The hour is late and my companion bottle is dangerously low — let’s dispense with preamble and get right to the comics.
Alpha Flight number 5 makes me question what I’m doing buying this book. This seems to be the norm, however; every other issue reads sorta “meh,” and then the next issue picks up the pace or at least makes more sense to me. Admittedly, some of my confusion arises from the fact that I haven’t been reading any of the Fear Itself books except this one and Herc, so I’m probably missing key developments. In this issue, Puck calls in a favor from his old pal, the Taskmaster, to get him to help train all the Canadian intellectuals Alpha Flight busted out of the re-education camps last month. Train them to do what, you ask? Oh, just to be a powered-armor wearing army that will overthrown the current fascist government of Canada, that’s all. There’s a lot of far-fetched stuff in this one, but you know that, you read the previous sentence. I think I could tolerate the outré turns (Canadian fascists, as if) if there was more forward movement in the characters. For example, we’re almost 20 years past when Northstar came out as gay, and yet all he’s been allowed to do so far is be the arrogant, prickly gay guy. His sister, Aurora, is still battling her various split-personalities, just like it’s 1992 again. Is there nothing else we can do with these characters? Marina’s gone all Hot Topic, Sasquatch is losing his mind, Snowbird’s finally stable emotionally and mentally and Guardian has temporarily lost his wife to extreme craziness — everybody except the twins has moved into new territory. Ah, well. If the pattern holds, I’m really going to like next month’s book.
Demon Knights 2 is a book I didn’t really like last month, despite being a fan of the Demon and also harboring a fondness for the whole swords and sorcery deal. Paul Cornell and Diogenes Neves have our Demon Knights fighting some dinosaurs in a small village while Morgan Le Fey and Mordred try to conquer the world, an effort that the Demon seems committed to obstructing. I admit, issue 2 is a marked improvement. We get the names of all the characters, the Demon gets in a rhyme and Vandal Savage kills and eats a dinosaur (!). There are a couple plot holes here and there, but there’s plenty of action and a stronger sense of who these characters are and why I should care about them. While not great, this is a solid B comic book. I don’t know that DC had to hit the reset button just to create more B comics, but after the thud of last month’s issues, I’ll take the improvements wherever I find ‘em.
Kull: The Cat and the Skull 1 starts a new miniseries for my favorite Robert E. Howard character, with David Lapham and Gabriel Guzman’s adaptation of REH’s short story, “Delcardes’ Cat.” Lapham’s made some structural changes to the story for the sake of bringing more action to it — it’s a weird one, about a cat who talks and tells the future and then bewitches Kull with its prophesying — which I’m all right with in theory. Kull stories are often heavy on atmosphere and low on action, so bumping up the fight quotient is a good idea for a miniseries. And Guzman does a fine job bringing the atmosphere; I really like his depiction of Kull and the great city of Valusia, and his women ain’t bad either. This one’s off to a flying start.
Elric: The Balance Lost 4 seems to be losing its altitude as the series goes on. Chris Roberson’s story brings together four of Michael Moorcock’s iconic fantasy characters (Corum, Hawkmoon, von Bek and Elric), but unfortunately they’re still not actually together, even after four issues — and that’s the problem. Every time you turn the page, you’re jumping into another parallel story centered on one of the four, but the same basic series of events is happening on each page. I get what Roberson’s going for, that these events are playing out simultaneously across the Multiverse, but as a reading experience the entire series has thus far felt like a little kid telling a story, with each turn of the page bringing a new “and then …”. This gives you no time to latch on to any of these guys, effectively keeping you at arm’s length, and I say that as someone who’s read the entirety of these four characters’ published series. The good news is that by the end of this issue, the group has become two sets of two characters fighting evil together, so we’re halfway to some sort of convocation. Let’s hope it doesn’t take four more issues to consecrate this union.
FF 10, however, feels like a return to the Fantastic Four of last year. Jonathan Hickman and Barry Kitson have the old gang coming back together, as Reed returns home in the aftermath of last issue’s epic battle/collapse of all Sue’s hard-won alliances, one of the Evil Reeds heads to Latveria with his prisoner, Victor von Doom, and Spider-Man and Thing return to Avengers Mansion to plot the next move. Hickman plays to his strengths here, finally returning to depicting the relationships of Marvel’s first family and how they shape each character. The second-best part of this book is an extended scene between Reed and Sue in which Sue gently chides Reed for making some dumb decisions in the past few months (assembling a team of supervillian geniuses to do his thinking, headquartering them in the family home, etc.) even as she leads him in the right direction — it’s a married woman trick, don’t try to figure it out if you’re a man, just nod your head and agree, as Reed does here. This is the sort of stuff Hickman does well, and it’s nice to have the soul of the book back as the focus. The first best thing about this issue is, of course, Benjamin J. Grimm making the decision to return to the fold so that he can go about the very important business of pounding some bad guys. I’ve lost track of how many months its been since the Thing has engaged in Clobbering Time in his own book, so this is long overdue as far as I’m concerned. I’m primed to see Ben pointed at a problem that can only be solved with his rocky fists of justice — let’s get this done next month. First Evil Reed, then Doom, ok?
Oh, Amazing Spider-Man 671: Your cover is fanboy pandering of the basest sort, but your insides are the stuff of legend. Dan Slott apparently looked back on the past year of this book and thought to himself, “This has been a pretty good run. You know what would make it better? If I built and detonated a huge bomb of ‘WHAT?’ in the middle of this, and then drowned the whole thing in awesome sauce.” As Peter Parker fights to stop the Jackal from contaminating the entire country with the Spider Virus, the team at Horizon Labs help Reed Richards reverse-engineer a cure for the disease. Slott’s WHAT-bomb comes in the form of finally revealing who the top-secret researcher is in Horizon’s Lab Six — I never would have guessed the answer in six million weeks. The awesome sauce arrives when Reed and Horizon come up with a proven cure, and inadvertently undo something major that happened earlier in Pete’s life — no, not the One More Day thing. This book — THIS BOOK is the reason we all buy comics. Superheroes come in many shapes and sizes, but Dan Slott only writes in one size: Extra-large, gigante fun size.
Northlanders 45 — come on, you know the drill by now. I love Northlanders. Issue 45 features evocative art by Declan Shalvey and the standard, high-quality writing of Brian Wood. There are but five issues left of this series, so there’s little point in telling you how great it is, how distinctive Wood’s characters are or how masterfully he builds a tale from historical fact (the Christian conversion of Iceland) and makes it a powerful work of fiction. Northlanders is the best comic going, but it’s almost gone. I remove it from contention because everything is second place at best compared to this.
So there you have it. Amazing Spider-Man and its ever-unfolding glory is the best thing I read this week that isn’t Northlanders. Long may Dan Slott reign.
-Paul
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