First, the passing of Tim Sale was quite a blow that came out of nowhere. I went back and gawked over his artwork. Catwoman: When In Rome *might* be my favorite of his work. It evoked the 40's, 50's and 60's, but never felt retro or nostalgic. His art style was so distinct and much like Darwyn Cooke, I doubt we'll ever see someone close to that caliber of art ever again. His was such a timeless style.
Speaking of Darwyn Cooke, I bought the Parker vol. 2 Martini Edition Last Call hardcover. It just reminded me of how huge a loss it was to the art world when Cooke died. This book comes in at Absolute size, so the art is about 2x larger than the original hardcover editions of the Parker adaptions previously released. These books are masterclasses in visual and narrative storytelling, and seeing them at this size is awe inspiring. This particular volume includes a short story by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips (who also designed this book), and a round table discussion about Cooke with Brubaker, Bruce Timm and Scott Dunbier. I already have the original 4 hardcover novels Cooke did, but this Martini Edition and vol. 1 are well worth the double dip. And as two of my hardcovers are signed and doodled by Cooke (done when I met him at NY Comic Con years ago), I won't be getting rid of them at all.
Anyways, it's new comics Wednesday. I'm gonna go ahead a give a SPOILERS warning since I'm assuming most folks here haven't had a chance to either pick up or read the new books yet.
Last week was pretty small with one book: The Cimmerian: Hour of the Dragon #4. This completes the 4-issue adaptation of Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel. It was pretty darn good, but ultimately suffers from being too short. It glosses over lots of good material and concludes a little too quickly. Overall, this has been the better Conan book since Marvel got the rights. And now that Marvel lost the rights, only for them to get picked up by Titan Books, it remains to be seen of these Ablaze Comics english translations of French Conan comics can still reign supreme.
Black Adam #1. Best book of the week. It's nice to see the Marvel family moving away from Geoff Johns and into the hands of new creators (the Mary Marvel book also looks fantastic) and here, Christopher Priest imbues deft knowledge of world politics and race relations into this book as only he can. The interviews I've read with him indicate that this is gonna be a wild, absorbing ride, and probably the first intelligent story about Black Adam in a very long time. It also seems diametrically opposed to having any synergy to the film, which looks pretty "meh" to me. Online discussion seems focussed on the speech patterns of one particular character, which in the ignorant land of outspoken comics-fandom apparently determines the quality of a book. Ignore that stuff. This book was tops, and shouldn't be overlooked. Buy this.
Rest of the week was pretty disappointing in some ways.
Flash #783. A Dark Crisis tie-in. I'm not reading the main book, primarily because Death of The Justice League was perhaps the single worst comic I've read this year, so much did it turn me off of reading Dark Crisis. This issue was fun, though pretty forgettable. It was great seeing the Flash Family back together again, but all this story does is force DC to come up with yet another way to reconcile Barry and Wally co-existing as The Flash. I'm here for the long run, as Jeremy Adams' run has so far been awesome. But it seems that until Dark Crisis is over at the end of the year, plans for the Flash Family remain up in the air.
World's Finest #4. Easy, breezy, and forgettable. That's really all there is to say about this one. As fun as this book has been, it's not very engaging and I don't particularly find this villain to be all that compelling. I like the more personal dynamic between Batman and Superman (calling each other by their real names as opposed to their superhero names), but $4.00 for a book that could be read in about 30 seconds, it was pretty disappointing.
Nightwing #93. Another disappointment. We've had Taylor on this book for over a year, and while I love the artwork, and can appreciate the more up-beat tone of the book, this book is just too damn fluffy for it's own good and so superficial. There's no true sense of danger and the stakes never seem real, and it feels like this story is taking forever to get anywhere. The same is happening over in Superman: Son of Kal-El, which I dropped. All of the social progressiveness used as story beats, which attracted me to these books in the first place, feels so shallow and naive. There's no exploration of these as actual themes, barring Jon's relationship with Jay. They feel like one and done "Gotcha!" counter point moments that belong to some online argument we're not privy to. I'll give this book a few more issues, but my interest in this book is waning severely. There's more to Nightwing than this. I hope we get to covering that sooner than later.
