An aside on Batman:
In order of greatness, I rat the bat-works thus:
Year One
The Killing Joke
The Dark Knight Returns
Arkham Asylum
Year One is the perfect hardboiled noir tale and the use of Jim Gordon, and the contrast of his confidence with Bruce Wayne's insecurity is perfect. The Killing Joke really makes the Joker a tragic character and is a very poetic work. It's marred a little by the fact that it feels like Moore is just bringing his Watchmen bag-o-tricks to Bats, but I reckon it's still decent. DKR was great when I first read it but hasn't aged well. All the writing is so goddam butch now, it just seems every bit as campy as the Adam West vibe it was trying to overturn. And I thought AA had some good writing but it was a bit up itself and McKean hadn't yet learned how to draw sequential art. (He eventually would with Cages but early stuff like Violent Cases, Black Orchid and AA are far too static to work well as comics; it's the same problem that I have with Alex Ross.)
Okay, back on topic...
X-Statix 17-18
Why the hell is Spider-Man in this story? I mean, is he even really in this story? He's in a few panels at the end of #17 and a few at the start of #18. Then the villains drag Diana into the X-Statix shop, X-Statix give up and go home 'cause they can't be arsed, and Spidey just ... vanishes.
What the hell is going on here? It's just dumb. It's not even like PM is making some kind of point about the pointlessness of crossovers. It's like he just forgot that he'd put Spidey into a couple of panels of the comic. I soooooo predict SM is going to save Di from X-Statix in #19 and we'll be supposed to care. But this is really at the same level as Liefeld's inability to remember the guns on Cable's shoulders, IMO. Maybe this story just suffered from rewriteitis, but whatever the explanation, it's a low point for the book.
Planetary #17
Solid stuff. I hope Ellis and Cassaday keep cranking this out because it's working well now, and it works much better when you see the damn thing regularly. Agree with others: Don't visit the thread until you read the issue, unless you've already been spoilered by other parts of the web.
NXM #148
Okay, I guess. I like Jimenez's art on this a lot. The story doesn't quite seem to know where it wants to go. I would actually like to see more about Magneto and his impotence in his moment of victory. There's not quite enough there to make it interesting. And the decisions to drop the other X-teams out of the continuity and have the Special Class sign up to be the new Brotherhood both rankle a bit. Alas.
Usagi Yojimbo: Duel At Kitanoji
Usagi Yojimbo is just one of the best comics out there, a really great adaptation of samurai legend to a storytelling style which is a hybrid of the best elements of American and Japanese comics. To my mind, this is vastly more readable than the Lone Wolf & Cub stuff, and has a really great progression of the characters in a slow-building saga. This volume features the climatic duel between Usagi's master and the one swordsman who might actually be his match - the only man to beat our hero one on one in a fair duel over all these long years. It's rock solid and Sakai keeps a very steady hand on the tension, letting it build to the perfect point. |
