Wednesday Comics #1 (of 12) — and you’re crazy if you think I’m listing the credits for 15 features….
This, kids, is what newspaper Sunday comics sections used to look like in their golden era, from the early 1900s through to sometime in the ’50s: one strip per page, full color, a variety of styles, and at least a couple of strips per issue that were absolute triumphs of design and storytelling. Not so today, of course — the Arizona Republic now fits five or six Sunday strips per page, and you need a magnifying glass — so Wednesday Comics is a welcome return to a neglected art form. Telling a story in one big page a week isn’t easy, though; part of the fun here is watching the various creators solve the narrative problems in different ways. Some don’t quite get it (the Teen Titans and Deadman strips fall into the Too Much Infodump trap), while others fall back on classic solutions (the Kamandi is done in Prince Valiant format, while Paul Pope’s Adam Strange echos both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers), and still others just go for rock-solid modern design (the Gaiman/Allred Metamorpho, or the Kuberts’ Sgt. Rock, or Kyle Baker’s Hawkman). The most innovative (although not necessarily the most successful) is Caldwell’s Wonder Woman: the page is broken up into 16 panels in a 4×4 grid, and then each “panel” is actually a complete page, yielding a 16-page story — it’s too tiny to read easily or instinctively, but once you get the pattern it’s an interesting experiment, and the art looks like no one else’s.
DC’s offering 12 weeks of this, @3.99, with 15 strips per issue, and I can’t imagine any comics fan who wouldn’t find at least a couple of memorable moments in it. Get ’em while they’re still available.
Green Lantern #43 — Writer: Geoff Johns; Pencils: Doug Mahnke; Inks: Christian Alamy
“Darkest Night” kicks off here, and it’s everything you’d want to in a big summer event. Creepy and not for kids (because of one full-page splash, especially — and I’m wondering if they intentionally placed it opposite the page with the ad for Wednesday Comics that says, in big letters, “Mind-Blowing”; if that wasn’t intentional, it’s one hell of an accidental juxtaposition), but then it’s essentially a zombie tale, with Mahnke’s art a perfect, moody match for the material. Buckle up; this is shaping up to be a dark-carnival roller-coaster ride, and very hard to resist.
No Hero #6 (of 7) — Writer: Warren Ellis; Art: Juan Jose Ryp
Ellis turns the Nihilism Dial up to 11, as even the one good guy does some very bad things, and Ryp is there to render each fragment of tooth and splatter of gore in loving detail. The revelations about just how deep the main character’s mentors’ cynicism and manipulation run are probably too quick and too pat, and this is not a comic to read if you’ve just been laid off and need cheering up, but on its own terms it’s a bleakly funny look at the collision between the idealism and fascism that are the twin bases of most superhero stories.
Batman #688 — Writer: Judd Winnick; Pencils: Mark Bagley; Inks: Rob Hunter
Winnick does a good job here — he stays away from his usual group of narrative tics, and that lets his natural grasp of character come through more cleanly — but this book’s problem is that it’s in direct competition with the “other” New Batman book, by Morrison and Quitely, and anything else is going to look second-rate next to that team. It still makes the cut, though, on the strength of Bagley’s art — like Sal Buscema in the ’70s, he’s become the classic house style for superhero books, deceptively simple but with the ability to suggest a whole, solid fantasy world in just a few lines. It’s no accident top writers like Busiek and Bendis line up to work with him, because he’s a collaborator’s dream: practically any characters or plot look better when he draws them.
B.P.R.D.: 1947 #1 (of 5) — Writers: Mike Mignola and Joshua Dysart; Art: Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon
Another book that makes the cut based on its art: Ba and Moon give the story’s mid-century European settings and characters (claustrophobic streets, cats and bats, satanic little girls, mysterious late-night librarians and not-so-ruined ruined chateaus) their own style, with just enough Mignola flavoring to fit in(not that hard, considering that Umbrella Academy often shows his influence; it looks like a more brightly-colored Hellboy, with science-fiction trappings instead of mythic/horror ones).
Star Trek: Crew #5 — Writer/Artist: John Byrne
Worth buying even if you aren’t that much of a Trek fan: Byrnes’s self-contained stories are classic adolescent sf, with plucky heroines, far-future settings, splashy ideas and puzzles to solve if the protagonist is level-headed and courageous enough; add that to the pleasures of his clean, clear composition and design, and this is a comic that’s easy to like.
Stuff I read and liked enough to buy, but don’t have much to say about, so read previous reviews in the archives if you’re interested:
X-Men: Legacy #226 — Writer: Mike Carey; Pencils: Dustin Weaver; Inks: Ed Tadeo
Phil Mateer
