Reviews

Spider-Man: With Great Power… #5 (of 5) — Writer/Penciler: David Lapham;  Inker: Stefano Gaudiano And so ends another retelling of Spidey’s early, pre-Uncle-Ben’s-death career, this one shoehorning in encounters with a pre-superhero Marvel monster, crooked wrestling promoters, and a drunken older woman. Forgettable and dismissable: Lapham, who’s so good with his own noir creations, just doesn’t seem to have the chops for straight corporate character work like this (as he showed with that endless, incomprehensible Batman serial he did a few years ago); he has to rein in his usual effective nastiness, and when his art has to cover spandex … Continue reading →

Ambush Bug: Year None #1 — Writer: Robert Loren Fleming;  Art: Keith Giffen So sue me: I’ve always liked this series, and Giffen and Fleming pick it up like they’ve never left it, with the Bug trying to find Jonni DC’s murderer and encountering, among others, ‘Mazing Man, Space Cabby, Yankee Poodle, Ace the Bathound, and Sugar (of “…and Spike”). If you know who most of those characters are, and know why go-go checks are funny, and would understand a joke about why all major appliances sold in the DC Universe come with dead bodies in them, then this is … Continue reading →

Gravel #3 — Writers: Warren Ellis and Mike Wolfer; Art: Oscar Jimenez Black Summer #7 (of 7) — Writer: Warren Ellis; Art: Juan Jose Ryp There was a point where I’d buy anything with Ellis’s name on it, but, let’s face it, he produces a ton of work, and some of it is minor. Gravel, for example, uses the occult-detective theme from his earliest output (stuff like City of Silence and Druid), and doesn’t do much with it, other than offering some interesting bits on the history and dialect of Yorkshire. Black Summer started out stronger, with its exploration of … Continue reading →

Omega The Unknown #10 (of 10) — Writer: Jonathan Lethem;  Art: Farel Dalrymple Don’t pick up this final installment of the series as your first issue; all but two panels are wordless, and it’s all aftermath, the explosion that ended last issue having fried the brain (and the hearing?) of the title character, but left him alive. You won’t understand why the little omega symbols in the salt show that the good guys have won, or be able to figure out what happens to each of the protagonists, or know whether to find the hobo Hollywood Squares at the end … Continue reading →

Final Crisis: Rogue’s Revenge #1 (of 3) — Writer: Geoff Johns;  Artist: Scott Kolins This isn’t bad, but it’s basically an issue of the old Johns-Kolins Flash series, with the old-school Rogues against the newer, more bloodthirsty ones, and no actual Flashes in sight.  Johns’s intimate, by-now-instinctive knowledge of the characters, and Kolins’s detailed art, make it readable, but it feels more like an echo of past good stories than a self-contained new one, and the connection to Final Crisis is tenuous;  you get the feeling you could skip all of this, and the bigger mini-series would roll right along, … Continue reading →