So, got a big box of stuff last week from the nice folks at Ace. Here's the highlights.
THE ULTIMATES 2 #8, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch.
See, this is why I'll always forgive Millar for the daft things he tends to say over at his forum (unlike, say, John Byrne at his). Because when it matters, his work actually makes all the self-aggrandizing, all the cult manufacturing, immaterial. Good issue. That said, I'm pretty sure I've got it all figured out, and know exactly how it'll play out over the next few months. If Millar and Hitch throw a few new wrinkles into the old "It was Loki manipulating us all the time" plot I'm foreseeing, good for him.
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #23 by Mark Millar and Greg Land.
Craptastic. Well, thank god I'll never have to buy another issue of that, ever again. Actually, having been harsh on this comic in the past, I'll say something nice about it here. At least this plot was new, rather than a re-telling of an old Lee/Kirby effort. But really, Land's work is the worst kind of awful.
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #1 by Mark Millar and Jae Lee.
D'Oh!
What a mistake-ah to make-ah! Having already re-invented the Inhumans once for Marvel Knights, maybe it was a bit much getting Jae Lee to do it again for the Ultimate Universe. So, this is basically a rehash of Lee/Kirby's original Inhuman's debut, only now they're wearing kinkier bondage suits. Arse!
THE DEFENDERS #3 by Keith Giffen, Jean Marc DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire.
Of course, any book that manages to make excellent comedic material out of The Hulk getting his end away is all right by me.
DESOLATION JONES #3, by Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III.
Elsewhere, I recently plugged this series by saying if TRANSMETROPOLITAN was Ellis channelling Hunter S Thompson, then this is Ellis channeling Chuck Palahniuk. The gonzo humour of the previous couple of issues of the "Hitler Porn" storyline subsides in order to meditate on the dehumanizing aspects of the porno trade. Williams, as usual, excels himself with a bravura display of hopping and skipping between styles and media.
BIRDS OF PREY #86, by Gail Simone, Bruce Timm, and a buncha others.
This is one of those DC "continuity cop" series that normally I dodge like the plague, but I bought because it features a seven page sequence by the mighty Bruce Timm. Simone recently wrote a couple of episodes of the JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cartoon for Timm, so I guess this is some sort of payback. His art was, predictably, great. The rest was kinda "meh". It might have been great, and I wouldn't have noticed because this title is, for me, indicative of the sort of mistakes DC editorial have been making since the Crisis. A Batgirl who is still in a wheelchair since KILLING JOKE (how many other characters have been maimed and fixed, maimed and fixed, ad nauseum since the mid-eighties? But 'cus Alan Moore wrote the initial maiming, it's all "woooh, out of bounds"). A Huntress who isn't the Earth 2 daughter of Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle? What's wrong with this picture?
Fer fucks ache.
NEW AVENGERS #10 by Brian Michael Bendis and Steve McNiven.
So, issue ten rolls in and the new Avengers amass another member. Still, just one more arc before they pick up their last - and then the fun can really begin! Spot on Yankee Dogs, I'm being sarcastic again. This issue may go a long way in making Paul Jenkins' The Sentry character useable in the day-to-day for Marvel, but *good god y'all* I just can't handle the mind numbing tedium of Bendis' pacing. I'm dropping this as a monthly after the Ronin arc, I may start picking up the trades depending on who draws what. Plus, the "fanfic" aspects of Bendis' writing for Marvel is wearing me down. That may well be because I just read an entire year's worth of his DAREDEVIL run in one sitting a couple of days ago, but how much "hey, wouldn't it be cool if Daredevil hung out with Luke Cage and just, y'know, talked about chicks and shit?" can you read before snapping?
THE MANHATTAN GUARDIAN #4, by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart.
With this issue, it becomes clearer just how much Kirby there is in this whole SEVEN SOLDIERS gig. Sure, Klarion the Witch Boy was a throw-away Kirby character, but his own series featured nary a reference to any past, let alone to THE DEMON. Here, we get another riff off the King's work, with the first real look at the oft-hinted-at Newsboy Army (after Simon and Kirby's Newsboy Legion, the kid gang that hung about with the original Guardian). Reading between the lines, the Newsboys are clearly another ill-fated team of seven who fail against The Sheeda when they attempt a full-frontal assault with only six members (like Vigilante's team in SEVEN SOLDIERS #0).
Plus, when you look and see how DC have decided to publish this series as collections: man, I'm glad I bought the singles.
MISTER MIRACLE #1, by Grant Morrison and Pasqual Ferry. See what I was saying about the innate Kirbyness of the SEVEN SOLDIERS mega-series? How much more explicit does it have to get? Even though I've enjoyed the attempts of others to whip something up featuring Kirby's New Gods (Levitz/Giffen's GREAT DARKNESS SAGA, Starlin/Mignola's COSMIC ODYSSEY, Simonson's ORION), I always knew that for somebody to really get it right, they'd have to understand the two unexpressed central tenets of Kirby's thought on the series. The first: the New Gods were always a metaphor for society today, rather than just a bunch of superheroes titting about in over-designed lycra. The second: why settle for one mad idea per page when you could have half a dozen? Now, given those two golden rules, who better to write a New Gods story than Grant bleedin' Morrison?
No-one, that's who.
100 BULLETS #64 by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso.
Not sure what this issue means in the grand scheme of things. Sure looked good, though. As did the preview of Azz's new western LOVELESS. Looking forward to that one.
DEVIL DINOSAUR #1, by Eric Powell.
More Kirby Kast-Offs being reheated, this time for comic effect by the creator of THE GOON, Eric Powell. This whole "Marvel Monsters Group" stunt is just the sort of retro gag I can get behind, especially when it's done with such panache and by a dream team of creators (Powell, Niles, Fegredo, Giffen, Allred, Pander, Langridge et al). Plus, everyone should have known that the author of The Goon would give such great Hulk, let alone Hulk versus Devil Dinosaur. So stupid it's clever. Zen stupid.
THE MALLRATS COMPANION by Kevin Smith.
MALLRATS remains my favourite film of Smith's, largely for Proustian reasons (beer, dope, and Jacko and me standing in a video rental place, "say, what did you call that movie yer man did after 'Clerks'?": and the rest is history). So, of course I was always going to buy this scriptbook. Nice packaging, too. These things count.
BACKISSUE! #12, edited by Michael Eury.
My quest goes on for the best fit for a comics magazine that suits me. Latest on the chopping block was this issue of yet another Twomorrows Publishing fanzine. Now, Twomorrows raised the bar for this sorta thing years ago with their JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR (man, am I on a Kirby high horse today, or what?), so yes, this is a suitably glossy publication. But I've been looking for a comics mag to latch on to for ages, something that'd give me as much pleasure as I got from FANTASY ADVERTISER, AMAZING HEROES or COMICS INTERVIEW as a kid. The COMICS JOURNAL remains just a little too up itself. LO FI is dumb as a house brick. COMIC BOOK ARTIST should really be called MIDDLE AGED COMIC BOOK READER. ALTER EGO is GERIATRIC COMIC BOOK READER. Everything else is a glorified trade mag. So there's definitely a hole in the market for a smart, mainstream but progressive comics mag. BACKISSUE! isn't really it, but it was better than a poke in the eye.
Now then Mr Eury, there's a back cover blurb for yer collected edition.