Comics for June 30, 2010

[dvandom]

                   Dave's Unspoilt Capsules and Awards
         The Week's Picks and Pans, plus Awards of Dubious Merit

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups.  Recommendation does
not factor in price.  Not all books will have arrived in your area this week.
An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 
     Time to make another order at antarctic-press.com's store.

     Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Atomic Robo v4
#4 (of 4).

"Other Media" Capsules:

     Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.

     Nothing this week.


Time-Shifting:
     Sometimes I get a comic a week or two late because of Diamond's
combination of neglect and incompetence.  If it's more than a week late,
though, I won't review it unless it's very notable.  Additionally, I will
often get tradepaperbacks long after publication or even sometimes before
Diamond ships them, and those will go here.  If I'm reasonably sure I'm
reviewing something that didn't ship this week, this is the section for it.

     Before going into the review of Spider-Man, I should explain a
phenomenon that's been giving me problems lately.  As sometimes happens,
Marvel is doing alternate covers for a lot of books, a common enough
occurrence I don't even bother commenting on it in reviews.  But Diamond has
also started shipping these alternate covers more than once, splitting my
store's order into two shipments a week or two apart.  This has led to me
buying some books twice ("Well, Iron Man Legacy is on his pull, and I don't
recall seeing this cover before, so in the pull it goes."  "Huh, I didn't
have Iron Man Legacy on my list this week, but Diamond often ships things on
weeks it doesn't say it will.").  So when I got home with Spider-Man #635
last Wednesday I took a closer look at the cover, saw "GRIM HUNT PART 2" and
thought, "Oh, crap, I bought an alternate cover AGAIN, after joking about it
with the store employee."  And I set it aside to exchange.  Only later did I
realize that the "two issues in one week" bit from two weeks ago wasn't the
first two parts of Grim Hunt, I looked inside, and saw it was a new issue
after all.  Gah.  So, in a direct way, it's my own fault that this is
timeshifted.  But indirectly, it's merely a consequence of Diamond's
incompetence and my expectations of same.

     The Amazing Spider-Man #635: Marvel - The best lies contain mostly
truth.  The same can be said about the best prophecies, and for the same
reasons.  In a world where magic and prophecy are demonstrably real, then,
what better way to hide a lie than within them?  And that's one of the main
themes of this issue, part two of the Grim Hunt, capstone of the long
Gauntlet storyline.  It's not the only theme, though.  The signature theme of
Spider-Man, "with great power comes great responsibility," is hammered home
pretty hard as well, thanks to Kaine providing both example and counter-
example.  All in all, while he's theoretically the focus of the story,
Spider-Man isn't really who the story is about.  The story is AROUND him.
About everyone whose lives touch upon his and how they deal with him.  Love
him, hate him, hunt him, flee him, whatever.  Okay, I now verge on excessive
pretention, but so does Joe Kelly in several places.  On the plus side, the
pretention is well-leavened with snarky (albeit mostly dark) humor.  The art
doesn't particularly work for me, unfortunately...it has the right tone, but
stumbles on the actual details.  DeMatteis's Kaine backup is like a thematic
and artistic distillation of the strengths and flaws of the main story.  More
pretentious, uglier (but still tone-accurate) art.  Recommended.  $3.99


New Comics:
     Comics and comic collections that I got this week and were actually
supposed to be out this week, as far as I can tell.  These reviews will
generally be spoiler-free, but the occasional bit will slip in.

     Justice Society of America #40: DC - Okay, down to the wire,
Willingham.  Impress me or go off the list.  And...whoops, this is a "you
have one issue to wrap it all up and leave" story told mostly in narrated
flashback, with just a few key scenes here and there.  And some snarky
comments that this old Legion of Net.Heroes hand can tell are thinly veiled
slams at comic writers as a whole.  Next issue is a Brightest Day crossover,
but I won't be getting it.  Bye bye, JSA.  $2.99

     Wonder Woman #600: DC - Well, it's a slow week, and there's Internet
Dramaz surrounding this issue (and the JMS interview about it), so I figured
I'd give it a shot.  It's pretty much a jam piece, though.  In addition to a
load of pinups, there's several short stories by various creators who have
worked on Wonder Woman and a bare teaser of the New Direction.  In fact, the
interview on the last two pages tells more about the new storyline than the
actual story does.  And it's a "someone's changed the past so now the book is
off in its own splinter reality for a while and no one gets to use Wonder
Woman in other books" deal.  Yawn.  The Amanda Connor piece was pretty good,
but there's really not enough in this to be worth five bucks and I'm
certainly not interested in continuing with the New Direction.  $4.99

     Gold Digger v3 #119: Antarctic Press - Well, Diamond can ship AP books
sometimes, at least.  And it looks like missing #118 isn't a problem at the
moment, as this is the start of a new story focusing on some non-core
characters (a core character is on the cover, but not even mentioned in the
issue, guess the pacing got away from Perry again).  Even with all the
exposition in this issue, I felt a little lost jumping back into the lives of
characters who were backgrounded well before the post-#100 timejump,
especially since most of their character development took place in, what, one
issue back then?  It's an amusing read, but felt a little too "you had to be
there".  Mildly recommended.  $2.99

     Invincible #73: Image - Well, Diamond can ship Image books sometimes, at
least.  Looks like I missed the big fight...this issue is a combination of
the Nolans slowly recovering from the big fight, and snapshots of what's
going on without them in the war, particularly Allen the Alien and
TechJacket.  Unlike the "wrap it up" narration story in JSA, though, this one
is more organic, better paced, and better at natural-feeling character
development.  And I was able to follow it easily despite having missed #72.
The TechJacket backup, unfortunately, was missing a pretty important chunk
and was kinda opaque.  Recommended.  $2.99

     Atomic Robo v4 #4: Red5 Comics - A very Mignola/Hellboy cover, I must
say.  In the end, the whole Vampire Dimension was just issue 1, and not a
thematic connection for the series.  Now, what we really got was "A Week In
The Life".  All four issues took place over the course of one week in 1999,
just another normal weird week for Tesladyne.  There's much less fighting and
exploding here, which might seem odd from a "final issue" standpoint, but it
actually follows a pretty clear arc: #1 was mostly a running fight, #2 had a
goodly amount of fighting, #3 was largely banter with a little fighting, and
this one is a mystery with only a little bit of wanton violence in the name
of science.  At the same time, the emotional investment has gone up with each
issue.  The vampires were just this thing.  The sentai were led by a friend.
Dr. Dinosaur seriously got on Robo's nerves.  And this issue hits right at
the core of Robo's past and his family...as the violence subsides, the caring
(for good or ill) goes up.  Interesting parallel, I wonder if Clevenger and
Wegener planned it that way, or it just sort of happened.  :)  Oh, and
there's some subtle but clear Ghostbusters references beyond, you know, the
ghost.  Maybe not the strongest Robo issue, but still the best comic I've
read all month.  Strongly recommended.  $3.50


Gone Missing:

     Stuff that came out some places this week and that I wanted to buy, but
couldn't find for whatever reason, so people don't have to email me asking
"Why didn't you review X?"  (If it's neither here nor in the section above,
though, feel free to ask, I might have forgotten about it!) 

     Current list as of 6/30/10: Gold Digger Peebri's Big Adventure #2,
Invincible #72, Prince of Power #2, Marvel Adventures Super Heroes #3, Gold
Digger v3 #118, Legion of Super-Heroes #2.  Grabbing the AP books plus the
complete Time Raft DVD online now.

Awards:

"Lies, Damned Lies, and Prophecy" Award to The Amazing Spider-Man #635

"Of COURSE He Likes The Twins" Award to Justice Society of America #40

"So, How Much Does Power Girl Really Know About Hentacles?" Award to Wonder
     Woman #600

"Thundercat Ho?" Award to Gold Digger v3 #119

"Ah, He's A Little Touchy On The Subject Of Being Able To Grow A Beard,
     Tech" Award to Invincible #73

"Ninety Nine Percent Expiration" Award to Atomic Robo v4 #4 (of 4)

   Dave Van Domelen, "Reminds me of my parents at Passover. Uh, but also with a robot and a ghost." - Dr. Schaefer, Atomic Robo v4 #4 (of 4)

Comments

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Internet Dramaz

DramaballZ, where the drama is over 9,000!

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the JSA, but I really don't understand what the point was for the storyline. The JSA proper's been basically invisible in the alternate reality for the past two issues, save for Mr. Terrific...who's just serving as a narrator. As previously pointed out, the whole "take away superpowers" doesn't equate to Nazis being able to take over the US anyway. Spotlighted characters in the "break out" scene are Superman, Wonder Woman, and most of the Bat-Family rather than the JSA. So why tell a multi-part story in JSA that really has little, if anything, to do with the, y'know, JSA or its members.

Unless this is a continuation of what appears to be DiDio's fetish for taking the lead/title characters out of their own books.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

All I can say is, "Wonder Woman writers, remember Chun Li and the disaster that was the white pantsuit."