Welcome one and all to my weekly review of the comics I bought! Every week I buy comics and then talk about them. Unfortunately, most of my friends are not readers of comics so there's only so much they can stand before they stop inviting me to parties. And now this blog is where I dump everything they can't understand.
Enough introduction... Here's what I bought this week:
FF #3
Batman, Incorporated #6
The Unwritten #25
Punisher Max #13
Daredevil: Reborn #4 of 4
Batgirl #21
Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #618
Chew #27
Cinderella: Fables Are Forever #4 of 6
Mega Man #1
Let's get judgemental!
Almost everything I bought this week was exceptional.
Almost. So let's we get the worst of the week's book out of the way up front, shall we? Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #618 was a mess. Since David Liss took over writing the book and Black Panther took over Daredevil's role it's been wildly inconsistent, ranging from seven-face-kicks-in-one-issue awesomeness to not-quite-fan-fic terrible. This issue managed to be all of that without any actual face kicks. It wraps up the first arc in a flurry of unnecessary exposition of the sort where characters are explaining what they're doing as they do it. It's tough to read.
But, and this is a "but" so big Too $hort wrote songs about it, the last page. Oh, the last page. Even after the trainwreck that this arc has been in parts, especially the end, the last page is perfect and makes me earnestly excited to read what comes next. The
other big ol' but in this series is Francesco Francavilla. He's simply amazing and I will continue to buy this book for as long as he draws it. He's also the only reason this book didn't score a -1.
SCORE: 0
The other worst book of the week is Daredevil: Reborn #4 of 4. The best thing about this issue is that it's the last of the series. It's just not good. I'm not sure what happened. Andy Diggle is a good writer but from his first issue of Daredevil to this one, his run with the character just got worse with each new book. If you haven't already, don't buy this comic. The art is really good, but unlike Francavilla's Black Panther, Davide Gianfelice is not enough to save it. Did I say the art is really good? Because it's really good. His style reminds me a lot of Pasqual Ferry with sharper lines. But here's the thing: Matt Murdock does not look good rocking the beard-and-no-mustache look. Ugh.
SCORE: -1
SPOILER ALERT: Everything else I'm going to review was awesome. If you haven't bought these books already then you totally should.
FF #3 is great in the way that Jonathan Hickman's entire run on Fantastic Four/FF has been great. There's very little action, but it doesn't need fighting because Doctor Doom is inviting the smartest super villains in the Marvel Universe to the Baxter Building to figure out how to kill Reed Richards four times. That is objectively awesome. There is nothing you can say about that to make it any less than it is. And what it is is
awesome. I mean,
Doctor Doom literally sent out invitations.
SCORE: +1
In The Unwritten #25, Tom Taylor explodes out of the abstract concept of a novel into the real world via a glass of water. Other things happen as well, but I encourage you to read the previous sentence again. This book is fantastic and I would buy it every month just on the promise of getting another Mr. Bun/Pauly Bruckner issue once every year. But again, I encourage you to read the first sentence of this review.
SCORE: +1
Oops! I'm not all the way caught up with this series, so I can't review it yet. Sorry everyone. It's written by Chris Roberson, though, so I feel confident that it has earned its +1 score.
SCORE: +1
Chew #27 is a pretty ingenious idea come to fruition. The last issue to come out was #18 (it was awesome, btw) and instead of releasing issue #19 the series jumps ahead by a full year of publication to #27. Is the issue good? Well, yeah. It's Chew after all, but it still leaves all the questions from #18 unanswered while simultaneously posing a year's worth of new questions. As an exercise in making me want to keep reading, does it work? Yeah. It does. But the real question is does it make for good comics? Yeah. It does that, too.
SCORE: +1
This comic is the opening "cinematic" that you get when you wait to press start in the game. If you've ever played the games you already know everything that happens in this comic. There is literally nothing added to the story. There's no new twist on the formula. And that's exactly what it needed to be.
SCORE: +1
Look at this cover. Oh my god, it's
beautiful. You can't see it on this image, but the cover for Batgirl #21 credits the art to Pere Perez. The wonderful surprise awaiting me when I opened the book was page after page of art by Dustin Nguyen. It's enough to make a fella swoon... Seriously, there hasn't been a less-than-great issue of Batgirl since Stephanie Brown took the mantle from Cassandra Cain and this one is no different. Batgirl faces the Reapers' next contestant, the Grey Ghost knows not what he does, Proxy makes a life changing decision, and Niles enjoys reading all of it.
SCORE: +1
Batman, Incorporated #6 is one of the best comic books I've ever read. It's perfect. It's just absolutely perfect on every level and from every angle. From
Bruce Wayne's take on Voltaire's theology, to
Batman: Message Board Troll, to "Welcome to Gotham.", to the very last page, this comic book is perfect. It's the fulfilled promise of the maximized potential of what a comic called "Batman, Incorporated" can be. If you haven't bought it already, go buy it
now. If you already bought it, give your copy to someone who didn't and go buy it again. Look for this one at the Eisners next year for best single issue.
SCORE: +2
"Juxtaposition" is not a word I like to use very often. It's one of those words that, once you say it, it immediately makes people not want to be friends with you. Unfortunately, that's the name of the game in Punisher Max #13. This is My Favorite Comic Book of the Week because the juxtaposition works so marvelously well that I don't even care that I've now used the word "juxtaposition" twice. Three times. The issue picks up right where the last one left off, with Frank in prison and thinking back on the day he returned to the states after fighting in the Vietnam War. The Young Frank/Old Frank thing works so well because we realize that they're the exact same. Frank walking into his house for the first time is the same as Frank walking into the solitary confinement cell. This is my favorite issue of the book since the phenomenal Kingpin arc.
SCORE: +2
That's what I read this week, so what's say we see who lives and who dies...
Marvel: +2
DC: +3
Image: +1
Vertigo: +2
Archie: +1
Oh, man. DC and the rest of the publishers were at the park, just cold chillin' having a picnic when a mob war broke out and all of them except for DC were caught in the crossfire causing DC to swear revenge and begin a mission to eradicate crime by savagely murdering every criminal. I guess any week that two great Bat-books come out is a week where DC is going to win. It certainly didn't help Marvel that two really bad Daredevil-related books came out this week. Anyways, thanks for reading! See you next week!
I read a review for this issue, in which the reviewer had an issue with a "poorly timed joke" made by Dupli-Kate, whereas I thought the joke fit the character quite well and broke the tension in what would have been an overly-emotional-in-a-bad-way-moment.
