The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: Someday We Should Just Admit That We're Looking To Get A Big Juicy Hard-On, Like We Did From Mister Miracle

Batman Odyssey # 5
Written by Neal Adams
Art by Neal Adams and computers
Published by DC Comics

If there's any comic that can get away with mis-cutting the pages in such a fashion that four of them have the word balloons sliced neatly in half, thus resulting in a loss of text, it's this one. Sure, you'll miss some of the "jokes" as well as portions of the "plot", but truthfully speaking, the pleasures of Batman Odyssey aren't tangled up in those sorts of pedantic concerns. This comic is pure trainwreck fascination--why does Aquaman look like that, what's keeping Talia's breasts in place, why is Commissioner Gordon so quick to give Robin a ride, and seriously, is Bruce Wayne narrating this comic fully nude? And sure, you could get the same "look at this world's failure" thrill by reading the twitter feeds of Newsarama employees, but Odyssey is a route that doesn't produce a pesky "will these hands ne'er be clean?" attitude.

Shadowland # 5
Written by Andy Diggle
Art by Billy Tan & Guru eFx & Victor Olazabu
Published by Marvel Comics

Not much you can say about this one. It's the last issue of a mini-series where Daredevil was the bad guy, because he'd been possessed by a character last featured in Elektra: Assassin, which was a pretty decent comic that came out back when "taking chances" meant more than complaining about the treatment you got from American Airlines on fucking Facebook. You'd think this might be interesting to read--after all, everybody who read it hated it, and since everybody skipped Thor the Mighty Avenger and it was so wonderful that Jesus nearly came back to cook you a panini, you should always do the opposite of whatever everybody does and you'll end up only reading good comics. (Is that how it works?) Turns out a stopped clock is right twice a day, or whatever else it was that alcoholic vegan I thought was my father told me right before he said "come get these comic boxes out of the garage or I'll tell you exactly what it is that keeps me from loving you".

Detective Comics Annual # 12
Written by David Hine
Art by Agustin Padilla
Published by DC Comics

The one thing that Batman hasn't had in common with other DC characters in the last few years is pretty obvious: people still want to buy monthly comics featuring him. Superman and Wonder Woman comics keep setting records for how many readers they can shed, Green Lantern is incapable of producing consistent interest if he isn't involved in some kind of everybody-in-the-pool crossover, and the Flash gets a new relaunch whenever somebody shouts "nobody puts baby in the corner" loud enough. Batman's ability to survive is only surprising if you're smart enough to ignore comics websites--the company has spent the last year rearranging chairs and titles so often that it seems like DC is being run by the guy who prints their business cards, so it's not a shocker that Batman's hasn't experienced a break-this-so-it-can-be-broken experience to claim as his own.

Luckily, Grant Morrison came up with an idea that's going to pay off handsomely: Batman Incorporated. It's an unlimited credit card for DC to pump out a bunch of half-cooked stories, because all a writer has to do is propose the opening of a Batman office in whatever random countries Morrison hasn't claimed for himself, and bang, DC has something to fill out all those random spin-offs that they seem incapable of saying "no" to. And sure, you might think that brand dilution is a concern, but if you think that, you're probably waiting on Santa Claus to get your parents back together, because everybody over the age of six knows that Brand Dilution is the only business model that DC's executive team remember from their Devry classes. On top of that, we've just hit a solid ten years of not giving a shit whether the art in continuity comics makes any fucking sense whatsoever, so DC's free to hire the cheapest possible hands to churn out the most random stuff they can find--like this annual for instance, which is apparently about Batman's fetish for hiring strangers and making them wear the ninja henchmen costumes left over from Batman Begins.

Uncanny X-Force # 2
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Jerome Opena & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

Reading Uncanny X-Force is like sitting attentively through a Harry Potter fan-video with a Garth Brooks spousal abuse soundtrack: every fiber of your being will tell you that what you're doing benefits you nothing, and yet you sink in deeper, intoxicated by the thought that you'll soon be swallowed whole. And while all of the credit may be due to Jerome Opena's Euro-inspired pencil of detail, it's hard to forget about Daken (he's the dark wolverine), which remains a visual feast, and yet reads as if all possibility of pleasure has been surgically removed. God knows if something like this—the wonderful trash, about a team made of crazies, led by a monster, hunting a little boy—can maintain, but for now, this is your donut, powdered with cheap speed.

B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: New World # 5
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

And so we reach the conclusion of an action-heavy episode in Dark Horse's long-running B.P.R.D. series, and while the tale ends up being a particularly well-told piece of stand-alone pleasure, it's a bit curious--is this what we're doing, now? Monster-of-the-week stories, incremental movements in the lives of our heroes? Oh, it isn't a bad thing, if that's the case--hell, pick a television show that's still doing the once-a-week story well, name a comic, there isn't any comparison; this is the Mignola-verse, these are the one cherry bed left, a place where the visuals are a point of pride, where the stories are tightly plotted and no apologies (i just like art/i just like story) are required. It's a good comic, this one. But when something you love has been great before? You know how that story goes.

Widowmaker # 1
Written by Jim McCann
Art by David Lopez, Alvaro Lopez & Nathan Fairbairn
Published by Marvel Comics

This isn't actually a new mini-series, it's the next issue in a series that just got cancelled. Same creative team, same characters, and the story is a direct continuation of whatever happened in the last issue of Hawkeye & Mockingbird. Marvel tried this same thing with the Agents of Atlas franchise, and while it worked for a little while, it eventually didn't. This probably won't be any different--whatever it was that didn't catch on with Hawkeye & Mockingbird won't catch on in Widowmaker, but the whole point of the choice has nothing to do with actually pleasing anyone, it's just a numbers game. Widowmaker #1's first issue sales have to beat Hawkeye & Mockingbird's last issue sales, and then whatever mini-series follows Widowmaker has to beat the last issue sales of Widowmaker. That cycle will continue until it's no longer profitable to do so, and then some other title will receive the same treatment. One could argue for the book's quality--it is competently made--but none of that has any relationship to why it exists. And since Marvel is so blatantly going to treat it like a product, here's the only review that matters: it comes with paper and staples. On that front, your mileage will not vary.

R.E.B.E.L.S. # 23
Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Claude St. Aubin, Scott Hanna, Rich & Tanya Horie
Published by DC Comics

In this comic, the reader discovers that one of the rewards of being promoted from cadet status in the Green Lantern Corps involves "customizing" one's uniform, and there's probably no better indication of the tediousness of the Green Lantern concept than that moment, as "customization" revolves around re-arranging the black and green colors on a form-fitting bodysuit. At one point, a character mentions that the rings "choose" their bearers based off "how good power rings are at reading the content of your character". Following that one down the logical rabbithole, part of one's "character" is tied up in being an unimaginative douchebag? To its credit, that seems to be one of the main narrative threads of the R.E.B.E.L.S. series--that Green Lantern's are a bunch of boring tools, and the only mature response is the one the main character of this series so frequently delivers: reminding them of this constantly.

The Incredible Hulks # 618
Written by Greg Pak
Art by Paul Pelletier, Danny Miki & Paul Mounts
Published by Marvel Comics

Here's the background plot for this issue: some bad guy named "the chaos king" made everybody in the world go to sleep, and then he made all the dead people rise up to "walk the earth", and then the Hulks showed up to fight them. (But first the Hulk cries.) If it mattered that this is the third time in recent memory that a super-hero "event" story revolved around zombie characters fighting living super-heroes, then this might be a subject of ridicule. As it is, the only way to figure out whether this is laughable or not would be to play catch up on a bunch of series that are so toxically unfriendly they should probably just rename the cross-over "Go the FUCK AWAY", and that ain't happening, at least not until they cut the number of Hulks in this book to a manageable number. Like eight.

The Boys # 49
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by Russ Braun & Tony Avina
Published by Dynamite

Whereas a recent issue introduced a never before seen omniscient narrator who showed up to give a scene extra melodrama it most certainly didn't require, this issue contains a confusingly plotted flashback sequence that strains the dwindling goodwill that's been extended towards The Boys for the last year. Now that it isn't just the art that's falling apart, it's starting to seem like Dynamite's "editors? nahhhh" methodology might not be that great of an idea.

Wolverine The Best There Is # 1
Written by Charlie Huston
Art by Juan Jose Ryp & Andres Mossa
Published by Marvel Comics

This is the new Wolverine series. It's a thought project designed to make you believe that serious Wolverine comics focused on topics like "the animal inside" and "the cycle of violence" are what Wolverine comics should always be about. This way, anytime someone complains about comics where Wolverine talks a lot, has girlfriend trouble, grieves over whichever fellow X-men is currently on coffin rotation, or basically does a bunch of boring shit like cry a single tear and let Spider-man get away with asking him out for "sushi and talking" (that actually happened), Marvel can point at this The Best There Is thing and say "look, we did one that was just focused on exploitative violence, and it was a piece of shit, you don't know what you're talking about." It's a mean idea, but it's not a bad idea. It'll probably work too, because this is totally the piece of shit you'd need to prove that point.

Batman & Robin # 17
Written by Paul Cornell
Art by Scott McDaniel
Published by DC Comics

The big question with comics that are often referred to as “fun” is what the fuck “fun” actually means. See, some people use the word “fun” to refer to comics that don't have rape or giant vagina shaped monsters in them, comics that focus on people patting each other on the back and grinning like Bruce Vilanch just showed up on a unicycle, while other people just use “fun” to indicate that they read something really fucking stupid, knew it was fucking stupid, and still enjoyed it without feeling the need to come up with arguments for why the people involved in said thing's creation are some kind of collective of geniuses. When “fun” is used as a slam—as it should be for this comic—it can be in reference to dopey shit like a couple of people jumping into an open grave to have a conversation, in which it's revealed that the open grave is a crime scene that's now rendered completely useless in terms of evidence gathering. But dopey shit isn't enough: for “fun” to be a slam, the comic should also have 1) jokes that aren't funny 2) a general failing to conceal the mercenery nature of the product and 3) i don't know. Like this:

 

Invincible Iron Man # 32
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Salvador Larroca & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

We're out here on the edge of the pop consciousness, making trips to the seventh sector, this is just what Kirby would've dreamed off if he had lived in a bisected digital mind, retweet that, yesss, and this: it's talking, baby. The talk-talk-talk. Underscore it, if you feel it. I'm saying--wait, i'm saying. Talking. Talk.
--
I've never wanted to be in comics, more, you know? Like: living the dream. My super-hero power is making up arguments why what I do should be called art.
-

See, some people--i call them "fanboyz"--they complain to me baby. Baby baby, I'm telling you that they complain to me. They say: Nothing ever happens in Iron Man comics. Wait-Aziz is calling.
-

Nevermind, I text him later. Bananaphone. I was saying?
-
Oh yeah, nothing happening? Fix the way you read, that's the program. The action IS there--it's in the salt, the meal is prepared. I have the the matrix on lockdown, i rub them with oils. The three kings, you understand language.
-
The art? I don't look at it. Its like--is there a better word than Chi? Chi seems retro. I'm more about the futuristic. But chi: i can't look at art. The words are art enough. Them shits flow like the river Styx. One love.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: He Didn't Work All Day To Come Home And Eat Pizza

Batman The Return # 1
Batman Incorporated # 1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by David Finch and Yanick Paquette
Published by DC Comics

It's beyond useless to care about certain things with Grant Morrison Batman comics anymore. Art will never matter in them, it will always remain their most unreliable component—sometimes good, occasionally great, but almost never will it operate with the same direct fluidity of exchange that can be found in those of the writer's contemporaries. The team that created WE3 is gone, they'll return in name only, and whatever wall it is that came flying up after Seaguy is here to stay. (At least, one hopes, until Seaguy himself returns.) And while that lack of connection is what will eventually doom this portion of its writer's legacy, as one can't help but imagine that the eventual digital camps of not-us readers will reject the forced consumption of so much of this Bat-work that the ramshackle nature of its serialization engendered, choosing instead to grasp for more cohesive objects that those devices will better serve, it's fruitless to mourn it any longer. The Andy Kubert Batman is never coming, and all of the cuts that have worked their tiny compromises across the last (almost) five years will only grow into crevice if they are stared at much longer. If there was a plan, it's gone now, and this is the new thing, a beginning, again.

It's not a particularly bad one. Exploiting an always popular sequence, the one where Batman collects his most trusted charges and adorns them with the description of his new world—there's a reason this scene shows up so often, going back through the days of Brubaker & Rucka to Grant and Dixon, stretching even further, there's a clear magic that so many disparate Bat-writers find in Bruce, with his cave, telling his children of the world he plans to create. (Even Miller used it to great effect as the perfect ending to a story, eventually realizing it could serve as perfect beginning as well.) And while Morrison has to know—because he's read them all by now, his fan-knowledge entered Geoff Johns territory back in RIP at least—he's still smart enough to endow a scene we know to be a lie (because these plans never play out the way Bruce always says they will, that's the oldest lie in Batman, it's that old man joke about using plans to make God laugh, a joke Morrison may, the scene seems to say, have finally gotten) with a sense of gravity and weight. It starts with A Return, the comic practically screams, and of course—being drawn by David Finch, an artist whose best efforts are so clamorous that his obsessed rendering is more reminiscent of a bludgeoning than it is drawing—it has to do so to be heard. And while the promise of Incorporated is, so far, of a slighter kind, it's an affectionate one. Stupidly erotic in that clambaked way all super-hero romances always are (someday, an actual romance will occur in a post Romita Sr comic, and the world will crack in half with its long-buried demand), laced with a cheekier version of the Johns remember-this school in its I Bought Bat Manga Too, Just Like You silliness, Incorporated shucks off all of the unnecessary (and stupidly self-imposed) importance that the last few years consistently failed to deliver upon with one deft swoop, literally. Swinging across the city, knees tucked up like the Robin he can't handle, here he is: a super-hero, with his girlfriend. They're gonna fight some crime now. It takes work to fuck that up, and the desire for that work is one that, hopefully, has finally been extinguished. This is a collaborative product, and his ambitions were too great for the words alone to suffice. 

Hellblazer #273
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Simon Bisley, Stefano Landini, Trish Mulvihill & Brian Buccallato
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Merrily marching its way towards oblivion—jane, just admit it—and just as happy as could be while doing so, Hellblazer 273 (or 219? or 183? or 116?) is the joint for classy sex scenes. Not classy because their content is one that exceeds those found in whatever escapes Rob Zombie's pen, but termed so due to their ever present craft: these, friend, are the sorts of drawings of the beast with two backs that can be said to be somewhat hawt. Nipples will pop, demurely so, leaking from vantage points no human eye could provide, while the rectal cleft of a beckoning rear end winks from Simon Bisley's pen. There's story, sure—a better one than John's had in a while—but it's the porniness that will live in memory most. In the thrust of the ongoing debate, let it never be forgotten: this is what the kids are looking for. To be 14 again!

Thunderbolts # 150
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker, Frank Martin & Fabio D'Auria
Published by Marvel Comics

After a meager dance in cross combine insurrection, Thunderbolts returns home, a sorely missed Kev Walker in tow. Being anniversary time, the issue devotes itself to a rough trade (meaning painful, meaning without request) appearance by the Has A Movie Or Soon Will characters, who seem to have shown up just to make sure that Marvel's commitment to treacly lines about heroism are available in all team titles, regardless of their necessity. Thankfully for some, Jeff Parker is willing to throw as much of his wit into the mix as these on-demand comics allow room for. A frog dies, not so man can live, but because frogs, no matter genre's demands, are stupid, stupid creatures.

Superman # 705
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Eddy Barrows, Wellington Dias, JP Mayer, Eber Ferriera & Rod Reis
Published by DC Comics

With our Straczynski adventure coming to an abrupt, abortive close, one's left with this, the much-heralded story behind a justly ridiculed-on-first-sight cover. It's about a boy, a Superman fan, whose abusive father seems to have gotten his personality off of that old Public Service Announcement where a man beat his wife off screen upon discovering that she had called for delivery instead of home cooking a meal. It's always a sight to behold, in comics or elsewhere, when something as horrific as a wife-beater serves as pure entertainment, and make no mistake: even the most sensitive are going to roll their eyes at this gaudy thing. Ultimately, there's little that can be said about this that hasn't been covered in every conversation that its dwindling number of readers have already said to one another—it's as bad as you could imagine, as accidentally hilarious as one could have hoped. In the service of singing its praises, one thing can be said: it takes a lot less time to read this shitty comic than it would to watch that J-Lo movie, even though the J-Lo movie has better special effects.

X-Men # 5
Written by Victor Gischler
Art by Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco & Marte Gracia
Published by Marvel Comics

Super-hero comics almost never flow. They have these parts, some of which function, some of which don't, and their occasional success—as entertainment mostly, although art remains a lurking potential, if one that's rarely realized—depends upon a mixing of those parts, one that hopes to force their mongrel nature together. They'll ask you to believe in a language, to gauge them as seamless mixtures of words and pictures, but that's something they rarely achieve, which is why those that provide successful immersion so often get overly praised, even when the speakers know that what they're reading isn't very good. Mostly, they're like this: something you glaze through, sliding across their surface. Some panels may strike out and demand a gaze, while others go neatly ignored, especially when the text goes bawdy. These Gischler X-Men comics are the worst kind of that, an eye bleeding read where images cannot land, stories that seem disassociated from the illustrations surrounding them, more like a novel, with frontispiece illustrations that have wormed their way into every paragraph. Words that won't stop talking, pictures without traction. It's about Cyclops and Wolverine, and how they work together by keeping the other one in the dark.

That's called irony.

Superman/Batman # 78

Written by Joe Kelly, Jack Kelly & Amanda McMurray
Art by Ed Benes, Pete Pantazis, Brett Booth & Andrew Dalhouse
Published by DC Comics

Two stories here, the first one about the title characters. It's a fan-fiction favor, a story where two super-hero fans narrate a possible battle between Batman & Superman. It has its moments, but it's one of those things that strives so hard to be “fun” that it ultimately turns into the reading equivalent of the forced smile you throw on when an extended family member tortures a predictable joke into an unbearably long monologue that points to an as-of-yet unknown stand-up career best left in fantasy. The second story—which isn't the draw, unless you're the type of person who scans the bottom line of text on covers, desperately searching out C-list character appearances—focuses on Power Girl and Huntress, the only DC heroines who could give the unfortunate Zatanna a run for her money in the “half my fans crave nude drawings of me” department. Drawn in that Art Thibert/Marc Silverstri style that's usually found in crass Top Cow trash, over-written in gloom-soaked, self-referential overdubs that would seem like cries for psychiatry were they to appear in a high-school diary, this is a comic, defined only due to its constituent parts. In the rest of the dictionary, it's just another piece of shit.

G.I. Joe Future Noir Special # 1

Written by Andy Schmidt
Art by Giacomo Bevilacqua
Published by IDW

This is an eight dollar black and white comic book, which is an interesting (and a bit cruel) way for IDW to respond to the occasional complaint that they “flood the racks” with shitty GI Joe comics, because this way they can sneak out really long mini-series in an intensely short period of time, that time hopefully being short enough so that the “whoa, this is really terrible” word won't leak out to the readers who might be willing to give a chance to something even though they've been “giving it a chance” for so long that they've de facto created a company (IDW) whose only output besides those horrible Craig Yoe books and Parker comics is the exploitation of the cultural nostalgia for 80's toy advertisements. Because, of course, this is terrible—the equivalent of copying dialog off of a Nintendo 64 cutscene, combined with art that struggles towards competency in the few panels that could seriously be considered “finished”--but hey, at least it's really fucking long. The good guy gets distracted by the bad girl's leather dominatrix outfit! Also, it's in the future, and apparently women still have the same hairstyles they do today.

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

The dichotomy of agreeing that most Big Two comics writers are following a Soderberghian 1-for-them, 1-for-you path is that it allows for the tacit agreement that Big Two comics are themselves responsible for their failings, and the oh-so-holy creators would do better if they could, but they can't, you know, it's super-heroes, there's obs-tackles. And yet—Kyle Baker! Either ignored, pedestal-forced or dishonestly sloughed off, the guy does what he likes, how he likes it, over and over again. Like Fugazi, another culture-product factory that's been lionized in part so that others wouldn't have to follow, Baker produces work, enjoys doing so, and never has to apologize. Is his Deadpool MAX the greatest work of his career? Of course it isn't. It's kind of crap at times, as all Deadpool comics are, because the character is pretty much just Spider-Man with murder powers and more jokes, only half of which even take a shot at being funny. But it's unapologetic, profoundly committed work, the kind that Marvel has spent a generation crushing the hunger for. It's a comic about understanding what the “free” part of freelance means, and unlike the things that outsell it, it's courage isn't a forced story point. It's written on every page, for all to see.

Green Lantern # 59
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne, Randy Mayor & Gabe Eltreb
Published by DC Comics

Cover to cover, what you've got here is a conversation between Flash and Green Lantern, with a short break so that one of the many aliens that this comic features can talk to those other aliens that someone besides me can look at and not immediately struggle with a brain that goes “elderly smurfs elderly smurfs wonder if they shit blue in a bag these elderly smurfs”. Except for that one break, this entire comic is a conversation wherein Geoff Johns pulls out as many of the stops as his longbox memory has access to, all in the service of proving that Hal Jordan's basic personality is somehow different from Barry Allen's basic personality. He fails, but that's okay. After all, their costumes are different colors. In DC Comics, just like the Care Bears, color choices actually relate to emotional states.

Osborn # 1

Written by Kelly Sue DeConnick & Warren Ellis
Art by Emma Rios, Jose Villarrubia, Matt Wilson, Jamie McKelvie
Published by Marvel Comics
You Can Get A Temporary Tattoo With This Comic, But Why Not Go For Face-Painting, As You're Five 

Why is it that comic book characters and real life gangster rappers and normal people on twitter always say things like “I never back down from a fight. Never. Never ever.” Who are these people who live their suburban lives quoting Gladiator? Do they also make “sluurp” blow job jokes? (Is that what that is?) Anyway, Emma Rios: she can draw some shit, she's done it before. Hopefully she'll get the chance to do some of it before this talk-talk nonsense thing is over. It's five issues, it'll probably come up later. The back half is Warren Ellis, doing the 913th riff on some blond woman who says things like “people who should have been made to pass a competence test before they were born”, which hey, that's new, Warren Ellis has a mouthpiece character for him to remind you how stupid all of you are, you people, oh so stupid, you're all so dumb, so stupid, I wrote this at a pub, here's a picture of some sexy teenagers, look how I singlehandedly created the persona of all modern comics writers, so on. It's a nifty trick—not the “everybody is so dumb except for us” thing, but the way Ellis has been able to build an entire career out of saying “everybody is an idiot except for us”, and then he's just used that career so that he can repeat some variation of that phrase, forever. It's kind of like blogging, sure, “you're all a bunch of fucking morons, but i'm not” is pretty much the modus for—well, everything these days, if you think about it, even the I Don't Have A Facebook Account and I Canceled My Cable and I Use The Library 'tude is the same as Here's My Movie Review, Fuck Your Mother In The Face Dot Com and that's not even getting into Stop Downloading, which is: you get it, it's all the same. But usually people grow out of it, they mellow out. Have a kid, figure out where to buy Sara Lee Coffee Cakes, that sort of thing. But Ellis: jesus. He's all Friday Night Lights committed to this same-old-shit thing, it's like he has to keep up the shtick for health insurance or something. You'd be impressed, but jesus: you're going to have to read Gravel and things like this just to know it's happening.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Building A Better Human: BPRD Hell On Earth # 4

BPRD Hell on Earth # 4
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and, credits page be damned, Guy Davis
Art by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart
Printed by Dark Horse Comics

0.0

We should start off with something from Proust, a guy who wrote a long serialized novel that doesn't feature any zombies despite the fact that a good portion of it was written in the middle of the night by a writer who didn't leave his bedroom for almost three years (which is a funny thing to write down, since it's from Wikipedia and while it has a source will eventually become, like all things Wikipedia based, further and further from the truth where it is assumed to be in relation to as the digital library of the future continues its rejection of archival evidence and resides further in the realm of whomever is most dedicated to maintaining its web listing which will of course be the most obsessive fans who are ultimately unreliable and unwilling to admit their unreliability, and will in fact defend their unreliability with the same amount of vitriol someone like Proust--who wasn't a very nice person, understandably so as he was a isolated writer who never got the chance to find out that Alain de Botton was going to write a popular book about him, and all isolated artists who invest massive amounts of creative energy into a project while struggling with physical ailments and happen to be, since we should be thorough, homosexual men at the turn of the century which wasn't a very easy time to be a homosexual although admittedly not as bad as it might be to be a homosexual right now in certain Middle Eastern and African countries to say nothing of small Texan towns, it's no surprise he could be a bit testy, so unused to interaction as he was--might defend their unreliability, as fandom carries with it what seems to be a natural sense of entitlement and ownership, and when this entitlement and ownership is combined with this decades overwhelming sense of entitlement and ownership wherein things that are free and new are roundly criticized for their failings as if they are in any way responsible towards the people who use them freely, one ends up in a situation where a nexus of preening and whining is crossed with a sense that the preening and whining is also a responsibility which means you basically get something akin to this, which looks like a math equation but is actually just a repurposed symbolic logic argument found in a textbook that was sitting on the street after a particularly upsetting fire-

x + y = x² + y² 

-and as you can see the example could make sense as a math equation because any remedial algebra student could immediately be able to tell that x and y could both stand for 1 or 0 or -1 and possibly some other numbers as well but since we're talking about a remedial math student they wouldn't make that leap or would only imply it by possibly raising their eyebrows in a way that implied "...or I guess it could be something else?" and we're beyond the pale here a bit so let's just say this, that the x stands for our imaginary Proust fan's sense of ownership over Proust-related information and the y stands for what's being described as the current generation's sense of ownership over everything their fingers and eyes can help them find even if they don't pay for it (while Louis CK's examples regarding internet access on airplane flights is obviously the funniest and best known of this type of argument, a more controversial one that seems more relevant in today's news cycle might be the occasional complaints regarding what Facebook does with "your private information", as if Facebook owes any of its users anything beyond not actually coming into their users homes and fingering their dog against their dog's will, because Facebook is something that's free that people opt into becoming commodities and advertisements for and it isn't in any way necessary to anyone's life, it's just another free way to waste time and now, essentially, to convince them to spend some of the money they so often claim is "hard-earned" despite the evidence to the contrary which is that they still have to pay for their clothes and ye gods what awful clothes they choose to wear), and as we return to our little logic equation that actually is working quite well as a math equation, we find the odd little magic thing where the numbers aren't 1 or negative 1 or even zero, but are something bigger like maybe a 4 or a 12 or even a 23 which was always a personal favorite and now the math doesn't work that well, it doesn't work at all--but it does work that well--because we have the loop, where people who are too crazy about Proust make a full stop and are no longer able to be objective at all about Proust, because the importance of Proust has been exchanged for the importance of one's personal Proustian fandom and now we make a million little compromises that eventually result in a Wikipedia page on Proust that is constructed out of a million little compromises that will eventually end up on a bunch of term papers about Proust due to the rampant plagiarism in today's university system (a problem that is only truly problematic if one still holds onto the belief that a college education is anything more than a life studies find-a-hobby program with no provable connection to one's future except in those cases of the medical and legal profession, and even then, you know, immigrants) and all our information about Proust will basically result in something like the history of comics, which is basically a rough trade amalgamation of what Art Spiegelman thinks the history of comics is, since nobody can find any copies of those hideous magazine things that Jim Steranko published about the original appearances of King Cop of Cop-Chop Police Comics, although it's always possible that Craig Yoe's "i'll do some research as a little present for myself when I've reached my 1,000th book" tactics might win out over Art's "nobody liked what they were doing and everything they were doing was shit except for some kickass layouts and line weights, except for the underground guys, and while that might have been because they were all high as fuck and screwing hippie chicks I prefer to think it's because they were all One True Artists and holy shit what do you mean I can't smoke in here it's not like you're birthing infants or running marathons" school of thought, which just goes to show you that making friends with people who don't have many will get you a whole lot of waved hands and "something is better than nothing" despite the clear evidentiary retort that is "we had nothing up until now, and nothing actually was better than this something since this may now be the only something we ever get and when, exactly, did you decide that selling your own fucking soul meant everybody who didn't get in line with your craven My Friends Keep Trying mentality was the problem instead of somebody else, like maybe you my god those pants one could plotz", and that's pretty much why comics are a lot more like contemporary poetry than they are music, which brings it all back to Proust who wrote Literature with a capital L which also means Long As Fucking Fuck:

"The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated by us in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon, and night - that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known."

1

BPRD Hell on Earth 4 starts with the reveal of a lie, the kind of lie that Proust describes as being the perfect kind because it helps--in this case, it helps that woman move through life without having to experience the shattering loss that she had to face all on her own, and she's able to move through life as more than just a broken, ghostly shell, which puts her in stark contrast to the man she eventually faces in this comic's final pages, she's able to move through life as some kind of a mother, and only a monstrous one because of the monstrous thing that rides near her, she's able to be a primal mother, an instinctual one, one who protects and runs and fights and feeds a child, and it's the lie that keeps it alive, a lie that says that her baby is not dead and buried in the ground, buried in the ground by her, alone without her husband to hold and grieve with her when the dirt went down and the meat--it's BPRD, and Killing Ground and the Scorched Earth Trilogy and the way Guy Davis draws Benjamin Daimio's jagged sawblade teeth face will never let you forget this, we are meat, our best hope is that the pilots of this flesh are something that live on--decayed and fell apart down in a hole in one of those caskets that never looks right and if you've never had to see a baby get buried than god hope you never will because you will never ever forget what that's like and you will never ever feel sorry for anyone again no matter what happens to them because there is nothing in the world that looks as wrong as those little caskets when they go down and the dirt starts laying down on them, and so fuck off if she told herself a lie and she found herself something else and she kept on living and she went crazy and the way she went crazy is a way that makes so much sense that you almost feel bad for her even though you know in your heart of hearts that you don't care about her the way you care about the men she stands against, because those men wormed their way into your heart long before you heard her story and there's not enough room for all of the tragedies and victims in the world this story is set in, and in the back of it all you remember that this world isn't ours anyway, it never was ours, it wasn't a world at all but a playpen for Mike Mignola's stories and ideas and creature features and although he did a fine job making that world a visual, visceral place, a place you wanted to live in, it was John Arcudi who figured out how to make it a human place, he figured out how to take that fictional universe of horror whose borders never extended beyond the fighting and the screaming and the horror and he set up windows inside it, windows where human beings and human lives could matter, which is why the BPRD series is the one that feels like it might be set somewhere where the reader lives and Hellboy feels like one that's set just outside of it, and that's why you get somewhere like this and see one of those little coffins and the disgust lessens because it's Hell, and there's a million little coffins, because there were babies on those planes that went down in the Salton Sea

back in the fifth issue of King Of Fear and those babies are monsters now and the only people left to care about this little coffin are the crazy lady in the woods who keeps feeding little towns to oblivion and a broken US soldier who has to hunt his wife with a sack full of AK-47's alongside a couple of strangers who have spent the last decade wearing this world's hell in gloves of horror dripping off the ends of their forearms and that's how you know that what a story has done has done it well because you've realized right there that you went there and said that the little deaths would have to be unsung so that the magnitude of death itself can find itself squared off against the opponents that matter, those strangers, and while that woman--her name is Nessa, and her son's name was Jaxon--may be the star of a movie that is sad and tragic and a little too familiar, she is not the star of the movie that matters in this world, and if she has to die so that Benjamin Daimio and Abe Sapian can walk out of those woods as heroes than that will have to be and that is a trade that is willingly made with a mind that is clear and understands what that says, because this is tragedy but it is also soap, and soap isn't about learning new names but watching the old ones do it for us, and the window that Arcudi opened inside Mignola's word can only work if we feel human, and so we do, but in a way that is like Daimio, a way that says we can only pretend to be sorry so that the rest feel comfortable when sitting and talking at campfires, because we are not sorry anymore after what has been seen and what has been done and what must be done in the days to come.

2

The other thing that Proust is referring to in his statement is a more authorial thing, he's saying that writing openly about homosexuality--which is part of what he was doing in the multiple volumes of his gigantic book, and why all of the women have men's names with vowels on the end of them--opened up a world to him where he was not only truly free as an author but truly free as a human being, able to punch through the world he lived in and towards the world that he and everyone else like him deserved, which is also oddly mirrored in the freedom that Guy Davis has to design massive, drill-like vaginal worms that eat people and forests and why--despite their failings as a publisher in terms of meeting release dates or not publishing deeply shitty licensed comics or keeping things available after people have decided that they might possibly want them--Dark Horse is ultimately a better thing for the world, because it provides a home where people like Mignola are left to create an empire that can sustain an artist like Davis, who is so incredibly gifted and consistently interesting that the fact that his career exists and operates the way it does works as a constant, unchanging reminder that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, you can actually work in comics and be somewhat rewarded for being talented even while everyone around you builds gigantic sandcastles of buck-passing blame-throwing huckster-promoting ass-kissing burger-whoring here's another piece of shit won't you please fucking buy it so the next piece of shit might actually be something that I'm not ashamed to send copies of to the few friends I have who actually tell the truth to me and question why I'm wasting my fucking life stacking corny nonsense into a statue called my corny nonsense hacked out legacy, and that window, that window of opportunity that split open a part of our world and created a place where John Arcudi might be rescued (despite his occasional relapse into Aliens comics) from an industry that seemed to decide the guy who wrote a comic that made a million dollar Jim Carrey movie didn't have a place at a company that puts 3rd string Nightwing fill-ins on 1st tier t-shirt characters, and Guy Davis could be given a forever free pass, that window was originally only opened out of Mignola's desire to do something that looked "cool" that belonged to him and him alone (that thing being Hellboy) and that thing divided and procreated and gave birth, making Mignola a teller of his own kind of perfect lie, a lie that said he had nothing to bring but a drawing and maybe a story but a story that he would need help with, and he did, and then this, and one has to admit, that even though the model for the franchise was supposedly what Marvel used to do (but is obviously more like what Mignola misremembers or wishes Marvel used to do), this never would've happened there or any place like it, because this is a story that is untouched by the grubby hands of today's modern comics editors, almost all of whom are failed or wanna-be comics writers working with failed or wanna-be screenwriters, a group of people who can only be guaranteed to agree on one thing, which is that they all really hate people who know how to draw.

3

Which, though it doesn't really work as a segue-way into Daryl, it does bring up the very notion of Davis as cruelly disgusting monster designing artiste, of which Daryl and the (one assumes) soon to return jaguar spirit are excellent representations of, even more so per the artist's off hand mention back in the days of the Universal Machine that the character "worked out from the first series of sketches" which lends to the ever popular (because it's a really stupid fucking thing to say, which is why you always know you're talking to somebody really fucking stupid when they say it) kind of remark about Davis being a weird guy into weird things because he's able to come up with stuff that's kind of gross or scary or just straight up unusual, and Daryl, who is a wendigo with what looks like a bib made out of blood and gore matted into his white fur (because he eats living things, like people, and your mother, she's people) is as weird and gross and scary as drawings of things can get, even more so when you first met him back in Universal Machine and you couldn't help but feel sorry for him when they took him back and put him in a cell and said you're never getting out, and you'll never die, and this is the rest of your life for all eternity and the only thing we can say is "sorry", and yeah, if you're stupid, the immediate response is probably going to be something like "hey, the guy who made this weird strange thing must be weird and strange", because that's a lot more comforting than sitting back and admitting that The Incredibles was right, and some people are special and some people aren't special, and you can spend the rest of your life believing that isn't so and that everybody is the same except for hard work and luck, but the truth is that no, loving something doesn't mean that you should make it or could or would even be good at it, and while it's nice and all that the Internet broke down some barriers of entrance, most of us will never sketch a Daryl in black and white and end up creating something special, but at the end of the day, that can be okay too, because if you clean yourself up and find somebody to fucking bang with on a regular to semi-regular basis, you'll find out that creating art and creating comics and writing screenplays and running marathons and doing standing backflips is nowhere near as fucking sweet as sex sex sex sexxxy sex all the time, no matter how many pictures of pre-release Sinestro Geoff Johns might get on his phone, and anyone who tries to tell you different, or even tries to tell you that there's a contest, holy shit kid do not believe them because like wow, big time liar, big time liar.

4

"It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars' shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which until now had been unknown to me. In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precious minutes, my real existence began..." Dostoevsky, a dead guy who wrote books when he wasn't gambling

One of the primary keys in the way the BPRD sinks into the consciousness of the reader isn't in any of its more recognizable characters or events, but in the way that a character like Tom Manning, the rarely seen, rarely mentioned Director of the organization that gives the title its name seamlessly transitions from the on-panel fictional world he truly inhabits and the maintenance memory of the reader's brain, where the stories live after the reader's initial ingestion of the stories--it's a nefarious trick that Mignola and Arcudi devised, trusting in the way American's have so completed rejected a factual relationship with the very real bureaucracies that govern their world (hence why a Tea Partier might decry "welfare" completely except for when something like social security, disability, or farm subsidies are questioned, because they fail to see the connection, because for them, like the staunch liberal that believes Dick Cheney's pendulous old man ballskin tightened around his testicles everytime he pushed for more no-option ex-industrial children to be gorged upon in the ravenous maw of two wars that pumped up his income, as if the death of teenagers was the primary goal, doesn't exist, the tea party doesn't see social security as welfare and Cheney didn't see his Blackwater options as blood money and the liberal's brain doesn't process human life as fiscal equation the way our former vp so often did, connections, empathy, the ability to suspend one's brain and understand the other so rife with these equations, so toxic in its constant screaming death, death, death, the same way one man's relaxing fuck the world and turn up the Yes joint is another man's extended middle finger to the blood drenched tale of Miss Sinola which is quoted here for purposes of disgust "The police took her and raped her for three days. Eight policemen, over and over...by the time they got her to the asylum, Miss Sinola's buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.", and it is the fallout from these revulsions that the hand squirts up like one in a cliched restaurant when the cliched waiter asks if you want more, because everyone always wants more, and the hand up and the head shake and the voice, croaking, enough, enough, i must take no more and i need much less and i can no longer bear it i no longer can bear any of it, i say to you ha ha i will make a joke of it, i will not give up like the boy in dead poets society, i will look my father in the face and i will be the doctor he asks me to be ten years you say, i can do ten years of obedience on my head, just no more of this news and these stories and these equations and these people, no more of their realities of horror i must have fiction, i will eat my fill of death in stories at home, and then these things escape and evacuate us as we retreat, like turtles, like ostriches, and say that it is self-care and self-medication when all we have done is the same as the boy, we have killed ourselves alive, and the place where we understand the difference is gone and dead forever and we are left with something that is even less human, before we at least had rage, now you have what, a blog), trusting that the place where Tom Manning lives when he doesn't appear in the comic becomes intrinsically mixed with the place that all UN talking, White House visiting, gimme-some-of-those-appropriated-fund type government employees live, inside a part of the brain that is rarely visited, to the point where Manning's name has to be labeled as being one relating to a fictional person every time it comes up--and it's that area, that place that Manning lives which can be labeled as the new world old Fyoder is referring to: it's the zone of complete fiction that's been endowed with actual life, first witnessed by its creators and now managed by the individual reader (only in part is it connected by the title of the mini-series this issue, only in part but somehow whole), they were the travelers, and while they found this new world, what has been done is infection, a viral mode of storytelling, one where our memory, the core of it that we do not confront unless the face of past failings (because that is what shapes us, change is pain, change is failure, no one remembers the average sandwich), that core memory turns the wheels of the Tom Manning's on its own steam, forever and forever and forever.

5

Blanchot described the true experience of Proust as being one of a "fragment of time in a pure state", and it is in spite, actual spite, visceral, delightful, pointless, infantile, wet drenched down the thighs spite that his words are used in reference again, to the pages of BPRD King of Fear, where a character (the firestarter, the twisted firestarter, fear addicted, danger illustrated) happens upon pictures of the future, pictures that the pages of Hell On Earth New World constantly recognize and reinforce by the maybe-a-little-heavy-handed-this-time mention of Carlo Giarocco, who is no longer a dead burned out ashen carcass, but a living fictional character whose name is printed in bold letters to insure that the reader understands she means something even if they can't remember one panel from King Of Fear, which is understandable enough considering that the one panel was surrounded by pictures of fucked up things, exciting things, and changes, one of which is most noticeable by absence, the status of our friend and compatriot Johann Krauss, the defacto funny character and unfortunately enough the target of Panya, who never really has panned out as a bonus for the BPRD and may no actively be seeking to do them ill, even though those pictures, of the future and of now and of the past, as all time is one, according to the man who seems to have been truthful when he said he would never tell a lie (he was killed even then), showcase Panya as some kind of stern and embittered member of the team, but it is in Panya, the living embodiment of forever, that Johann's torture lies--he is the one who she no longer hides her machinations from, the sad victim of the cruel villainess who is witness to her evil, the Elijah Wood to Macaulay Culkin, with no David Morse on the horizon, and it is her fundamental disconnect from kindness (the trick was played early, when her only request was for a "little kitty", but she is not your sweet old grandmother, she's over a thousand years old and has played games with the rest of the mortals for them all) that renders her the antithesis of Proust's fragment, she is that thing without that purity, she is a black thing, a diseased thing, and as she grows stronger, so does her cruelty--spreading, migrating, expanding--she is the fragment of time as destructive force, and Johann is the object of her initial assault, the first victim of what she no longer recognizes as cruelty, the eyeless man, more fragile than he realizes, who finds himself helpless in his desire for a life he can only glimpse in the strands of hope that are mirrored in the circulatory system he fantasizes for himself.

0.1

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: "It was a fine cow, but like so many cows it lacked sustained dramatic interest."

Wolverine # 3
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Renato Guedes, Jose Wilson Magalhaes, Oclair Albert & Matt Wilson
Published by Marvel Comics 

The bad guy in this is The Red Right Hand? Like the Nick Cage song they used in the X-Files movie? Actually, that isn't the funny part of this comic. The funny part of this comic is when you find out that Wolverine has a Calvin and Hobbes style sign on his door at the place where the X-people live.

  
Does anybody put a sign like that on their bedroom door after they get old enough to buy a goddamned lock? 

Batman & Robin # 16
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Cameron Stewart, Frazer Irving, Chris Burnham & Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

There's some cool shit in this issue, some of which was cooler back when Peter Milligan did it, some of which is cool because it means Morrison read some cool Peter Milligan Batman comics so he probably also read the Idiot Root or that hardcover where Batman punches a white female terrorist and says "I'm a fucking ATHEIST, amends DONT MEAN SHIT", but still, Chris Burhham's on board and he doesn't get to draw guts and garters dripping off of Bruce's knuckles? That's a missed opportunity.

This isn't an ending, of course--you have to credit Morrison for his career streak of not writing those--but it still feels like one, and it'll be interesting to find out what the Bruce-break has done for the writer's mood. Will we get some more Batman & Son, international playboy style? Will the lack of Tony "My panels are also tricky" Daniel give comic's only Shaman standing the desire to write something that washes away the still-reeks crap of RIP? And what of little Damian, a character who has only been funny under one hand?

The answers to these questions aren't to be found in these mainstream media promoted pages. But what is here is pretty damn alright--an unlocked door was closed on the irritating Simon Hurt, Frazer Irving finally morphed from a lesser-known darling to a wherever-he-wants headliner, but most of all, a writer who has spent way too long reaping the benefits of suspended judgment proved he could still toss off something pretty special with the best super-hero material there is: Your Motherfucking Batman.

Invincible # 75
Written by Robert Kirkman
Art by Ryan Ottley, Cliff Rathburn, Sheila Saldana, FCO Plascencia & Ivan Plascencia
Published by Image

It's nice and all that there's a creator-owned super-hero title that does more than just eke out survival numbers beyond the reach of DC/Marvel hamburger compound, but you can't exactly wish away content by focusing on industrial uniqueness, and most of the time, Invincible is more impressive as a resume entry. But the comic can be enormously effective, invariably when it focuses on its side characters (Allen the Alien and Battle Beast, specifically), its villains (monstrous riffs on Superman the lot, mustached across the board) or the bedsheets of blood style violence that Ottley and the Magnificent Ambersons Plascencias have long mastered. This issue has all three of those, along with the (hopefully) much welcomed slaughter of the title's second-most obnoxious character, but it's still an underwhelming and overpriced excursion that serves best as an example of what happens when simple pleasures are overthought. There's plenty of extravagance, sure, but none of this comic's two page spreads can compare to the perfection of one, a small panel where Battle Beast--deep in exercise of the murder he loves best--cries out, excitedly, for "more".

Amazing Spider-Man # 647
Written by Fred Van Lente, Bob Gale, Zeb Wells, Joe Kelly, Mark Waid, Marc Guggenheim & Dan Slott
Art by Max Fiumara, Morry Hollowell, Michael Del Mundo, Karl Kesel, Antonio Fabela, J.M Ken Niimura, Paul Azaceta, Graham Nolan, Mark Pennington & Adam Archer
Published by Marvel Comics

If you're in the group of people who liked the way Brand New Day was going, then you'll want to pick this up and sit with it for awhile. Basically, it's a bunch of Brand New Day story arcs that won't get ever get published due to the "give the fucking thing to Dan Slott" parachute that is taking the title over. And sure, those story arcs aren't getting stretched out to their full length, the way they would've been if the Brand New Day wasn't ending, but let's be honest: if you were going to succumb to obligation and read another cringe-inducing potboiler where Flash Thompson and Spider-Man swap inspiration kisses with one another, you're going to be a hell of a lot happier doing it in a scant few pages.

Superboy # 1
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Pier Gallo & Jamie Grant
Published by DC Comics

Having failed to successfully turn Adventure Comics into Superboy comics, the character will now get his own series, courtesy of the one "alt" writer that Johns deems worthy of the task. (Or maybe Jeff is the only name he can remember?) As with Lemire's Atom one-shot, there's little here to indicate that the writer is doing anything more than pumping out the same generic pap that any professional might with the role-playing-game style fact sheet DC provides for each of its characters. This is cold-blooded comics, so cliched and dull that it'll be best remembered as trivia quote when someone asks future publishers how they knew the world was prepared to read comics written by digital algorithms.

Captain America Man Out Of Time # 1
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Jorge Molina, Karl Kesel & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

Weird comic. Most of it seems to track, it's another retelling of Captain America's last adventure followed by the big wake-up, but then the Avengers disappear and abandon our laughing boy in the streets of New York, where there is of course a broad daylight extremeo mugging that ends with Cap getting capped by the victim in a fit of too many pistols. Maybe Mark Waid is a gun-control guy? There doesn't seem to be any other explanation here. At least there aren't any parts where the television show Lie To Me is used like it's a factual reference.

Godland Dogland # 33
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Tom Scioli & Bill Crabtree
Published by Image Comics

Godland isn't like most of the comics it shares shelf space with, which is why it's tempting to praise or defend it as being important, even as its creators spend a good portion of their time making it clear that word isn't their holy objective. Entertainment, according to the braying taglines and letters columns, is: and yet Godland rarely achieves the form of that the way its 4th World inspirations did. It's funny, of course, that's never been something Casey had a problem delivering, and it's loudly attractive in Scioli's steadfast refusal to contemporize. But Godland's pleasures are twisted, specific to the disposable chapter, and that's even truer as the series draws towards conclusion. They're discovered in the eleven square panels that bounce across, then upwards, snaking through the page to the words "Madness!" and "Glorious!", from the always welcome sight of bipedal mice in suits and glasses, or a Casey character once again realizing their fictional nature, and stoically committing to see things through to the end. The sweltering embrace, soon to depart.

Brightest Day # 13
Written by Geoff Johns & Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Ivan Reis, Ardian Syaf, Joe Prado, Vicente Cifunentes, Peter Steigerwald, John Starr & Ray Dillon
Published by DC Comics

In an odd reversal of expectations, this issue of Brightest Day zeroes in on the late 90's, a period of time when DC's best answer to "how the fuck are we going to fix Hawkman's continuity?" was responded to with the bizarre decision of making all of the character's previous stories "true", thus beating Grant Morrison to the bar long before anyone could be bothered to cast a trophy. Having built his career thus far on the canonization of the Silver Age, it's oddly inspiring to see Johns challenge himself by embracing stories that, unlike those written before many of us were born, we are all old enough to remember disliking.

Taskmaster # 3
Written by Fred Van Lente
Art by Jefte Palo & Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Published by Marvel Comics

This is a neat comic about a character with a shitty outfit (it's like Skeletor plus Moon Knight). It's drawn well, by the guy who did the last good Black Panther story. Marvel makes these once in a while--short mini-series by talented professional types--but you'd be goddamned if anybody is going to know they exist, because they're always surrounded by a bunch of horrible mini-series about the same three or so characters that the movies-only audience know the names of. If there was a scale of things to cry about, this situation wouldn't be one that got access to the room where that scale is kept. Still, this is one of those times that frowny emoticons were invented to describe.

Avengers Academy # 6
Written by Christos Gae
Art by Mike McKone, Dave Meikis, Rebecca Buchman, Andrew Henessey, Rick Ketchum & Jeromy Cox
Published by Marvel Comics

Basically, it boils down to this: do you dig on super-hero comics that have full page monologues about how to deal with the psychological trauma of rape? Because that's what this super-hero comic has, that's where it gets the dramatic oomph from. And if that's what you want, and you don't mind that the monologue is brought to the table by Tigra as a way to help a young super-hero who has trouble controlling himself when he turns into a red dinosaur, then here you go dude, it's the super-hero comic you were looking for! It also has four inkers, meaning there were a lot of people who could've said "...the fuck are we doing?" and, then, you know, didn't.

Red Hood: Something About Days # 6
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Jeremy Haun
Published by DC Comics

Outside of Penthouse Letters, who fucks their dad's ex-girlfriend when their dad will most definitely hook up with her again? That's grody as hell. 

Bullseye: Perfect Game # 1
Written by Charlie Huston
Art by Shawn Martinbrough & Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics

Yeah, we all miss Peter Milligan's Human Target. That doesn't mean grumbly one-man monologue comic rip-offs of Human Target stories featuring Bullseye are going to fill the void.

Generation Hope # 1
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Salvador Espin & Jim Charalampidis
Published by Marvel Comics

Hey, amateur night on the art front here. If you're going to homage something, why homage something that's in part famous because it's drawn so incredibly fucking well?

Punisher: In The Blood # 1
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Roland Boschi & Dan Brown
Published by Marvel Comics

Who cares?

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: Nice Face You Got There, Trainwreck

Thunderbolts # 149
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Declan Shalvey & Frank Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

Marvel and DC make crossover and tie-in comics as if their readers are in a committed relationship with the title, as if the audience will just stick it out no matter how creepy the bedroom sanctions have become. And at one point, that was probably true--you could dress Batman up in a football uniform and readers would still clamber into bed, forcibly ignoring how uncomfortable it felt to have flashlight batteries shoved into their labial matrix. But nowadays--uh uh, sister. I'm not wearing that prom dress until you start holding doors, like you did when we first met.

Superman # 704
Written by G. Willow Wilson
Art by Leandro Oliveira, Walden Wong & Rod Reis
Published by DC Comics

Dope shit here. Turns out Lois Lane has been spending some time thinking (always a mistake, when you're a female comic book character), and it's finally dawned on her that she's spent all of her time on a career and not on baby-making, so now she's all kinds of fucked up, the all-kinds that can only be fixed by having her man tell her he wuvs her. And who is it that's responsible for this terrible trip down sad thoughts highway? Why, the single most influential architect in small-town Indiana, that's who! See, this little tart just happens to run a successful architectural firm in a small town populated by stereotypes and be a mom at the same time! Doesn't that just curl your hair? Why it's enough to make a Cub Scout cross-eyed!

Oh, and make a note somewhere: Superman 704 has the deadest eyes you'll ever find. Every single page has at least one panel (and in almost all cases, that one panel is every panel) depicting the most soulless faces comics can produce. It feels like you're standing in the Barbie aisle after the toystore shut down for the night. And while that's totally understandable--the comic is a fill-in issue, the art had to get pumped out on the express rail--it still ends up winning a prize that nobody would be excited to claim.

Fantastic Four # 584
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Steve Epting & Paul Mounts
Published by Marvel Comics

This is mostly wish-fulfillment cutesy shit, but that's pretty much what you're supposed to do with "Ben Grimm has a human body" stories. That way it hurts so much more when he turns back into a hideous freak, hated by God. There's only two blatant problems with it, the first being that Epting draws Jack Kirby as if the King's body is filling in for an off-Broadway version of Weekend At Bernie's (with Stan Lee taking Andrew McCarthy's AND the Single Guy's spot), and the second being the completely blown opportunity for Johnny Storm to have said something awesome like "you go let that girl read Braille off your flesh penis, Benji".

JLA The 99 # 1
Written by Stuart Moore & Fabian Nicieza
Art by Tom Derenick, Drew Geraci & Allen Passalaqua
Published by DC Comics
The French, Regarding The Cover 

Huh. Kind of disrespectful for something like this to be sold in the same hemisphere as Ground Zero. Well, it's like BenRix always says: The shit, for the countries of the shit. Oh look Hawkman has a giant ass growing out of his arm

That's pretty fucked up

Secret Avengers # 6
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Mike Deodato
Published by Marvel Comics

Plaster some breasticles on the variant cover, set the info dump portion during a sexxxy massage sesh, it won't change the simple truth that some people are here for Moon Knight and Moon Knight alone. Sure, there's going to be people who might show up to see how Brubaker deals with the lack of a Fu Manchu license, there might even be an uptick courtesy of the curious Shadowland reader, hungry to find out what crybaby Chi calls himself now that he's lost the "Master" that was attached to his "Kung-Fu", but it's the Moon Knight fans who are keeping this sucker alive. Jesus said it on the cross: don't shit on who brung you.

Justice League Generation Lost # 12
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Fernando Dagnino, Raul Fernandez & Hi-Fi
Published by DC Comics

The appeal of this comic, one would surmise, would be the opportunity to continue reading something that people remember fondly, that something being the Justice League International stuff that got rolling in the late 80's. And while some of this is certainly that (the Rocket Red character still has his Yakov Smirnoff accent, and one recent plot featured cutesy 80's shit like a Voltron-ic assembly of Metal Men), the series now seems to be hewing a lot closer to a comic nobody remembers fondly (if they think of it at all), Extreme Justice. Extreme Justice is notable for being completely ignored (you'll notice that few people ever talk about the period of time when Booster Gold's body was kept alive by an armored suit that had the exact visual punch as a stack of microwaves) due to it being corny and horrible: which would make it right at home here, in a story called "The Cold Truth", which is about how long-time wallflower (WAIT FOR IT) Ice is actually responsible for the death of her father and a good portion of her extended family, had totally forgotten about it, and it all came rushing back when her costume got a requisite Superfluous Hardcore Update. Grimy!

The Bulletproof Coffin # 5
Written by David Hine
Art by Shaky Kane
Published by Image Comics

Yeah, so this thing isn't really going anywhere, but at least it looks nice while doing so. After a fashion, that almost seems like part of the point: appearance wise, format wise, publisher wise, Bulletproof sure looks like it's a serialized comic mini-series of the variety that Image occasionally puts out. And in the way Hine keeps presenting the same characters again and again, deepening some of them and violently removing others, it is. But on every other basic level, it's a comic whose value is in direct connection to how interested one is in looking at Shaky Kane drawings of people wearing poorly-fitted super-hero costumes (in the daylight, for the most part) as they go about the business of failing. Lucky day!

Teen Titans # 88
Written by JT Krul
Art by Nicola Scott & Doug Hazlewood
Published by DC Comics

Finally, after months of anticipation, readers around the world have gotten the chance to see what JT Krul really has to bring to the table. Up until now, you couldn't really tell what the cat could cook with--sure, there was Rise of Arsenal, but when it comes down to it, Krul hasn't been partnered up with anybody on the art details who you could charitably argue was considered "competent", or when he has been, those individuals only handled a few pages of one of his postmodern masterworks. In a neat stroke of the genius that has seen them win the hearts, minds and open wallets of America's comics readers, DC Comics spent the last couple of years destroying whatever goodwill the Teen Titans had left, and it was all apparently to prepare the ground for our man Krul's arrival, who is getting a chance to start off relatively clean. It's as if the restaurant down the block, the one that used to defecate on pictures of your Bible whenever you asked for a sandwich, decided to hire an all new staff. Sure, they still serve human feces, but now they do it faster, with embroidered napkins.

Incognito Bad Influences # 1
Written by Ed Bruabker
Art by Sean Philips
Published by Icon/Marvel

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack qualities of humanity, hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.

Detective Comics # 870
Written by David Hine
Art by Scott McDaniel & Andy Owens
Published by DC Comics

Funny thing: if you have Scott McDaniel drawing a comic, that comic can include a massive death toll, and yet it won't seem overly serious or gloomy. Like this, for example. According to the text, nearly two hundred people died in the rioting and fighting that takes up the majority of the comics pages, all of them innocent people and police officers, and while some of those deaths are depicted, it still never seems like that big of a deal. Because...well, let's be honest, it isn't a big deal. When it comes to death, civilians in comics are like Mexicans in real life: nobody can be bothered to care. Happy birthday!

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: Shit, I Wish Your Mother Had Clicked "Close Tab"

Strange Tales II # 1
By Kevin Huizenga, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, Kate Beaton, Rafael Grampa
Published by Marvel Comics

It didn't get mentioned that much the first time Marvel went down this road, but the first Strange Tales mini-series was mostly a piece of shit, completely shown up by the Gary Panter contributions to Omega The Unknown (which had proved that Marvel did have a few people still connected to their courage) and the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror (which showed what independent creators could do with companies that actually understood the definition of the word "freedom"). Now, the first attempt at Strange Tales wasn't a piece of shit the way a lot of Big Two comics are in terms of lacking anything interesting to look at, it was a piece of shit the way anything always is when better, more expansive versions of what it offers are available online constantly, for free. This time around, things seem a bit different, like the people involved are involved for more than just generic jack-off reasons, that there's an investment being made in taking a chance. Some of it is still just a rough hewn example of their more interesting non-Marvel work--Kate Beaton, for one, delivers little more than a funny reminder to check her website (which most people are certainly doing already)--but there's very little here that calls back to the first time Marvel tried this, which was when they basically published a longform themed sketchbook of the indie world. There's a lot of praise being heaped on the Grampa thing, and while that's all well-deserved, it's Dash Shaw's passionate mash-up of Spider-Man that seals what Santoro, Huizenga and the aforementioned Grampa all toy with. In a few pages, glaringly unlike anything Marvel publishes, Shaw mixes a variation on his (let's call it what it is, "weird") obsession with kitschy reality television against Stan Lee's classic Peter Parker positive-speak, all of it married in the all-too-telling image of our hero and his adventures being thrown away with the trash. And if the point wasn't clear enough, it's verbalized right on the page: The dumpsters is where this genre fucking thrives.

Return of Bruce Wayne # 5
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Ryan Sook, Pere Perez & Mick Gray
Published by DC Comics

It's kind of hysterical that DC and Grant Morrison had the opportunity to see Marvel fuck up the return of Captain America, by publishing multiple comics where Steve Rogers wore a black spec-ops bodysuit and stood on the tops of buildings watching heroes do shit before the Reborn mini-series concluded, and yet still turn around and manage to fuck up their own Return of Bruce Wayne shindig in the exact same fashion. All the evidence has been there for months of what was going to happen, and they still went ahead and chose to fuck it up anyway. Here's your unfinished, late as hell mini-series by the marquee names (plus a fill-in dude), released alongside a stack of one-shots, all of which feature Bruce Wayne, in a black, spec-ops bodysuit, standing on top of buildings, watching heroes do shit.

Edge of Doom # 1
Written by Steve Niles
Art by Kelley Jones & Jay Fotos
Published by IDW

You've got to admire the balls out courage it takes for IDW to look at the consistent failure of new horror anthology comics to find an audience and still decide "fuck it, we'll do a bunch of them anyway, and we'll make them even longer". Hell, if you look at the way they describe this issue, you might even think that Edge of Doom is actually a mini-series based around one story. (It isn't.) On the other hand, maybe you're just looking into this thing because it's Kelley Jones, and you're one of those people so sick of Tony Daniel/David Finch Batman drawings that you've actually started wetting the bed for the old Moench/Jones Fuck The Government paranoia years. If that's the case, here you go: it's a Tales From The Crypt riff on Gulliver's Travels, with a curious nerd who gets his eyeball yanked out by tiny arrows.

Amazing Spider-Man # 645
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Paul Azaceta, Matthew Southworth & Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

While the previous installations in Mark Waid's performance piece on Spider-Man featured what one assumes is his preferred version of the character (the simpering crybaby with wisecracks aplenty), this chapter cuts to the other Spider-Man, the one that imitates Christian Bale's Batman for some reason involving feelings. So look and behold, as Peter Parker silently terrorizes all of his villains before snapping the Shocker's wrist (or something). Cast your eyes upon the requisite reverse-homage to old Spider-Man comics, this one being the "I must hold up this thing that is heavy", and this time, it's all like, scary and shit. It's a lot of fun, because it's not any fun at all.

Superman # 703
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Eddy Barrows, J.P. Mayer & Rod Reis
Published by DC Comics

The general rule for whenever Superman and Batman get together is that the one who is right is always the one whose name is on the cover. If Superman shows up in a Batman comic, he's going to act like a self-righteous tool, and when the reverse happens, Superman will be thoughtful and human, while Batman will shoot his mouth off like a gloomy Dead Can Dance fan with an inferiority complex. And--well, you can't fault Straczynski too much, he certainly shoots for accuracy in his attempt to make Superman seem thoughtful, he just misses the mark because of his primary failing, which can be summed up by remembering that he's a tedious, boring writer who comes up with concepts that he never bothers to fill out with actual characters or dialog. (Which is why he's best served by television, where he can count on a crew of people to fill in all the gaps that he leaves behind.) In comics--specifically, Big Two comics, a place where any creator with even the vaguest "celebrity" is given free rein to embarrass themselves as much as humanly possible, up to and including taking business advice from beef-addicted morons in jean shorts--a writer has no crew to turn to, as DC and Marvel have spent the post-Image decades feverishly dismantling the idea that the people drawing these things could possibly understand storytelling themselves. Instead, they have this: a writer who believes himself automatic genius, no help required. God forbid anyone reads these things and sees the banality that belief produced.

BPRD Hell On Earth: New World # 3
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Guy Davis & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

While the return of the BPRD's most dangerous unresolved subplot has gone a lot differently than what might have been predicted, the bigger surprise is how committed the Arcudi/Mignola duo is to the whole "Hell on Earth" concept. While the damage foretold in the trilogy that brought the new status quo forth was extensive, the continuing collapse of our home planet hasn't stopped, and everything must go. And yet, after smartly delivering a one page scene of destruction that left thousands dead, this issue dived out of the apocalypse window entirely, choosing to focus on our two heroes (and there aren't many left), as they 36th Chamber their way against one stand-alone monster. It's frequently claimed that serialized comics run out of places to go after they go big and loud, but Arcudi and Mignola prove that to be a song of laziness. All this issue is, when you boil it down, is a stripped to the gears fight scene: two dudes, one bad guy, and a pick-up truck full of weapons. It's been thrown to Guy Davis and Dave Stewart, those guys have continued their streak of doing things perfectly, and when you're finished, you're fat with satisfaction.

The Invincible Iron Man # 31
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Salvador Larroca & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

If you ignore everything that goes into the actual reading of these Iron Man comics, like the horribly inhuman drawings and the obnoxious "people talking to each other, about nothing, forever" structure, what you've got is a comic that's supposedly about one of the top ten smartest people in the Marvel universe, and that's an actual list that someone is paid to keep track of. So what is the smartest man obsessed with doing? What kind of plan for changing the world do we get from a genius who fetishizes his alcoholism when he needs to teach his ex-girlfriend shitty metaphors?

He makes a car that looks like a clunky cross between a Lamborghini and a Toyota Tercel. That's this bozo's vision of the future: an ugly two-door sports car with a fucking blower on top. Here's another word for that: starts with q, and it rhymes, sort of, with "taint".

Green Lantern # 58
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke & Christian Alamy
Published by DC Comics

Since "hope" is basically a kid's game, a gamey concept as realistic as Santa Claus or peace in Israel, Geoff Johns had no choice but to pick a fourteen year old girl as its physical agent. (The only thing more hopelessly stupid than a fourteen year old girl being, obviously, a fourteen year old boy.) It's still Johns, so the girl happens to be the latest victim in a string of kidnap/murders at the hands of what looks to be a young, mustached Professor Ivo, and the whole story is really just a sideshow, plot events tied up in finding new ways to define boring old Hal Jordan. (He's into hope, but afraid of it, and the cliffhanger ending is the Flash questioning Hal's choices in running buddies.) Basically, it's another routine Green Lantern comic--scream-y, weird, and dull.

Gantz # 13
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse

While the charm of the Gantz crew fighting dinosaurs wore off quite a bit when it become clear that Oku's obsession for detail meant that every single way-too-intricate drawing of dinosaurs was going to clash with his studio's way-too-intricate background drawings of buildings, thus resulting in some of the densest, most unfriendly panels this series had so far (and the action has been plenty confusing before), it's endlessly amusing when a forty-year old nebbish screams lines like "I can feel the lust for life within you! You're strong! You have the strength to survive anything!" Gantz isn't alone in having a complete lack of internal life--that's pretty much every Robert Kirkman comic, honestly--but unlike the this-is-so-serious Walking Dead, the Gantz translators seem to understand that the only way to handle something so egregiously ridiculous as a bunch of idiots in scuba gear ghost-fighting gigantic dinosaurs while E-cup porn girls idly stand on the sidelines (and a panda bear shows up for some friendly wrassling) is for absolutely every single line of dialog to be delivered with a zero tolerance policy towards sarcasm, self-awareness or maturity. If these chapters took any time to read, the high pitch might make one deaf. As it is, it's one of the reasons why Gantz--the most sterile masturbation action fantasy that wasn't made by the Wachowski Brothers--remains so consistently gratifying. Whether it's good or bad, this is what pride actually looks like, and American comics could take a lesson: apologies are for high school kids.

I Am An Avenger # 2
Written by Greg Rucka, Sean McKeever, Paul Tobin & Jacob Chabot
Art by Michael Lark, Stefano Gaudiano, Matt Hollingsworth, Mike Mayhew, Rain Beredo, Nathan Fairbairn, David Lopez, Alvaro Lopez & Jacob Chabot
Published by Marvel Comics

According to this comic, Steve Rogers attends the funerals of American soldiers who die in conflict with Epic Marvel Crossover Events. Lucky for him, only one soldier died in Siege, lucky for you, that only makes one ridiculously maudlin funeral scene involving Captain Fucking America to read. Here's the message it delivers: it really sucks to lose a family member in a pointless secret super-hero war, because it means the funeral is going to be completely overshadowed by the gigantic super-hero creep who wanders around and says "geez, i'm really sorry, America Pledge of Allegiance eagles" while you're trying to say goodbye to somebody killed by Daken (the Dark Wolverine!). Nothing's worse than crying your eyes out while those eyes are looking at something that your brain is totally convinced you should be laughing your ass off at.

Slam Dunk Volume 12
By Takehiko Inoue
Published by Viz

It's probably unfair to call this installment in Inoue's basketball manga "more of the same", since it does include a couple of new plot twists (the coach does something! the bad guys have their own crazy dude!), but that's pretty much what this volume is: more. The feelings are there, stronger than they might have been previously (the team captain reveals he's been dreaming of the coming game, every night, for three years), but Inoue's decision to replicate our leads exactly in this new opposing squad makes the story read more like a meta-comic about practice than the sudsy testosterone melodrama that made the previous game (which was also, like, A Really Big Deal) so deliciously painful to wait on. The one saving grace that remains is found in the final panel, when the team's silent assassin takes to the floor and mutters "you all talk too much". While previous volumes have shown what this enigmatic fucker can do, as well as providing Inoue with his most aggressive opportunities for action drawing outside of Vagabond, the tease is enough to postpone abandonment a little bit longer. 

Daken Dark Wolverine # 2
Written by Daniel Way & Marjorie Liu
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Frank D'Armata & Onofrio Catacchio
Published by Marvel Comics

The best anybody could hope for with a character as ridiculous as Daken (the Dark Wolverine!) was that a comic focusing on his exploits would look nice (because it's Camuncoli, one of those rare artists D'Armata doesn't seem to be able to entirely cripple) and that it would be funny, because...well, fuck dude, it's about Daken, he's the Dark Wolverine. He's bisexual and has pheromone powers with which to tease, tantalize and turn on both sexes. He has a flowy mohawk. Ultimately, he's the end result of a lack of imagination, sure, but that's the rule of the day in all super-hero comics when children are involved (except for Cable, who is the end result of a lack of imagination PLUS gigantic guns and metal, and those can fix lots of things, the same way drawing all your characters with gigantic letter V's bisecting them can fix lots of things). The first issue of this series seemed to be a general step in the right direction--Daken fucked a girl, fed another girl a strawberry, there was a great fight scene, Daken humped a midget, he yelled at buildings--but this issue goes in another direction, one that incorporates weird cringing comedy, bullshit Wolverine tie-in crap nobody cares about, and shows the one thing you don't want to see in a comic about a sleazy cornball with sexxxy powers, which is the part where he acts embarrassed. Bad form, and bad tidings as well.

Warlord of Mars # 1
Written by Arvid Nelson
Art by Stephen Sadowski & Adriano Lucas
Masturbation Fodder Variant Cover by the one-speed master
Published by Dynamite

They should really dole out the licensed comic adaptation deals once a year, in a high school gymnasium. You could invite all of the bloggers who aren't too busy taking pictures of themselves standing next to a oversized model of a X-Wing Fighter, Five Guys could cater it so that nobody fucks up and loses any weight, the whole thing would be a pretty sweet deal for genre freaks. Everybody would get draft picks based off how shitty their taste is, and then things would be a little more fair, and it could possibly result in more exciting comics as result. Like, instead of seeing a bunch of big tier creators doing Dark Tower for Marvel while the scrub list manhandles the Phantom, you'd get Jacen Burrows adding his plastic rape faces to Halo: Bonghits while Brendan McCarthy draws hallucination panels into Tarzan crap.

Thor # 616
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Pasqual Ferry & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics 

There's a lot of problems with Thor comics right now, and while most of that is tangled up in the fact that there's just too fucking many of them for any one person to possibly care about one of them in great magnitude (except for the one that's for kids and yet happens to be most popular with people who aren't actual kids), but that's more an industrial problem than it is one of content or form or any of those other words that gets thrown around when there's nobody getting fired to blog about. The real problem with Thor comics (besides the Ultimate ones where entire scenes get yanked from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction), is that Thor's primary villain gets all of his primary villainous opportunities directly from Thor, because Thor is really fucking stupid when it comes to the guy. Over and over again, this is the nature and planning of every modern Thor comic: a bunch of people says "Hey, you really shouldn't trust Loki, he's a bad guy", Thor says "nah, he's my bro, shaddup" and then Loki reinstitutes slavery or fingerbangs Margaret Thatcher against her Iron Will, and then Thor has to hit Loki with a hammer or lightning or whatever, and then there's something with Frost Giants while Loki licks himself clean and comes up with another plan. That's the cycle, over and over again. How do you root for that? How is that entertaining? It's not like Thor is being a moron in the way that a guy in a Failblog video is being a moron, he's not slipping on banana peels and falling into custard. He's just an idiot with a hammer that he never uses. What's pop art about that?

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: It's When The Neckbeards Disapprove, That's When You're On The Right Track

From Mome 19, which is the best volume of the series so far. While it's arguable that the series has moved a bit away from whatever original plan it may have had by shortening the list of contributors (#19 has eight, much less than the usual number) and including artists few Fantagraphic fans will be unaware of (almost every contributor has at least one published book to their name already), it's pretty difficult to argue with the results. Josh Simmons' "White Rhinocerous Part 1", a collaboration with the Partridge in the Pear Tree (kill me now, that name) adorns both covers and consists both of Josh appropriating non-horror objects in use of the same creepy fearshow stylings he brought in Cockbone, as well as a being a twisted introduction to his latest (probably doomed) lead, an overweight white girl who looks like an overweight Michael Jackson. It's short, makes sense, is funny: great comic.

The rest of Mome 19 doesn't fall apart on the job either--TIm Lane produces one of his classic steeped-in-Americana portrayals, this one of a runaway husband staring into an abandoned carnival in hopes of finding enough nostalgia to pilot him home, Olivier Schrauwen brings more evidence of why his appeal should stretch beyond the 16 or so people who have seen his comics in a painful riff on an elderly man desperately escaping his broken meat sleeve to dally in a (possibly inspired by the Shaw/Santoro style?) candy-colored world of fantasy, and Gilbert Hernandez does...well. One of those comics that's drawn really well, that's funny, and yet doesn't make a huge amount of sense. It's about the Mexican Herbie.

There's other good stuff too, like God taking a shit on the Catholic Church. But the real prize here is DJ Bryant, who, according to the back cover bio, has released one short comic for an anthology and done some strips for Cinema Sewer. Now, if that's true--if the guy has actually done that little published work--then it might be necessary to clear off the mantelpiece and yell at the moon for a little while, because now there's another reason--in a month that's been absolutely goddamn good and full of them--to get a little bit ecstatic about comics for a moment, even if that clashes with the basic formation of our current universe, which is one of complete and utter degradation, shame, horror, rejection, depression, entitlement, hate, idiocy, gluttony, posturing, basically just an intense loathing of absolutely every single thing that could be considered sincere or, if we're being frank about it, human.

See, this is one of those old comics, very similar in tone and plot to something EC might have published (or, as Fanta's own Four Color Fear collection depicts, any one of the publishers in the early 50's who were smart enough to ape EC's style). It's about a guy, who married a girl, and the girl treats him like shit, and he takes it. Over and over again, she humiliates him, physically assaults him, sexually emasculates him, forces him into the rain so she can fuck somebody else in front of him, all while his constant weakness, his unfailing willingness to accept whatever punishment she dishes out, serves to perpetuate the hatred she has for him.

And oh yes, because it is 2010, because MOME and DJ Bryant don't have to pretend the way EC did that their primary audience is children, the sex is explicitly depicted, driving home the one thing that similarly toned stories (like Four Color Fear's opener "Hen-Pecked Harry") fail too. This victimized husband is getting something out of the relationship, and under DJ Bryant's able, perverse hand, what he's getting is clearly something that a part of him graeatly enjoys, and that enjoyment may be the whole reason he ended up in these positions in the first place.

Laced with sex, violence and murder, Bryant's final contribution to this grunting backwards homage is the delve into mania, and its here that he makes clear who he was thinking about: Steve Ditko.

Although the comic's first page had already thrown a Know Your Shit reference to Ditko's "Driven To Destruction" (caught here by Claire Donner), it's when our mid-range psycho goes full tilt loon that the comic detonates. Transitioning seamlessly between raw, hard sex and a full mental breakdown, Bryant starts splitting faces down the middle, blending panels into one, and by the ambiguous close, he's succeeded in surpassing his inspirations. Alongside a group of contemporaries who possess some of comic's most innovative talents, he chose refinement. It fucking worked. 

Secret Avengers # 5
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by David Aja & Michael Lark
Published by Marvel Comics

Secret Avengers issues 1-4 weren't garbage comics, but let's be honest: you spent the whole time wondering why in the hell Moon Knight was on the team, when you remembered Moon Knight WAS on the team, which wasn't that often. Now, this, on the other hand--it's not what Secret Avengers could have been, because it's not about the Secret Avengers at all, it's another one of those sneak-him-onboard Nick Fury issues (not at all dissimilar to the Nick Fury issue of New Avengers that Bendis wrote, which, like Secret, had much more interesting and well let's just say it, better, art than whoever else was drawing New Avengers at the time, although that's neither here nor there anyway, as New Avengers wasn't a comic that really needed to have art at all, so it almost never did, although there were some occasionally interesting poster drawings interspersed amongst those thousands of panels featuring people talking at extraordinarily great lengths about what was eventually revealed to be absolutely nothing of consequence.)

So yeah: this is a Nick Fury comic, and it's a lot like what Brubaker was doing on Captain America back when Captain America clearly had a planned story that it was in the business of telling, which was the time period from when the comic started up until those issues where the Chinese war doctor showed up and Namor scowled around to show off how skeeved out he was by all these Chinese war doctor experiments. Namely, Secret Avengers is a comic where serious men with serious jawlines drop guns into their hands in homage to Asian gangster flicks so that they can clamber around inside Steranko inspired panels, all while talking about ridiculous things; glorious, wonderful, ridiculous things, like flying cars, and robots with souls, and it's all rather pleasant and rewarding. There's even reason to hope that it might last through future issues, when the comic returns to being about a team that has Moon Knight on it, for some reason that will hopefully never be explained.

The Spirit # 6
Written by David Hine & Brian Azzarello
Art by Moritat & Eduardo Risso
Published by DC Comics

The only way out is through, so let's pause for a second and forget that the First Wave launch has been a non-stop clusterfuck of late shipping and changing creative teams. This, for what it's worth, is actually the sort of thing that's worth spending time with.

HE MEANS HIS FISTS and he's supposed to be the Shadow, this Spirit, and while the historical importance of that second choice would assumedly make the lack of the first work, it hasn't yet. But look at the man David Hine has started to create: he's less Eisner, more Miller, and yet he somehow feels fresh, unsheathed from Frank's plastic wrap of icons and fetish. Under Moritat's hands, the visuals are taking a firmer shape: molten steel traps ignite the flesh of killer and savior alike, brute-filled shadows explode into blizzards of melodrama, all while Gabriel Bautista grows less and less willing to force a thousand colors into the panel. This comic is getting better--gnarlier, meaner--and while the Spirit can't be as cool as the Shadow, there's got to be a way to make this motherfucker play. He may now be under the control of hands that understand that.

Thor # 615
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Pasquel Ferry & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics

Well, it's certainly nice to find out that Matt Fraction is such a stalwart member of the Writers Who Hate Poetry club that he's willing to extend that loathing into the scripts of his comics and bisect the torsos of those damnable verse-loving depressives. But the important, historical draw here is the corporate hands of Disney, who have lovingly inserted a gigantic two page advertisement for their upcoming Tron film, which used to be called TR2N, until somebody sobered up and took the idiot out of their ass.

Oh wait maybe that's part of the comic

Justice League of America # 49
Written by James Robinson
Art by...wait, it's better if you actually SEE this credits box.

Count it up: that's NINE inkers, two pencilers.
Published by You Guessed It

No fucking around: that's crazy as shit! Justice League of America is, or used to be, the marquee book for this company, the one thing they could count on to sell alongside the other things they could count on to sell, which was A) Superman and B) Batman. Batman's still trucking along okay, although the next few months of non-stop Bat-spin-off comics will probably bring it low, which is where Superman lives. Justice League--give it a rest. Nine inkers? Two pencilers? How does the workflow for that even get handled? Do they just send everybody FTP access and say "finish whatever you can, whoever's first gets the money" and then everybody just pulls an all-nighter, toasted on white crosses? Does Rod Reis hang out with Photoshop open, waiting for his email box to ping at him? Dude, is somebody taking bets? Is there a leader board? Hell, why not try a return to those old contests where you could win your name in a comic, only this time whoever writes the best letter about why DC should keep pretending having James Robinson on staff is as much a draw as Johns and Morrison will get the opportunity to ink an actual page in a JLA comic? (As long as they include a "don't mention Starman" rule, they could have a real challenge on their hands!)

Besides all that other nonsense, JLA 49 is otherwise notable for the new Arsenal editorial dictate (and since it happened in a Morrison Batman issue, you gotta assume it's a rule) which states that all flashback/nightmare versions of the character have to include some kind of visual notation that the character is now armless. Witness!

Fantastic Four #583
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Steve Epting & Paul Mounts
Published by Marvel Comics

Seems like an odd decision to make Reed Richard's daughter so intensely unlikeable through actual plot devices--after all, both of those kids are just unlikeable on the sheer principle of their existence alone, aggravating it even further by having Epting draw one of them with the most demanding punch-her-in-the-face sliminess he can muster is just risky. And yet, it's nice to see Hickman doing something different after spending so many issues riffing off of Supreme and Tom Strong. Maybe the next issue comes with a pony?

Titans # 27
Written by Eric Wallace
Art by Fabrizio Fiorentino
Published by DC Comics

Doing this was sort of an educational experience, as it pointed out that, no matter their failings, Marvel & DC are fundamentally more skillful when it comes to readable versions of serialized comic books than a lot of their competetitors. See, there's comics published by IDW, Dynamite, Top Cow and Boom that just don't make any sense, no matter how many times you read them. The work published by DC and Marvel can still be just as bad as some of those comics, but they're still comprehensible on the most basic level, even someone with the the most fundamental understanding of English is going to be able to grasp that what they're seeing is supposed to be a story of some kind, and not just a mishmash of shiny colored pages with words scattered across them.

But then, there's Titans. The first issue in its new, Deathstroke/Arsenal focused run was a veritable buffet line of mind-boggling confusion, a comic that featured multiple, unexplained narrators, held scenes of some plot importance off-panel in service of some kind of weird anti-comics argument that boiled down to "fuck you, here's a drawing of a door for two pages", all while refusing to present any evidence that the comic had actually been completed, at any level, prior to publication. There was a team? They were around? Maybe behind one of those doors that kept showing up?

In this issue, the "team", which is actually just a couple of different shitty half-ass anti-heroes, all of whom may or may not be hatching the world's most underplanned plot to assassinate Deathstroke, fight another group. That group is led by a drug kingpin who is reaping the fiscal whirlwind that stems from that old I Come In Peace (or, if you prefer, because we know that some of you do, that Torchwood mini-series) sour trick of using live human beings (children!) as the source for some supa-dupa drugs. They fight, it doesn't make any sense, ends arbitrarily because everybody forgot that the Marvel-powered kid can kill universes (or something, who knows, nobody ever bothers to explain what those characters can do) and then you get to the meat of the comic, which is also where all the effort seems to be, and two of the characters have sex so that the other character won't relapse on heroin. Oh how quickly we forget the lessons of Rush! 

The Incredible Hulk: Hide In Plain Sight
Written by Bruce Jones
Art by Leandro Fernandez
Published by Marvel Comics

A break from the long-form story that Bruce Jones' run on Hulk is most known for, this five-part story was probably created in case somebody watched the Hulk movie and liked it enough to check out the comic. (Ultimately, that was a short-sighted plan, as the comic would be returning to the middle of what became a 40 odd part story as soon as "Plain Sight" concluded, but then again, few people seem to have liked that Hulk movie to begin with.) Mostly, this is a decent thriller that probably would've worked better in four parts than five, but it's an excellent showcase for Leandro Fernandez, who is mostly known for drawing the worst Punisher MAX arc as well as making Queen & Country's main character so cheesecakey that you have to apologize to people when you recommend it to them. Check this shit out, this was in a Hulk book:

Nice.

Although Hide In Plain Sight isn't without a few missteps, like when it's revealed that the Absorbing Man has possessed a very young girl and forced her to brutally kill her own parents with a very small knife, or the inclusion of a extraordinarily resourceful woman who trusts Bruce Banner completely within hours of meeting him, it's still a solid, quick thriller, and one that, for better or worse, fits in well with Jones' run on the title. Old men being mind-controlled into big handgun suicide: that's an AC/DC song on paper.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: Well, Sort Of

Everything's in SUCH A TIZZY!

Dakendarkwolverine1
Written by a lady
drawn by a gentleman
published by deviants
read by horny miscreants

This isn't the professionally put together version of sleazy metrosexual super-heroics that was hoped for, at least not quite yet, but it does include strawberry teased models, back room milan model make out sexxxions, four tightly fitted American Apparel outfit changes, and this little chunk of the violence:

ahhhmyeyespleasestopwiththeshinycoloring

Okay, check it: Camuncoli codes the characters above with different weapons each, and he times the violence out so that by panel five in the second row, Mr. Handgun has moved his weapon above his waist and pointed it at mohawk-vest, meaning that's the length of time it took for vest-mohawk to kill the people in those first four middle panels. (In the top panel, the handgun is just beginning its ascent.) Also: all the directional changes in the killing panels fit with where the characters are in space--he turns left, because they're on the left, etc. Fucks the 180 rule, which is one of the reasons Martin Pasko hated Neal Adams (that makes sense later), but it works, who cares.

PS: this fight scene takes place after vest-mohawk-tightpants flirts with Johnny Storm on the phone. Coos right in the Human Torch's ear, he does! 

Now take a look at this:

This is morning glories 1. What happened here, kemosabe? Does the guy in the ugly tie with his silent elbows and "tok" superkick stop, wait for the two guys, turn around and pull his tricks? Does he run up to them and spin around? Do they teleport and exchange places so that he can run in the middle of them to do the moves in panel two?

Not supposed to be spending this kind of time. For extra credit, you can do this in your very on own home with every other fight/action scene in the comic. (Secret tip: don't dilly dally around trying to figure out the architecture of the hallways and rooms, that's a lockbox without solution.)

Comics Journal # 37
Published by Fantagraphics I guess, 1977

The majority of this issue is devoted to stuff about the first Star Wars movie, as well as a half-ad/half-article about the upcoming Superman film that looks exactly like what Wizard might have produced if they'd been around in the 70's. The best part of the issue is found in Gary Groth's editorial evisceration of Jim Steranko's response to Mediascene (a zine Steranko was responsible for editing) being busted for publishing a plagiarized article. The article was about the upcoming Superman movie, Steranko's response to the plagiarism was a long-winded "this isn't a big deal, chill out". After that, there's a couple of good reviews by Kim Thompson, amongst others, one really hard to read Avengers review that goes into explicit detail about what's depicted in every single panel on every single page, and then an irritating convention write-up that keeps repeating the phrase "I hate kids". (If only you'd waited! They weren't going to be a problem much longer!) It all rounds up with a pretty decent interview with Martin Pasko, who talks some serious shit about Neal Adams, reveals that he has no idea how well any of his books sell unless they get cancelled, seems convinced that nobody in their right mind would ever pay more than thirty cents for a comic book, and basically says every single thing you've heard anybody say about excessive violence in super-hero comic books, expensive comic books, continuity errors, and the only thing substantially different in all of it compared to what you read yesterday at Robot 6's comment section is that the conversation took place in 1977 and not 2010.

Amazing Spider-Man # 643
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Paul Azaceta
Published by Marvel Comics

It's always worth remembering that there's a massive chunk of people that read comics who also pay absolutely no attention to the internet's take on them, and it might be worthwhile to laugh hysterically at all of them right now, because there's just no way those silly people with their silly Prodigy accounts are enjoying Mark Waid's joke at the beginning of this issue of Amazing Spider-Man # 643 as much as the rest of us. See, the joke goes something like this: in the last issue, Dr. Octopus, who lives in a cocoon now and no longer has the fat guy version of a girl's pageboy haircut (so many genders!), happened to deliver a baby and then cut the umbilical cord right in the middle of that poorly furnished coffee shop that Harry Osborn does a bad job of running. (Seriously, how much furniture does that place actually have?) 

So, in the beginning of this issue, Spider-Man rants and rants and rants, silently, about how gross it is that he had to see Dr. Octopus do THAT, you know, with an UMBILICAL CORD, like: so gross, UMBILICAL CORDS SHOULD BE INSIDE WOMEN, not OUTSIDE, GREATEST GENERATION. But then Waid plays it out even further, and has Spidey start questioning if maybe he's the one with the problem, going so far as to say "am I just getting old and fussy?", and if you can't see the mimicry of certain "I don't buy super-hero comics because they're just straight up fucking gross now" punditry, then you're just lying because seriously it takes like two seconds on twitter to find those kinds of remarks, hell I think "super-heroes are too violent for my precious orca-looking four year old, how ever will I distract him long enough so that I can have the kind of sexual affairs described in Oprah's recent Book Club pick" was the plot of a Brazzers video with Lezley Zen last week. (She succeeded.)

The Incal: John Difool, Class "R" Detective
Written by Alexandro Jodorowsky
Art by Zoran Janjetov & Valerie Beltran
Published by Humanoids

This isn't a piece of shit or anything like that, but it's still only a "pretty okay" version of something like that Marcos Martin Captain America comic where James Robinson told you the exciting story of what happened while Steve Rogers was on the way to the super-soldier injection. No matter how good it gets--and Martin drew anorexic Cap' pretty damn well--it's a story already told, one that has so many marks it has to hit that the capacity to surprise or engage on any level is constantly sublimated by the needs of utility. If you've read the Incal, you already know that John Difool has to 1) survive this story 2) still be an asshole after this story ends 3) and at some point have sex with a goddess disguised as a prostitute. (Of course, maybe you haven't read the Incal first, but come the fuck on: who reads the second volume of the not-illustrated-by-Moebius Incal prequel before they read the illustrated-by-Moebius Incal? CRAZY PEOPLE, that's who, let's never speak of them again.)

Peepo Choo #2
By Felipe Smith
Published by Vertical

There's this pretty good comic inside Peepo Choo about a perverted giant with real-deal facial hair who kills the shit out of things, masturbates a pail of semen into a condom when other people are killing the shit out of things, but that comic is lurking amongst a period-accurate depiction of boring, unimaginative adolescent sex-fantasy (oh god--she's wearing a towel! they're in the missionary position! stop before you blister my hands!), to say nothing of the parts about some cosplay kid who is upset to go to Japan and find out blah blah blah he wants to wear funny ears every day while singing, ho-hum making friends sure is a pickle we can all relate to.

Hellblazer # 271
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Simon Bisley, Stefano Landini & Trish Mulvihill
Published by DC Comics

You get a chance to see John Constantine's CD collection in this issue: it's problematic. Tom Waits makes sense, Metallica sort of does although John's a little old to hold onto that band, but the Verve's Urban Hymns and anything by System of a Down? No, sorry, that isn't John Constantine music. (To be accurate, System of a Down is nobody's music.) Be curious whose responsible for that intellectual travesty.

okay maybe travesty is too strong. The part where he jumps out of the window sure was great!

I Die At Midnight
By Kyle Baker
Published by holy shit Vertigo published this?

The last David Lapham comic anybody around here read featured a scene where a women cut a chunk out of her crotch regions to better hold a knife, a knife which she then used to fuck-stab her daughter-raping husband in the mouth. TEA PARTY

Here's the real zinger for you though: the people at Marvel MAX are so scared of what Kyle Baker might do on a Deadpool book by himself that they're sticking that guy--the crotch-slitting incest guy!--on writing details, despite the fact that it would most certainly be cheaper to just have Baker write the fucking thing himself. (And if the last six months have taught us anything, it's taught us that absolutely anyone can write a Deadpool book.) Now, I Die At Midnight isn't anybody's top-drawer Baker comic, despite having a great opening section, but still: this fucking guy! This fucking 64 pages of Dick Tracy in one week guy!

...

oh whatever you go be sad then. put that on your resume, that sadness.

Thunderbolts # 148
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Kev Walker Declan Shalvey, The Transporter & Fabio D'Auria
Published by Marvel Comics

You've got to hand it to Marvel, they certainly know when they aren't keeping up with the times. See, the popular thing to do right now is to make comics that people don't want to buy or at the very least to fuck up the ones that they do, and since Jeff Parker and Kev Walker were producing something that had started okay and moved right on over to pretty fucking great, it was decided to tie the title into what's called a "mini-event" comic (the word "mini" translates in this case to thirty separate comic books), and change the artist to someone whose style, while not horrible, shares almost nothing with Walker's. How extraordinarily well-planned to do this only four issues in! Oh, and if you're keeping track, the list of Marvel comic book characters who think the whole Shadowland story arc isn't a big deal worth paying attention has now grown from Iron Man, Thor and Captain America to include USAgent. Think about that for a second: a guy in a wheelchair with one fucking arm thinks Shadowland is a total non-starter. How is a reader supposed to care?

Incredible Hulk # 34-54
Written by Bruce Jones
Art by John Romita Jr, Lee Weeks, Stuart Immonen & Mike Deodato
Published by Marvel Comics in a bunch of different formats, the best of which is the one where you get to read this really horrifying essay by Bruce Jones where he explains how Marvel kept changing the artists out from underneath him.

This started off really great, although it seems nowadays to be popular to refer to it as the Hulk-without-a-Hulk book, which is kind of unfair, as both Romita Jr. and Lee Weeks draw some of their most balls out Hulk drawings ever. To say nothing of this, which is great:

But after that, Stuart Immonen got stuck drawing an overly drawn-out riff on Kafka-does-Chandler (with a Lynch soundtrack), and by the time Mike Deodato showed up to draw an Abomination/Hulk throwdown, the whole "terrifying secret organization" had deteriorated into throwing a bunch of easy-to-spot, easier-to-beat obstacles in the way of Bruce Banner, who won't stop talking about how they're trying to bait him with the life of a little boy he doesn't seem to be trying very hard to save. It's still the kind of bad that's sort of better than...

Incredible Hulks # 613
Written by Greg Pak & Scott Reed
Art by Tom Raney, Brian Ching, Victor Olazaba, Jorge Maese, Scott Hanna & John Rauch
Published by Marvel Comics

The Hulk cries disgusting green tears, might be worth finding out if that's canonical. (No it wouldn't.) Here's a shining beacon of what people complain about when they complain about using veiled Raymond Carver phrases to write sentences describing things; that this comic is split into two stories, one of which adds nothing to the story in the last issue (Hulk has a family picnic, mommy and daddy fight at the picnic), the other of which recaps a bunch of Son of Galactic Hulk comics that you didn't read on purpose, but now apparently are expected to care about or at least know of. Besides having too many spin-off comics, the Hulk books have something else in common with Shadowland: they're trying really hard to do something new with the character's usual plots, succeeding, and yet producing something that is about as enjoyable as a comic where Superman tries to pick out which suit he'd like to wear when he sneaks out to watch farming documentaries. Unusual, yes. Still dumb.

Brightest Day # 10
Written by GeoffJohnsPeterJTomasi
Art by Ivan reis scott clark joe prado oclair albert david beaty aspen mlts peter steigerwald john starr
Published by DC Comics

While previous issues have focused on mumbling declamations from talking light fixtures who wish people still understood cared about poetry, this issue is all about taking Firestorm to the Extreme, by giving him an arch-villain named "Deathstorm" who uses the word "boss" (just like my dad's dad did!) as an adjective and blatantly saying that Firestorm is "the most dangerous being in the universe" as if that statement is something that is going to convince people to say "oh, wait, maybe I don't find everything about Firestorm dated and boring and I will buy a comic about him even though I've skipped doing that at every opportunity since I was 12 years old", and then the comic closes it out by throwing old crusty Black Manta back on the scene, because Geoff Johns has yet to find a goofy DC character that he can't take seriously, because serious is the new Black and apparently Manta.

X-23 # 1
Written by Marjorie Liu
Art by Will Conrad & John Rauch
Published by Marvel Comics

There's nothing to this, a trivial remix of Wolverine standards (created to be a murderer, can she defeat her programming, let's go and sleep outdoors, also she's depressed sometimes), but there is a nice little piece of 2010 comic iconography in the back matter, where one of those terrible digital pictures is copied, reduced and pasted, resulting in an brilliant little expose on how easily destructible that kind of shit is, and hopefully foretelling a future where an accidental power outage will destroy all evidence art of its kind ever existed.

Shadowland Ghost Rider # 1
Written by Rob Williams
Art by take it all back, take it all back
Published by people who care about you

return of the king

 return of the KING

DCU Legacies # 5
Written by Len Wein
Art by George Perez, Walt Simonson, Scott Kolins, Mike Atiyeh, Scott Koblish & Allen Passalqua
Published by DC Comics

They should publish more of these, that way people won't have to go to the trouble of remembering stuff they've read before, or picking books off of the shelf: here's a Wikipedia entry for a Crisis, only with more draw-rings! This is part of the reason why digital comics are so exciting: no more leaving the house, no more clogging up the brain with all that pesky "what is it I like again, i keep forgetting because it isn't showing up automatically the way my food does", because now you can just get it injected directly into your bloodstream, the same way my brother and I injected Klonopin into my father's testicles every summer so that he'd have steady hands when he gave us those quality punches in the mouth he called "lovemakers". Sure, maybe you'll miss out on reading Simonson's Adam Strange back-up, which features a part where an alien with a gigantic vacuum cleaner breaks his vacuum cleaner after Adam Strange tricks him into sucking up an alien called Dust Devil. But at least you won't have left your house, and in your house, you can be a Viking.

Prison Pit Book 2
By Johnny Ryan
Published by Fantagraphics

Yeah, would've thought this would've had the top spot for the past week, but Gilbert handed out his own version of steeped in violence black comedy while his brother brought straight up comics perfection, that's already discussed here, Johnny Ryan, let's make it quick.

Prison Pit Book 2, if it has a flaw, it is that it's the second in a series that already cemented the surprise of Angry Youth Comics # 14, which was that Mr. Ryan was totally capable of doing something in comics that lasted longer than a couple of pages at a time. It's more of the same, down to the speed read the panels ignore and the unwillingness to allow for any limitation on Ryan's voracious palate of disgust. That isn't to ignore Book Two's occasional embrace of newness--for example, there seems to be a way off of the planet, and Book One didn't have any rape in it--but to acknowledge that the surprises in store are more of relief than shock: we already found out how good he could be at this, the only question was if he could maintain it.

He most certainly does. Prison Pit Book Two is as funny as Book One, and what it lacks in hysterical wordplay ("want me to send you an e-vite" remains the gold standard), it makes up for in its delirious commitment to excess, both in the grotesqueries on display as well as the suspense. This may not be the comic everybody else were waiting for, but around these parts, it most certainly was. Pin a rose on my dick, call me king of the geckos: I have found my homeland.

-Tucker Stone, 2010