Every Tuesday I work a long hard, ten-hours-minimum day at
the sharp end of comic-book retailing, then I kick back and read a few of the
week’s new titles, and by the time I do that I’m tired and fractious enough to
be both honest about what I’m reading and to not give a toss who that honesty
offends.
It won’t be deliberately nasty and it won’t be fawningly
polite, but it will be unfiltered opinion, and you know what they say about
opinions, don’t you?
There should be pictures but the scanner's taking forever and we value topicality over visuals so there.
Batman 29
Oh, that’s enough. It’s just… enough. Enough of this continual dragged-out Zero Year
bollocks, enough of Snyder’s ‘tell, don’t show’ exposition, enough of Capullo’s
underbaked facework where everybody under a certain age looks like a newspaper
cartoonist’s version of David Cameron or an over-filled sausage if there’s any
difference between those two, and everybody over a certain age looks like a caricature of Stan Laurel.
Enough of the sloppy proofing that allows
phrases like ‘inulin pump’ to appear (yes, I’ve checked. Inulin is a dietary
fibre. If you need a pump for that you’re beyond Batman’s help). It’s a fucking
insult to your readers, especially the diabetic ones. They’ve got enough
difficulty dodging comas while they plough through this shite, they don’t need
you not giving a toss about the name of their medicine.
And especially enough
of slapping a heavier cover on this tosh and charging five dollars for it.
That’s four and a half quid at my local, probably somewhere close to that at
yours. That’s just taking the piss. I’ll stick with Detective because I like
the work the new team did on Flash, but the main Batbook’s off my list from now
on. Which leaves just ‘Tec out of the whole DC line for me. Can’t say I’ll miss
‘em.
Hawkeye 17
Weird. Very weird. I mean, I applaud the idea and the
execution and by golly it’d be great if every title took a chance like this
every so often, but while Hawkeye’s a great book (not just a great book for a ‘superhero’ title from
Marvel, but a great book full stop), it’s not the biggest seller, and I wonder
if something as experimental as this issue may not end up causing a little bit
of alienation from the readership. Also I can see Fraction eventually leaving
this book like he did F4 and FF, and some less-able berk coming on and trying
to do issues like this and royally fucking it up. Anyway: well done Fraction,
well done Eliopoulos, well done Bellaire, well done Aja even if you only drew
two pages. Next issue: Kate. I like Kate.
All-New X-Men 24
I was really surprised by this book when I picked up the
first issue: I’d not looked at an X-book for years and actively disliked
Bendis’ smartarse, not-a-lot-happens-but-everybody’s-so-snarky writing style
(See! Anybody can do it!). But the two went together really well, and here we
are 24 issues later, still together. Having said that, this issue’s part of a
cross-over and cross-overs are what made me ditch the X-books in the first
place because too many issues of an over-long and badly-written story (ARE YOU
LISTENING, BATMAN?) and too many characters is just more than I want to
concentrate on. Also, I don’t care for the other book involved in this
cross-over. Don’t ask me why. I just don’t. Also, although Immomen & von
Grawbadger make some delightfully pretty pictures, the colouring mutes the line
art’s definition a little too often in this issue, losing figures in a
one-colour background or foreground. There’s a spread showing a whole load of
Marvel’s alien races, but as they’re pretty much all in purple it’s hard to see
who’s who. Same with the Shi’ar and, shamefully, the Starjammers. These are
colourful, swash-buckling space adventurers, people! Let’s see ‘em pop off that page!
Superior Spider-Man 29
Coming to the end of the Otto Era (or… Are we?) which will
be a shame. I like very much the idea of a superhero doing seriously fucked-up
things in the pursuit of doing a better job, and I like even more that said
super-hero is a complete arsehole, and that said arsehole is genuinely trying
to a good person but just can’t help being an arsehole, and that his fellow super-heroes
notice something’s off but most of them have always thought he was an arsehole anyway so they just let him get on with it. I also like very much that
some of the people reading this will have had some form of mental infarction
half-way through that sentence. Nice spread in this issue showing Otto’s
reasons for hating Parker-Spidey, also a Ben moment, some foreshadowing of a
pending Gwen moment, and some pretty heavy hints as to who’s going to be behind
Parker’s face once this thing goes Amazing again.
Avengers Undercover 1
I was one of the, I dunno, thirteen or so people who read
and loved Avengers Arena. I loved it so much that I recommended it to anybody
who’d listen (like I do with Hawkeye. I’m good like that). Some of these poor
sods actually listened. One of the reasons I loved AA was that yes it was Lord
Of The Flies and it was Battle Royale and it was Hunger Games, but also it was
about kids being completely out of their depth and doing things they didn’t
think they ever could, both good and very very bad. More than that, it was
about characters I didn’t know – I hadn’t touched a Marvel book in years – and
those characters, although for the most part established in other titles, were
relatively minor, which meant they could actually be killed (fiction-killed,
obviously, with the attendant opportunity to get better). Which in turn meant
there was actually some genuine character
progression in the book, and quite a bit of dramatic tension. I mean, no matter how many times you see some mindless hype about
The Death Of The Fantastic Four, you know it ain’t going to happen and in the
end it’ll come down to a change of costume. If big red skull-face guy Mettle
gets torn to pieces or Red Raven breaks her neck, though, they’re gone. When you've just got to know and like these kids, that's a blow, that is.
AU builds on the denouement of AA and hints that it’s going
to be a kind of Thunderbolts –(first run)-in-reverse, but I think – I hope –
it’s going to be more than that. Smaller cast this time because most of the
original lot died in AA (which is a great phrase, it’s like there’s a sniper
going round picking off alcoholics).
A bit naughty: two pages for the credits? I know it’s a way
of keeping the price down to $2.99 (ARE. YOU. LISTENING, BATMAN?) and it’ll look nice in the trade,
but…nah.
NEXT WEEK, SAME TIME: More of these twitchy, ill-tempered
castigations of some poor bunch of bastards’ hard work!
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