I'm glad everyone is picking up on Ram V. To me, he's THE creator to keep an eye on. Swamp Thing was brilliant. Aquaman: Andromeda is shaping up to be something special and his Detective Comics run is looking to be the same. I'm glad DC has allowed him to be himself instead of having to ape Tynion on Justice League Dark. He's so much better than that.
New Comics Week: A short, but entertaining week.
Superman: Warworld Apocolypse. The big finish to the Warworld Saga. It wasn't as big as I was expecting it to be, and I suspect that this probably would have been drawn out further if given the opportunity. But I could not put the book down for anything. Kennedy writes a truly honorable Superman, but more importantly, he writes a truly human Superman. His Superman isn't dripping with wishy washy sentiment or built up to be this hallow, saccharine statue of "hope". He's a man, challenged morally and philosophically, who's conscious weighs heavily when choosing to do the right thing. Fortunately, things work out. But the DRAMA! Kennedy does it quite well.
The biggest drawback to the bottom half of this story was the inconsistency with the art teams. It would have been great to get a single artist to finish it out instead of like 4, and some of it simply isn't as good as Sempere, Mendonca or Federici. What it does expertly is conclude the big story while blossoming future plot threads. The Warworld Saga is already one of the best Superman stories in a very long time, but if Kennedy can keep the momentum going, this could truly be one of the all time great runs. The next arc leading into #1050 is a big crossover with Tom Taylor's Superman. It makes sense, but I'm not too keen on picking up Taylor's books. We'll see. But the seeds planted in this particular issue, if allowed to grow, should lead to some compelling stories down the road.
Flash Annual 2022: This was a very funny read. The issue serves as the novel that Linda has been writing since Jeremy Adams has taken over the Flash book. It's delightful. I've seen other reviews praise it for how good it (Linda's novel) is, but I actually found the comic so good precisely because of how BAD it was. It hits every cheap romance/sci-fi novel trope in the book, and runs with it unapologetically. It was such a fun read. It concludes with some major news about the Flash family, and damnit, I'm in!
The art was once again the big drawback. I'm not too fond of this kind of anime/manga style of art that's on display here. It's never really been a style I can get into. Maybe it would have worked if it was the art for Linda's book with another artist doing the book-end portions, but it didn't really work for me.
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I know that this is a general discussion thread that's turned into a review thread BUT in an effort to go back to the original point of the thread....
I recently finished collecting the final 18 issues of Sandman Mystery Theatre (you know, the 18 issues that it seems DC will NEVER collect) and I started a huge binge re-read of all 8 collected TPBs and Sandman Midnight Theatre. If you've not read this series, I STRONGLY suggest looking into it. DC announced a compendium collection due for release early next year, which will collect for the third time material that is already available (and I'll buy when volume 2, god willing, gets released).
It's Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, and Guy Davis, and they take a deep dive into a sordid, demented, post-prohibition New York and tell some pretty magnificent pulp style stories with a contemporary, almost high literary twist using the Golden Age Sandman, Wesley Dodds. The stories use certain social stigmas, or even certain social practices of the day as the means to weave something rather disturbing and lurid. The stories force us to look at where we currently are as a society and witness how far, or how short, we've truly come. Yet at the heart of the series is the blooming romance between Wesley Dodds and Dian Belmont, and it's one of the very few comic book relationships that feels truly genuine. The way the dodge and weave each other and eventually come to be together is truly a wonderful reading experience. There is some very casual racism and sexism strewn throughout the series, but in lesser hands it would seem gratuitous. Here, it just helps paint the picture that this version of New York, or perhaps Wesley Dodd's view of the world and NYC in particular, is a lush and seething hell, permeating with the horrors one would only expect to find in nightmares.
I'm about a third of the way through the series and I am loving every bit of it. Sandman Mystery Theatre is yet another "lightning in a bottle" books DC had going in the 90's (the other being James Robinson's Starman). Give this book a read, especially if you like grim, pulp mystery stories.
