Tonight, though, Wife and son watched Glee and some other garbage I don’t watch, so I was able to repair to my man-cave (actually more of a man-corner-of-the-basement) and get some reading done.  Playlist of some stuff I listened to is available at 8tracks, if you’re interested.
Doc Savage #1
Creators: Paul Malmont and Howard Porter (backup by Jason Starr and Scott Hampton)
First Wave, I guess, is supposed to be set in a super-power-free reality.  Doc Savage is apparently a 30s-style adventurer, but apparently set in a 21st century that has zeppelins and cellphones and fedoras and digital thermostats. Not a lot is explained in terms of background, which I often enjoy.  The setting and back story are either really well thought out or completely haphazard.  Can’t tell from the first installment, but worth reading more of.  The B-story is set in the same reality and is slightly more interesting initially than the Doc.

Batman #698
Creators: Tony Daniel and Guillem March
Tony Daniel continues as writer, but hands off art to Guillem March, late of Gotham City Sirens.  March brings with him Edward Nigma, one of the more interesting and complicated figures in the current Bat-mythos thanks to Paul Dini’s work.  Daniel has the flagship title, but is still probably the third best writer on the Bat-books.  He seems to enjoy straightforward whodunnits that feel a bit like Scooby Doo episodes.  I was hoping that not having to work on art and story both might change some of his tendencies, but the last 4 or 5 pages of this thing are pretty muddled. Maybe Daniel needs to learn to communicate with the artist better when the artist isn’t named Tony Daniel.  The “Zur En Arrh” graffitti and visual quote from Dark Knight Returns in the last couple pages keep it kind of intersting, but it’s still a bit difficult to tell what’s going on.  If we’re to understand from disjointed thought boxes and badly laid out art, Nigma may or may not lie dead at the end, and I may or may not be interested in finishing this story.

Brightest Day #0
Creators: Geoff Johns, Peter J. Tomasi, and Fernando Pasarin
Things I can tell from reading Brightest Day #0
- somebody likes redheads
- wings get in the way of lovemaking
- somebody thought that whole DC Universe #0 thing was good for another go
- also, the whole “silent witness” thing from Kindom Come?  Pure gold. Hit it again.
Still, though, this is a nice setup for what will start out as a really interesting storyline.  I say “start out as” because Blackest Night started out that way, but collapsed under its own weight in the third act.  But here’s hoping.

Flash #1
Creators: Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul
I’m not big on the Flash.  I am a big fan of Geoff Johns, however, and I have a lot of confidence in his ability to tell a good story and build a good set of characters.  This first issue is just a lot of moments.  Flash taking time to talk to a little kid, the relationship he has with Iris, and the great street-level take on the rogues are all dead on and could make for a very good book.
Johns took Green Lantern’s convoluted backstory, cut out the chaff, defined the basics of the characters, and built a franchise that is currently one of the best in comics. I’m sincerely hoping that he can do that with Flash, a property that’s suffered and meandered for a number of years.

Daredevil #506
Creators: Andy Diggle, Antony Johnston, and Marco Checchetto
It’s been a DC-heavy week, but I’m a DC-heavy kinda guy. What better way to balance it out than with some Marvel written by a guy who got famous at DC?
There’s not much to say about this storyline except that it’s pretty awesome. Daredevil, martial arts, politics, and enough ninjas that you have to check the cover to make sure that Mark Millar didn’t write it.
The book is starting to move a bit too slowly for my taste.  The reveal at the end of this one should help that issue, however.

The evening’s music.
I was thinking of the excellent Vertigo title Daytripper (which I’ll hopefully write up later) and decided to listen to the Beatles song.  I did, and then left it running.  The library was sorted by name, but it wound up making for a kind of cool playlist. Unfortunately, I can’t embed an 8tracks player on wordpress.com, so I’ll just have to link to 8tracks.com

In a normal book, either the 22 pages of story are worth your money or they’re not.  You don’t go through and say “wow, pages 3, 7, 8, 17, and 21 were really awesome, but I totally got ripped off on pages 1, 5, 12, and 13.” In anthologies, though, each story contributes to whether it’s worth your time and money or not.

Wednesday Comics takes that to the extreme, because it essentially gives you one page each of 15 strips.  I say strips because they really do look like they belong in the Sunday paper rather than in a comic book.

I give credit where credit is due for a cool presentation and a cool idea.  They’re trying to break out of the box and present something people aren’t used to.  I get it.

And individually, there are some stories that I’m really stoked about reading. Azarello & Risso’s Batman, Kyle Baker’s Hawkman, Paul Pope’s Adam Strange, and a couple others look interesting if cheesy.  But is that enough interest to justify 16 bucks a month? I’m not sure.

Is it a new retro-cool artform, or a cheesy and temporary gimmick? Not sure about that one, either.  But I guess I’ll keep watching, because it’s definitely something different.

Creators: Ed Brubaker, Bryan Hitch, and Butch Guice

I’m conflicted about blatant retcons like bringing back Cap.  Retcon is silly, generally speaking. It’s non-sensical and usually messy, but it’s also an essential component of stories based on company-owned trademarks nearly as old as the Glen Miller Orchestra.  We all knew that Steve Rogers was coming back. The only question was how it would be accomplished.

To answer that, we have a story by Brubaker (who has done an excellent job on the Cap title for quite a while now) telling a story that has all the elements such a story must contain.  We have a re… um… re-Cap of the Steve Rogers’ life, a glimpse of Bucky as the new Cap, and an explanation of how when we saw Steve die, we didn’t really see him die.  We get a mildly bizarre look at Steve lost in time.  (And pretty soon Q will come along and explain it all to Picard.  No wait.  Sorry.  But srsly, Brubaker must have paid particular attention to the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

So basically if you get past the fact that the Cap mythos has been on fairly thin ice since about 1970, and if you don’t mind magical Doom tech being thrown around, you get a nice bring-back-Steve story that’s up with the current Dark Reigning times and looks to be pretty entertaining.

I think we can all agree that it’s a little silly, but sometimes you have to just enjoy the ride.

I don’t really get why everyone seems to hate Simone Bianchi, but the haters can rest easy now that his time on this book is done.

Ellis went with some rather weird pacing on this arc, which forced him to pack quite a bit into this last issue.  Bat-shit-insane Forge, “New Mutants,” a brief (maybe) explanation of where the ghost boxes are going, etc. each could have taken up much more page time.  Instead, they all got shoe-horned into this book, with the result that we don’t really get as much info as we’d like.

Still a pretty cool ending to a pretty crazy story.  Also, If you’d asked me to make a sworn statement, I’d have said the word “zettawatt” was made up.  It isn’t.

Gotham City Sirens #1
Detective #854
Streets Of Gotham #1

Things there are more of in the new Bat-universe:

Girls. True, there were always more than average, and the bat-femmes were always more ass-kicking than other lines (Casandra Cane is not Lois Lane, let’s face it). We see right off the… er… bat that Batwoman is driven. It’s nice that she isn’t an exact female version of the Bruce / Dick I-watched-my-parents-die cookie cutter.  Her tragedy is different, and her method of dealing with it is different.  And yet, just like Batman, she goes to great lengths to justify herself rather than dealing with the most basic of emotions.

Then there’s Catwoman, who’s never better than when Dini is handling her. She’s openly conflicted on which side of the fence she’s on, and it doesn’t look to get any clearer considering the company she’s keeping.

In addition, we get glimpses of other great female characters, like an unhinged Manhunter and a slightly oddball take on Renee Montoya as a private eye.

Great writers. Dini helms both Sirens and Streets, and Rucka is on Tec.  Both of these guys, just like Morrison and Winnick on the flagship titles, know their way around a comics series.  They each get to concentrate on characters they’ve been developing in other series for several years.  They know their characters, they know their settings, and it appears they have a great plan.

Artists. I’ll stop talking about Dustin Nguyen.  He’s one of my favorite artists, and one of my favorite Bat-artists, and he’s drawing Dini. Nuff said. JH Williams does some serious work, and makes even the most ridiculous things look classy.

Darkness. I hope everything’s okay with Dini, because his two books have both started out dark, dark, DARK.  Child hookers, burning bodies, mysoginistic bonecrushing.  We get pretty quickly how much Gotham has gone to hell since Bruce Wayne’s death.

I’m pretty happy with the starts of the two main Bat-titles.  I’m thrilled that there look to be great supporting books as well.

I don’t mean to be arrogant, but I don’t consider myself a dummy.  I think I have a pretty large capacity to understand what’s going on in a story, no matter how little backstory I have on it.

That said, the last three pages of Messiah War were completely incomprehensible to me.  I have no idea what they were doing, I have no idea why they were in the location they were, and I don’t know what it was that did or didn’t happen at the end.

I generally hate the reviews that say, “this sucks because I didn’t understand it.”  But what else can I say?  I can’t tell you if liked it or not, because I don’t even know what happened.

It seems likely we’re going to find out more if we keep reading X-Force, but then I question why the word “conclusion” was used here.  The only sense in which it’s a conclusion is that this must be the last book with the Messiah War branding on it.

So in the end, after 7 issues and 150 pages, here’s what we have: Cable is apparently still not coming back to the present, and Hope is apparently still with him.  I thought bringin them back to the present continuity was the whole point of the story. They could at least have attempted to bring some closure to this. Or did they, and I just didn’t understand it?

Batman & Robin #1
pretty much the week’s awesomest thing

X-Force #15
threat threat threat death threat cliffhanger

Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink #1
prepared to hate, but pleasantly surprised.

JSA #27
With Johns’ magic gone, I’m done.

Secret Six #10
unusually dark, even for this book

What I got was a bit less satisfying.  I’ll grant you that this alt-future that Millar has created is driving about 70% of my interest in this arc.  Regular readers may recall my theory that there are no more ideas left in the present-day 616 Marvel Universe, so well-planned alternate timelines appeal to me.

This, obviously, is why we hadn’t been told who the “President” was, and it resolves a good chunk of the ambiguity surrounding the fates of the big guns.

The imagery is fantastically vivid and creepy, as it has been throughout.  And you can’t tell me that the Logan / Skull battle isn’t spectacular.  It’s sort of a “What If” nerdgasm with a typically over the top Millar conclusion.

Then there’s the third act. Let’s make no mistake: the end of this book is a heartbreaker. We have a sense that things are not going to end as well as Logan thinks, but it’s still as gut-wrenching as it is inevitable.

There’s an uncharacteristic amount of thinkage in this book for a Millar work.  Is Logan a hero for going back to his old ways, or is he a hero?  If he is a hero, why did he wait until his loved ones were dead?  Is it okay to conquer your demons when those you depend on you might be better served by embracing them?

We probably won’t get any clear answers on these questions when we get to the REAL end–not the one I thought I was going to see here–in some sort of special one-shot.  I find that mildly annoying, but I’m still hoping for a good wrapup to a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Unlike the other FC aftermath dreck we’ve seen so far, this book has plenty of interesting features to recommend it.  There’s the rebelliousness of youth, of course.  Everyone likes that.  But complicating that, we see quickly that Superbat is not the kind of guy who wants to just bask in empty glory, even though that’s obviously what he’s expected to do.  The team would all like to chafe against authority, but at present they’re just too busy being young and looking good.  The side dishes are also pretty spectacular: we have unrequited love, a monster, big parties, a glimpse of the incredible pace at which Japanese pop culture seems to move, and a heavy layer of self-aware sarcasm. Top it off with a scolding from an aging old school hero and a sprinkling of evil-corporation scheming, and you’ve got a great little brew.

One thing I do wonder: +1 for the ongoing twitter stream in this book, but -2 to Casey, or his editors, or whoever, for not realizing that Superbat is @ing himself, highly odd behavior on twitter.