This particular week was arguably the finest haul I’ve pulled in months, not because everything is so great, but because so many of them teetered back and forth on the precipice of greatness. I think that’s a realistic goal for comics; they’re not all going to be New Gods, or whatever it is you feel is the pinnacle of the art form. But to have a sizable pile of weekly titles be just a shade under brilliant, well, that’s a healthy development.

Having said that, both the second installment of Marvel Masterworks’ Silver Surfer series and Dark Horse’s first volume of King Conan reprints (originally Marvel) came out this week, and those two books are so far on the other side of brilliant that they’re exempted from this exercise and will most likely be dealt with in separate posts — that King Conan is the way and the light as far as Dark Horse’s current Conan series goes.

You know what else is brilliant? Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four #582. We’ve got future Franklin and future Val helping Nathaniel Richards (Reed calls him daddy) kill off the last of all the other time-jumping Nathaniel Richardses (SPOILER ALERT: College-age Victor von Doom totally kills a guy with a mace, and that is like catnip to this comic kitty) and some table-setting for the impending death of The Thing. Oh, it’s not definite that Ben Grimm is the one getting whacked, but I’ve begun mentally preparing for the worst. Ben has been portrayed as nothing more than borderline useless comic relief for the past six months, and I’ve formulated a whole list of reasons why he’s the minus one in Fantastic Three (bottom line: he’s the only non-blood relation in the FF family, and Jonathan Hickman wants to make me cry). There’s a subtle hint dropped that it may be Johnny, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it, because I’m a pessimist. If you’re not reading FF right now, I highly recommend you pick up this month’s issue so you’re hooked before the “big run” begins next month; that way you can say you were there when Jonathan Hickman killed a part of my childhood. OK, that sounded much more negative than I intended, but hey — pessimism. This is the best superhero book going right now, but it’s going to tear my guts out in three months, and I’m still excited by it.

Green Arrow #3 is surprisingly good this month. I like the whole “Ollie Queen is a radical liberal who wants to help common people” thing that’s been a hallmark of the character since the O’Neill/Adams run in the late 60s, but in the past decade that’s been nothing more than window dressing. He’s a billionaire! He’s a bad father! He’s a better father! He’s a leader of some sort of weird arrow team! He’s the mayor! Well, now he’s nothing but a Robin Hood dude in this mystical forest that erupted in Star City that’s really a bad metaphor for Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans, and after two bland issues, we’re seeing actual forward progress in the area of plot. I could do without the aforementioned metaphor, but if J.T. Krul and Diogenes Neves are really serious about Ollie teaming up with Sir Galahad (yes, really!), well, I’m officially intrigued to see where this is going. There’s still some exceptionally stock character and plot points going on (there’s a shadow version of Ollie that he fights in a hallucination — or is it? *mouth fart*), but I’ll allow it in the interest of curiosity.

Speaking of stock characters, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s Baltimore: The Plague Ships gives us a hard-bitten, burly guy who fights supernatural creatures of Germanic origin with his fists, some guns and moxie — let’s save the suspense and just say “We’ve seen it.” Artist Ben Stenbeck is no Mike Mignola (or Guy Davis, for that matter), and I firmly believe Mignola’s stories stand or fall on the basis of the art; if it ain’t Mignola doing the art, it’s gonna be uphill. However, I am not immune to the lure of a pulp story told well, and Mignola has a feel for pulp. There’s some excitement, some mystery and electrified vampires in a Zeppelin — I liked just writing that sentence, imagine how much I enjoyed seeing it depicted. For a first issue, pretty good.

Garth Ennis wraps up this cycle of Battlefields: Motherland with this week’s issue, and I was surprised by both the hopeful tenor of the ending and one particular page of dialogue. Russian fighter pilot Anna Kharkova is up against the Nazi invasion of her homeland, the machinations of the Secret Police and her own tentative emotional awakening for her commanding officer. Complex, right? Comic books are awesome in the right hands. But anyway — in one page, Colonel Golovyachev lays out the insanity of war, the unquenchable hope of desperation, humanity’s need to find love no matter how bad things look, the compelling power of patriotism and the price of sacrifice. “If we survive (the war), our hearts will break. But I believe we’ll win,” he tells Anna.

Alan Vega, the singer for the band Suicide once said, “We wanted to call the band ‘Life’ but nobody would come see us.” I think Garth Ennis had the same suspicion about this book, and so he named it Battlefields just to confuse the simple-minded, because this book is more about the value and glory of life than it is about the glory of war.

If Battlefields is the bright center of the comic universe this week, Tank Girl: Hairy Heroes is the planet that it’s farthest from. Crass, stuffed with firearms and senseless violence, not above cheap jokes and general depravity — yes indeed, writer Alan C. Martin and the impeccably-named Rufus Dayglo have not just revived Tank Girl, they’ve restored her to glory. Dayglo packs each page with sight-gags and in-jokes, Martin continues to spin absolutely ridiculous stories about hundreds of Tank Girl clones overrunning a tropical island, and TG and her mutant kangaroo pal Booga escaping a tight situation thanks to the tiny bazooka in Booga’s pants. This is pure, unadulterated anarchy writ large, and there’s never enough of that in comics, or in the world for that matter. Sure, I want deeply-textured character development and sweeping plots from my comics, but I also want to laugh. Maybe it’s just the tail end of a tough couple weeks in the real world, but nothing delighted me as much as Tank Girl. Easily the best thing I read this week, and the fact that the title of the story only makes sense when you see the art on the title page (stashed at the back of the book, of course), well, this is exactly the sort of perverse (*wink*) trick at which Martin and Dayglo excel.

I think I’m in love.

-Paul

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