken bone, and so unfortunately I can't really get into this comic due to the way it depicts violence. Not that it's upsetting, but that I just can't get past how quickly the fight would be over the second that Wolverine sticks a claw through Cyclops' deltoid muscle. That would just be it, he'd be done forever. He'd be apologizing and crying and screaming (if he didn't pass out, and he'd probably pass out), and not becuase "Cyclops is a pussy", I actually like Cyclops, but man--that is just way too much fucking pain. You get your deltoid perforated, you're in the hospital immediately. It's going to take months and months before you can pick up a golf ball. Still, even if I'd been able to buy into this comic, there still would have been the stumbling block that, five issues in, it's still not clear what the  basic problem is. Cyclops wants to slaughter bad guys, so does Wolverine, but they can't agree on which age to set the enlistment minimum? How is that a disageement that requires fisticuffs and bombs to figure out? These guys are supposed to be best friends.

Thunderbolts #164
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker, Terry Pallot, D'Auria & Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

If you wanted to write a recipe for failure, there's no quicker way to go about it then to ditch your most entertaining characters and focus instead on the benchwarmers, who you've jettisoned backwards in time. And yet, while that's a brusque and cruel way to describe the plot that Jeff Parker's taken with his Thunderbolts, it's what he did, and it worked.

If there was a better example of Fear Itself failing to prove the value of those big round-up meetings that Marvel's various writers use to "architect"-uralize the various strands of comic book community, it could definitely be the Thunderbolts portion of the equation. Post Siege, Thunderbolts was the strongest of the various Avengers-related titles that Marvel was putting out. During Fear Itself, a series that prominently featured at least one of the Thunderbolts team and would therefore seem to be one of the book's most deserving of spotlight and attention, the book languished on the vine. And while Marvel seems to have fully embraced the editorial dictation style of comics--despite DC's consistent publication of 20 page pamphlets of proof that said method results in dire, hellish comics--this current Thunderbolts storyline reads like a writer going "well fuck it, can I at least take the guys you don't care about back in time, then?" The result is, so far, the most vibrant and engaging story since those first few issues. Hyde chucking bodies into Man-Thing's coma-rendered silent maw, the gooftastic 50's get-ups, and the first two page spread Kev Walker's had that stands eye-to-eye with his heaven-sent work on ABC Warriors: this comic just jumped back to the front of the line.

Action Comics #2
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales, Brent Anderson & Rick Bryant
Published by DC Comics

If there's one thing that Grant Morrison is good at but never gets credit for, it's that he does decadent shit in super-hero comics in a way that doesn't seem sleazy. (There's one exception I can think of that comes to mind: when the Joker cut his own tongue in half. But considering what keeps happening in every recent issues of Detective Comics, it's highly probable that Tony Daniel threw that in on his own.) Most of the time though, Morrison manages to pull off the very thing he seems to have wanted to criticize Mark Millar for: Grindy, too-old-for-genre FX channel twists. He gets credit for the way he traffics in horror stuff, like Pig in Batman & Robin or the galloping terrors in that Final Crisis spin-off, but not so much for the other things, the things he (and his readers) know would be a little bit embarrassing to explain if somebody actually asked what you were reading on I Bet Strangers Will Ignore The Ketchup Stains And Be Impressed By A Prominent Display Of Watchmen Day. This issue of Action goes down that road apiece, focusing on the story of Lex Luthor's attempts to go all Jack Bauer on a tied-to-chair Superman, and while the resulting experience doesn't manage to go anywhere in terms of plot, it still gets to be a relatively decent single issue experience. It's a bunch of jerk-offs trying to torture Superman: who doesn't want to see that? People who hate having a good time, that's who.

Casanova Avaritia #2
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Gabriel Ba
Published by Marvel Comics

I can't remember which comics reviewer/blogger/oversharing baby it is that made the claim that there's never a right time to include violence against animals in a story, but I sure wish I could, because how fucking wrong would a copy of this issue make them? It's great too, seeing that image of violence-against-pandas juxtaposed with one of this website's own personal shudders, which is a scene where the comics creator pops up in story. Because, honestly, this might be the first time since Jim Aparo drew himself in as an active player in a Batman story that the trick worked. (In that same issue, Bob Haney was depicted with a shotgun and no home phone, a classic example of how you make the fudge realer.) There's just something about this particular run on Casanova--maybe it's Fraction's confrontational attempt to exorcise whatever memories his reader's have of the guy who used to excitedly tell you about why he threw in a Liquid Swords reference, maybe it's that Dustin Harbin's fragile glass lettering makes every line seem more drunk with meaning, maybe it's that the plot seems redacted by memory, black sharpies across the script. Whatever it is, this is an exciting, exciting, comic. It's gnarly, unfriendly and ungainly, but it's still a story. Feeling like an out of the loop party crasher--this is definitely what a five dollar comic should be like.

-Tucker Stone, 2011