Hawkeye #10

written by Matt Fraction
art by Francesco Francavilla

This issue of Hawkeye belongs the Clown.  Francavilla's art style couldn't diverge much more from Aja's, but it's dramatic noir tones, fractured visual storytelling, and pulp sensibilities—in contrast to Aja's sleek, tiled layout and pop art aspect, with Matt Hollingsworth's muted color palate—make it perfect for the character portrait of the carnival clown turned professional hitman Kazimierz Kazimierczak.  The final page, which reiterates precisely the same dialogue and story as the last of the previous issue, essentially allows the same moment to be told in each character's story.

If he weren't a contract killer who loves his job and is probably getting close to her for professional reasons, Kate Bishop's flirtation with Kazi would be wickedly hot.  He's amazingly articulate and soulful even in his slightly broken English.

"It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be.  We are all New Yorkers then.  This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history.  It is history as fashion.  Trend.  Moments.  Moments lost and...and overwritten.  You have to hunt the past in New York.  Not like--like Prague, Budapest, Krakow, Paris, Istanbul.  These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts.  A woman.  Not a girl."  (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 96 [10: 7])

The conversation may be pretense, but the ideas are real.  Their quiet and gentle fondling sparks enough heat for the rest of Bishop's father's party to entirely fade away.  Even more impressive are Kate's bold, equally hot kiss to keep Kazi from stealing the cool mystery from their flirtation and her complete contentment to leave without a date or a phone number, just a first name.

Chronologically, Hawkeye #10 follows Kate on her "thing tonight" (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 86 [9: 19])—though it makes what look like Christmas trees at the party a little confusing, since it should still be Valentine's Day, right?—after she leaves Clint moping upstairs to his bedroom until it culminates in Gil's death, again.  As such, it at least partially clarifies Barton's tantalizing conversation on the rooftop with a soon-to-be-dead Gil.  The woman in question, the one for whom Barton will write a letter, is not "Friend-Girl" Jessica Drew (a.k.a. Spider-Woman) or Darlene Penelope Wright (a.k.a. Cherry), but Kate herself.  And while it suggests a romantic interest, since why else would Clint have so much difficulty finding the words, we readers are not privy to that part of the conversation in either telling.

[July 2013]

As collected in Hawkeye: Little Hits  (ISBN: 978-0785165637)

Spaceman #9

"Red Crater" (Part 9 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

If its readers were expecting Orson's triumph, the conclusion to Azzarello and Risso's sci-fi fable must be devastating.

Engineered for survival in a proto-colony on Mars, Orson's apish looks and dim intelligence have made him an outcast whose destiny—as he feels his purpose to have been—is painfully unrealized.  And he fantasizes about the possibilities of a life in which he is capable, useful, and more morally and intellectually sophisticated than he is.  These flashes, though Spaceman teases several possibilities about their veracity, are actually allegorical alternatives to Orson's own bleak life, mirroring his problems but allowing the better Orson of his imagination to solve them.

Carter, on the other hand, is a darker, crueller but more capable, more intelligent, more manipulative and more self-interested counterpart to Orson.  He's confronted with the same existential failures as Orson, but he makes his own Machiavellian way in a strange world.  When his employer abandons his attempts to abduct Tara following the popular attention her kidnapping has attracted from viewers of her reality television show, law enforcement, and other criminal interests, Carter exploits Orson's generally trusting and overly naïve temperament as well as his deep-seeded desire to be a hero to steal the spotlight, recast himself as the selfless hero, and launch his own career as a "reality" superstar.  Orson and Lilly end up jailed—"charged" in a world in which that literally entails a financial transaction—for Tara's kidnapping.

In what might be the most surprising twist in an issue that defies expectation, Carter—at his own expense, though with money he acquired by selling out Orson—pays for Orson and Lilly to be freed and let into the "dries".  He even seems genuinely sorry, if unsurprised, that Lilly doesn't wait ten minutes for Orson.  If Orson's Mars-self is more morally compromised than he really is, Carter is less so.  He's out for himself, but he takes no pleasure in leaving Orson behind and, in his own way, makes amends.

But it's Orson's final visit to The Ark, where policemen Wade and Cass are now members of the Ark security team and Tara is returned to her adoptive family, that gut-punches.  Orson takes one more look, scattering the gathered fans in fear and garnering the derisive looks from the crew, and turns and leaves, not just the set but also the "dries".  He walks alone, into his even more desolate Mars imagination.  In a sly elision between Tara, the young girl, and "terra" the distant Earth seen from the Martian landscape, he gives his last painful goodbye.

[October 2012]

Severed #5

Part Five, "The Road Beckons"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

Severed has from the beginning embraced its own metaphor for American modernism.  Historically situated just as American expansionism, technological innovation, and self-made idealism are booming, Severed is the gruesome, horrific underbelly, the story of those idealists who fall prey as they fall between the floorboards.  The equally gruesome, if ultimately hopeful, birth of a baby by amateur C-section in a tent on the side of the road is a bloody reminder of the dangers in this new world.  But sitting next to the pontificating predator Alan Fisher (olim Mr. Porter) as they drive to Mississippi and away from everyone who loves him, Jack Brakeman cannot hear that danger in his words or in his voice.

The nameless cannibal accomplishes his hunt by seducing others into trusting him, by removing one-by-one all his prey's other friends and family, and so he's quite accomplished at deception and often seems to revel in it, dangling the truth in front of his victims without them recognizing it.  But it still comes as a surprise when he arrives at a remote cabin to a delightful family who call him "Uncle Jethro".  He's able and inclined to sustain that deception.  He's the serial killer no one recognizes no matter how close to him they are.  It also reinforces his complete lack of conscience, his ability to differentiate between Sally's children with whom he plays and those whom he ambushes and eats.

It takes a while—and a violent confrontation with a shady pimp—for Jack to begin seeing his traveling companion for what he is.  At first, he grateful for the help against the greasy thug, but when he needlessly scalps him with his own knife, Jack sees the monster for the first time.  Just before they drive away, he sees Christy, the obviously underage prostitute left as vulnerable without the man who exploited her as with him.  They each, children that they are, are prey to the whims of violent men and each is, as Jack is coming to realize, in very real danger.  After being unwillingly drugged that night—probably to keep him from escaping now that he's seen the real Alan Fisher/Mr. Porter/Uncle Jethro—Jack wakes to find his wallet, with the photo of his father, tucked into the lining of Fisher's suitcase.  And all of a sudden, the stories he's been telling about Sam really don't add up.

Dial H #5

"Disconnected"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco

"A few days ago I was just some guy.  I'm still just some guy.  Some guy working with his best friend's murderer to rescue an old lady superhero.  To fight a supervillain and an angry void."  (Dial H #5: 1)

"Disconnected" resumes the hunt for Abyss, a ravenous nothingness consuming all light, threatening to turn the world into a cold, dark, lifeless rock or perhaps to eat it into nothing.  Dr. Wald, a.k.a. Ex Nihilo and now superhero Hairbringer, was so hubristic that the assumed the creature would show some allegiance to her for bringing it back into the world, but the nullomancer soon discovers otherwise.  Forced into strangely amicable cooperation with Darren's murderer the Squid and now finding himself in equally strange collusion with a villainous mastermind, Nelson and Wald collaborate to turn the Abyss's small offspring voids against their parent/maker.

It is, perhaps, a convenient solution, but one with wonderfully unexpected execution and consequences.  Santolouco's Abyss has always been a gorgeously massive and star-filled monster, who glitters with the light it's already devoured.  In magic-logic and poetically symmetrical physics, nothing eating something begets nothing, but nothing eating nothing begets something.  As the befuddled little voidlets eat away at their progenitor, he turns into an awesome and grotesquely crumbling stone statue in the middle of Littleville.  In the words of the Squid, "They'll chew it into dense dead presence" (14).  The Squid, ironically in context, is also gives voice to Miéville's eloquent, beautiful, and a little painful tribute to human language and expression:

"Some people on my world...  ...think the whole of our universe is just the effluent of nihils' predation on each other...   ...that we live in the crumbling corpolite of nul-eat-nul.  That matter is the leftover of void rapacity, like that ugly statue, that abyssal aftermath.  It sounds better in your languages.  I learned 17 when I came.  I could never decide which was my favorite.  Or which voice to use."  (18)

While it grants a greater depth to the Squid, turns a character introduced as little more than a mindless goon in X.N.'s employ into a quietly philosophical and aesthetically minded solon, it's largely ancillary to the main story.  Instead, it's an example of precisely the deep appreciation of human creativity and experience that makes Miéville's thoughtful world so elegant and poignant.

Even as the Abyss and Wald are defeated, another shadowy figure with full command of its Dial emerges out of the Abyss in search of H-Dials, disarming and killing Wald in the process.  Nelson's still-glitchy Dial, which switched off just before the creature emerged onto scene may have saved him and Roxie (Manteau, now unmasked) from a similar fate for the moment, but it already poses a significant threat to any Dial user and stands poised as the next arc's likely antagonist.

Superheroes:  Rescue Jack (un-dialed), [unnamed Swiss Army knife hero], Hairbringer, Atavist, Timekiller, Girl Eclipse, Cock-a-Hoop

[December 2012]

Starman #5

"Talking with David, '95"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

David's a difficult Starman to like.  No doubt, it's partly because most of what we've seen of David is through the eyes of his younger brother, but even when it's not, he's proven to be petty, hostile, and belligerent with Jack.  Robinson doesn't yet illuminate the circumstances of Jacks' graveyard visit with his dead brother, but he takes the opportunity to humanize the elder brother.  David is insecure, unsure of who he actually is, and envious of Jack because he knows, and probably because he's still alive.  But that doesn't keep him from still being an ass.

David taunts and antagonizes Jack from the beginning, steadfastly refusing to tell him exactly where they are—dream and afterlife excluded—just "'cause," though he subsequently tells Jack that it's not his secret to tell, and jumping Jack because he's now Starman, despite Jack being reluctant to assume the role.  Between the two of them, they wreak some havoc on the graveyard, upturning graves and breaking headstones, and they spend most the night trying to repair some of the damage they cause, which unlike destruction, as most superheroes find out, is usually unable to be accomplished with superpowers or extra-special superhero gadgets.  Eventually, the two make enough peace to last a year.  David makes some minor amends, but more importantly he clears the air for Jack to more openly and confidently embrace the hero that he wants to be without the oppressive expectations of what his father and his father's tradition demand him to be. 

The decision to make this a black-and-white issue, aside from David's gaudy Starman costume, is a bold one that pays off in both the general unearthly mood it strikes and the impact that the first full-page, full-color panel of David flying away with the rising sun provides.  Whether or not this coloring choice is indicative of just where they are is provocative but ultimately irrelevant.

[March 1995]

Swamp Thing #7

"Swamp Thing"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

Good lord, this book is beautiful!  Paquette's contributions to Swamp Thing have been exceptional from the beginning—incorporating organic green filigree between panels, inspired both by cellular structures of plants and art nouveau design, and elegant human figures—but in Alec Holland's transformation into the Swamp Thing, his work is invaluable.  As the Green shoots its roots into his body, invading his heart, lungs, brain and blood stream, the juxtaposition between the aggressive green fibers and the pink fleshy matter overlaid on a leaf pattern is both gorgeous and unsettling in its anatomical realism.  The following full-page close-up of the new Swamp Thing's face and eye is brimming with awakening power.  Nathan Fairbairn's colors, while always solid, are rarely as notable as they are here, with the orange fire started by the Rot in the Parliament competing with the newborn Swamp Thing's spreading green, casting shadows and warm, menacing light on the birth.

Snyder's also in prime form in this issue.  It doesn't progress the main plot anymore than can be easily surmised by its cover:  Alec Holland finally becomes the Swamp Thing.  However, it articulates some of Snyder's finest ideas for the relaunched series.  The Parliament, in particular, while it was always a strange and foreign mind, shows itself here to be cold, vindictive, and profoundly inhuman.  Frustrated with Holland for not eagerly assuming the mantle they assigned to him and angry at being infiltrated by the Rot, they use their last remaining power to save Holland long enough to watch them die before dying himself.  But Holland, even as he asks them to transform him, calls them out on their heartlessness and selfishness:

"Though maybe, it's for the very reasons you think us humans so scared and so weak—   —that we were chosen to be your conduits.  Because, as your brethren told me when he visited me in the swamp—   —what we offer you isn't power or strength.  It's restraint.  For a long time, I made the mistake of thinking of the plant world as a peaceful place...   ...a place of beauty and balance and wonder.  But the truth is, it's no different than the Red or the Rot.  It's a force of nature, volatile and wild and conscienceless."  (Swamp Thing #7: 9)

And when Holland is finally turned, he turns not to save the Green, whose own cruelty and vengefulness and inconsiderate persistence he's experienced so much of his life, and not even really to stop the Rot, though he has no love for it; it's for Abby, his lover equally coerced into playing a part she wants nothing to do with.

[May 2012]

Scalped #1

"Indian Country" (Part 1 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

He's not a large man, but he's been causing a lot of trouble for the local tribal thugs who strut around the Reservation like cocks in a barnyard.  Eventually, he's sufficiently outnumbered to be restrained, beaten, and brought before the tribal chief and crime boss Red Crow:  President of the Oglala Tribal Council, Sheriff of the Tribal Police Force, Chairman of the Prairie Rose Planning Committee, Treasurer of the Highway Safety Program, Managing Director of the new casino.  To the FBI agents attempting to make a case against him, the list looks a little different:  most powerful crime figure in three counties, who "traffics in methamphetamine, illegal arms and prostitution, runs his own private army of murderous thugs, and generally rules over this reservation like a medieval warlord" (Scalped #1: 22).

In one of the most chilling sequences in the medium, Red Crow interviews this prodigal son handcuffed to his office chair, encircled by two pacing pit bulls, with a freshly scalped corpse on the floor just next to him, and the knife responsible dug into the desk still dripping with blood.  Lincoln Red Crow might just kill him with so little fanfare he might not remember next Tuesday, but instead he offers him a job.  And so one of the most enviably named protagonists in literary history arrives back home after fifteen years to a badge in the Tribal Police Force:  Dashiell Bad Horse.

Inspired by the 1975 conflict that led to the shooting of two FBI agents on Reservation land, Aaron re-constructs a fictional history that capitalizes on the real animosity, willful misunderstanding and cultural hostility that seethed between American Indians and federal agencies in those decades.  But he's more interested in the current fallout of those mutual failures:  corrupt politicians and law enforcement, drug trafficking, epidemic drug and alcohol abuse, rampant poverty, and cultural activists increasingly willing to employ terrorism.  Aaron's political and cultural criticism is scathing but refreshingly unsimplified, and his implications go far beyond the borders of his fictional reservation.

"Do you know who we are?"
"Buncha football mascots?  I don't give a fuck."  (2)

But if the unjust treatment of American Indians by the federal government, the exploitation of stereotypes in American pop culture, and the persistent racism exhibited by people on and off the Reservation would perhaps earn some sympathy for the tribal residents, their unchecked hostility, willingness to exploit both what little federal aid they receive and each other for individual gain, and the complete ineptitude of local organizations and institutions negate that good will.

[March 2007]

FF #5

"Spooky Kids
or, Merrily into the Eight Arms of Durga the Invincible We All Go"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

Things have taken a turn for the decidedly ominous at the Future Foundation.  Following the departure of Alex Power over a disagreement with Scott Lang about whether or not to eliminate Dr. Doom and the departure of old Johnny Storm after Medusa again questions his identity, she also brings her son Athura to join her.  Barring the now absent Alex Power, he's easily the oldest and largest of the group and he's prone to periods of mental instability and violence.  Medusa also produces a terrigen lotus with a strange and threatening secret.

Scott's reeling from his perceived failures and the increasingly heavy responsibility of being the man in charge.  He's short-tempered, not shaving, and has allowed his room to be taken over by his computers and uneaten delivery pizza, which is apparently all he's living off of.  Darla Deering, who after her initial bout of insecurity has become the most reliable of the replacements, talks some easy sense into Scott Lang.

Meanwhile, John Storm is losing his mind somewhat, and finds himself on a fiery spree of destruction through the city.  Confronted, extinguished and ultimately sedated by the Replacement Four, along with the help of Vil and Wu and Bworrg the East River leviathan, Johnny is now incapacitated, still raving about the need to "end Doom".  But the most immediate threat seems to be the Wizard, with whom Medusa has been conspiring and who now approaches his clone-son Bentley-23.

While Fraction elevates the action in "Spooky Kids" and raises the stakes for most of his characters, many of the small moments, which relied so prominently on levity and fun, get condensed.  Vil and Wu rising to the occasion and summoning Bworrg to help the Four, as Scott Lang abruptly requested before rushing out, was a pleasant surprise, as was Lang's genuine appreciation of their contribution.  However flawed his approach has been so far, Lang's aptitude for this job remains high.  He could be really, really good at it.  Alex Power's idealistic crusade takes him to Latveria.  It's probably foolish and will undoubtedly get him into trouble, but at least Power is acting on his idealism.  He needs to be more than just talk, and he's fully aware of it.  The relationship he and Scott will develop—whether it's growing together or apart—is one of the series' most promising interpersonal dynamics.

[May 2013]

The Legend of Luther Strode #5

written by Justin Jordan
art by Tradd Moore
colors by Felipe Sobreiro

If Justin Jordan and Tradd Moore were to create a sweeping love story, it would look a lot like The Legend of Luther Strode #5.  After the events of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode, Luther spiraled out, believing the Librarian when he insisted that Luther and the others were made killers by the inevitable force of destiny or fate.  Believing this, and hating himself because of it, Luther channeled that rage and his murderous impulses against those he thought most deserved it.  And so, his wall of drivers' licenses was begun.  The reappearance of Petra in his life sparks something of his old feelings.

Petra sees something different in Luther.  She actually sees Luther.  Despite his repeated and fervent pleading that she leave, run away from the danger and himself, Petra stays.  When she confronts Luther about her resolve not to abandon him, Luther seems finally able to accept an alternate view of himself absent the bleak determinism preached to him by the Librarian and Binder.  In short, he recovers his humanity.  Their kiss, after he discards his mask and his blood-thirsty vigilante alter-ego, is suitably epic, an impassioned homage to classic Hollywood romance, a dramatic two-page spread with the lovers surrounded by yellow flames.

Jack, on the other hand, presents a more troubling problem.  Seizing the opportunity offered by Mr. Duvall's improvised bomb to kill Binder, Jack then escapes, abandoning Petra and Luther in the flames, to wreak a greater havoc on an unsuspecting public.  In a move that admittedly breaks the psychological pattern of the furtive serial killer, Jack enters Abberline Mall—a shopping center coincidentally named for the famous Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police tasked with investigating the Ripper murders in Whitechapel—with a grin that anticipates mass murder and widespread chaos.  It falls to Luther and Petra to find and stop him.

Justice League #23.3: Dial E

"Dial Q for Qued"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco, Carla Berrocal, Riccardo Burchielli, Liam Sharp, Jock, Tula Lotay, Marley Zarcone, Brendan McCarthy, Emma Rios, Emi Lenox, Jeff Lemire, Frazier Irving, David Lapham, Carmen Carnero, Sloane Leong, Kelsey Wroten, Michelle Farran, Annie Wu, Zak Smith, and Alberto Ponticelli with Dan Green

It's got all the quirky erudition and creative whimsy of Dial H with none of the narrative sophistication.  Four young teens, who work as couriers for a local crime boss, steal a Dial.  Add the Q-Dial—which dials up supervillains—to the arsenal of others in the Dial-verse:  H-Dial, S-Dial, G-Dial, J-Dial, and D-Dial.  The teens—Gwen, Al, Ben, and Case—take turns dialing as they flee from boss Tibb and his henchman Nick, trying to reclaim their property.

Ultimately, "Dial Q for Qued" is more a menagerie of dial-able supervillains than a cohesive story.  A new artist is responsible for each page, which is about how long each of the villains hangs around.  For those unfamiliar with Dial H, the effect is likely erratic, with little visual or narrative continuity.  For those already enamored of Miéville's world, it's a delightful presentation of possibilities that weren't.  You're invited to imagine this series as it could have been realized by any or all of these artists.  That it begins with the series' first Mateus Santolouco and concludes with the series' final team of penciller Alberto Ponticelli and inker Dan Green reinforces the idea that "Dial Q for Qued" is a kind of history or possible history.  In this case, the variability—in both supervillains and illustration style—is part of the fun.

KUDOS:  Baba Iago, Miéville's mash-up of Baba Yaga, the creature out of Slavic folklore who rides in a forest hut on giant chicken legs, and Shakespeare's somewhat diabolical villain Iago from Othello.  Ayenbite, a villain of regret, named after an obscure 14th-century Kentish poem.  Jock's unique style, while probably not the most promising in long-form Dial H, brings his moody near-disembodiment to life.  Decalcomaniac, brought to technicolor life by Brendan McCarthy, who draws the substance out of people and onto paper like transfer technique of his namesake.  David Lapham, whose exceptional rendition of the Centipede makes you wish he'd had a short run as artist on Dial H.  Mise-en-Abyme, because there's nothing like a recursive visual effect to wield superpowers.  Kelsey Wroten, whose monstrous Bad Dressage is genuinely creepy, with its skull bridle and over-sized hooves.

"Dial Q for Qued"'s interest in old school telephone—and the memory that old rotary phones don't have a numerical equivalent to "Q"—is matched only by its linguistic archaeology.  Miéville baited his readers into the entirely plausible assumption that to "Dial E" would mean dialing "E," no doubt for "Evil" and probably 3-8-4-5.  Instead, he mines the English language for "qued," which as a noun has been obsolete since at least the sixteenth century and uncommon since the thirteenth.  It's a detail, unlike most of his bizarre supervillains and the superheroes before them, that Miéville is compelled to elaborate, but in general he doesn't spell much out for his readers.  In Dial H, and to a lesser degree in the allusively dense but narratively simple Dial E, you get what you work for.

As a conclusion to Miéville's recently finished Dial H run, this issue is somewhat disappointing, nor is it likely to draw in new readers out of the reeling, whirlwind storytelling.  As a exercise in imagining the possibilities of the idea, it's a intellectually teasing and visually delightful treat.  And it's just like Miéville to end with a tantalizing mystery:  what does the last-minute appearance of Rescue Jill say about Nelson Jent's non-dialed hero persona Rescue Jack from Dial H #4?

Supervillains:  Suffer Kate, Baba Iago, Shell Shock, Electroplax, Ayenbite, Goad, Rent, Decalcomaniac, Ruination, Slub, The Bends, Gloaming, Wet Blanket, Byssus, Mise-en-Abyme, Bad Dressage, Captain Quag, Frontal, Gallowman, Topiary Rex, Recluse, The Stink, Mechasumo, Huldra, Snail Devil, Piñata

Superheroes:  Rescue Jill

[November 2013]

American Vampire #12

"Strange Frontier"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Danijel Zezelj

It takes only a few short decades—some of which Skinner Sweet spent buried in a coffin at the bottom of a reservoir—for the American West to become the stuff of mythology.  The lingering remnants, displaced and left behind as their world disappeared into a modernized twentieth century of increasing urbanism and nationwide expansion, are aging shells of themselves.  By 1919, they're attempting to capitalize on their reputations and the mystique of the fading West in a two-bit side-show led by rich Yankee Colonel Seldom French—Frenchie, to Sweet—who made his own fortune selling Buffalo coats.  They've re-written their own histories to appeal to the popular, romanticized Wild West.  Sweet finds himself one day in the crowd, watching a Broadway actor reenact his own (obviously inaccurate) demise at the hands of Jim Book.  Spurred by the insult of the inaccuracy and probably his own mischievous personality, Sweet makes real the pageant in front of him, loading their guns with real gunpowder and bullets and rekindling their own bitter histories with one another.

It would be a fine but otherwise uninteresting retelling of Sweet's past if it weren't for two things:  his drug-clouded reunion with former lover, brothel madam, and betrayer Kitty Banks, and his remembrance of old enemy Jim Book.  Sweet, it seems, is as protectively nostalgic and oddly honorable as Frenchie is exploitative.  Sweet may take his own place in the show's cast after decapitating his counterpart, but it's his defense of the memory of Jim Book as he attacks his show-double that's a bit startling:  "You don't deserve to wear Jim Book's name!" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 13 [American Vampire #12: 10]).  Sweet's nemesis had always borne his animosity, but also apparently his respect.

Kitty Banks, by the time Sweet finds her, is far gone and faded into an opium daze.  He comes to her like a ghost lover in a dream.  He's come to kill her after overhearing about her treachery, tipping off Felix Camillo, but he finds she'd intended it as a gift, a blaze of glory worthy of his legend, and she'd meant to die with him.  Unlike Sweet, she felt the noose tightening around the West, saw the writing on the wall.  Having just seen it for himself, Sweet understands, and in a moment of tenderness unmatched by anything we've seen from him—except perhaps some of his moments with Pearl, Kitty's successor—he kisses her and leaves her to her die in her "dream."

[April 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)

Dream Thief #5

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Dream Thief resolves the mysteries that it needs to, but more impressively, it also knows exactly which mysteries it shouldn't solve.  Yet, at least.  After escaping the war-painted home-invader from the end of the previous issue with the help of his police detective sister and his former running back best friend, Lincoln comes partially clean to his sister—and calls her out on her involvement in the cover-up of Claire's murder of Cordero—and completely clean to Reggie.  To his credit, Reggie is baffled and intrigued but not judgmental, even (or especially) about the sex.  As one of those great unsolvable mysteries and sometimes fantasies, the memory of sex as the opposite gender is one of those insights John's "talent" uniquely gives him.

As it turns out, the initial home invasion itself was a chain-link in the series of events that led John Lincoln to his current position.  Anticipating that the mask would find John, Patricio Brown-Eagle—who might actually be mentally ill, or might be exploiting the seemingly outrageous truth of the mask to exploit the penal system in his favor—broke in to eliminate Lincoln, and he returns to finish the job.  Even after re-reading the issue, Brown-Eagle's motivations are still very unclear.  Though he—along with John, John's father Fischer Ayers, and Ray Ray Benson—Brown-Eagle is a Dream Thief and therefore a supernatural avenger of unjust murders, but he seems to be acting on his own motivation when he tries to force John to kill himself.  Is he trying to eliminate all Dream Thieves?  Does he want to be the only one?  Why did he kill John's father as well?

Dream Thief steadfastly refuses to resolve some of the more intriguing and dangerous implications of the mask's memory sharing.  Though sometimes, especially initially, possessed by the murdered ghost of another person, John Lincoln appears to maintain his personality in the wake.  He has a plethora of new memories and experiences from which to draw, but he is fundamentally himself.  Yet, he writes to his father earnestly, though he is now dead, one memory collection among many in the repertoire of fellow Dream Thief and Georgia State Prison inmate, Ray Ray Benson.  It's a tease that makes me hopeful for more in Nitz's world, but there are enough answers to make this a satisfying conclusion to a far better-than-average mini-series. 

Animal Man #5

"Food Chain"
The Hunt, Conclusion
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman and Steve Pugh
inks by Jeff Huet

"Food Chain" certainly raises the stakes for Animal Man's gruesome horror.  So far, this series has demonstrated a gift for slight suggestions to make your skin crawl.  The third Hunter's tongue-tentacle creeping up Ellen Baker's nose, for instance, is unnervingly gross.  However, the vision the emissary of the Rot gives to Buddy Baker is genuinely horrific.  If his bloated and puss-filled face weren't horrible enough, the vision of his Rot-corrupted daughter literally eating his still-living face off his skull is monstrous.  Since no superhero comic in history has ever allowed its villain to triumph so completely, the veracity of this vision is undoubtedly to be questioned, but it nevertheless presents Animal Man with a dangerous conundrum, one that potentially pits the survival of the world and his young daughter against the lives of the rest of his family, including his own.

Maxine, stronger than even she yet knows, feels her father is losing his fight and summons the animals in the woods around her grandmother's farm to his defense.  Unfortunately, this proves to be a trick of the Rot, which nests itself in those same living creatures, essentially hijacking them, infecting them like a plague.  And, also like a plague, this threat spreads.  Once it has been introduced into the animal kingdom, it will spread like wildfire until all the Red is infected by the perversion.  The Rot, as the Hunter so proudly proclaims as it is being devoured by the wildlife, has already won.

However harsh Mary Frazier is to Buddy in his absence, in the crisis itself the woman comes through, even showing a little of her humor.

Cliff notices former avatar of the Red, Socks, talking:  "The cat talks!"
Mary, clutching the cross around her neck:  "That you're surprised by?"
(Animal Man #5: 13)

She's a difficult woman to like, an easy one to understand, but when she cries after having to leave her dog behind in their sudden escape from her home, she's incredibly sympathetic.  After all, no one likes to see a dog die.

[May 2012]

Spaceman #8

"Floating Wait Less" (8 of 9)
written by Brian Azzarello
art by Eduardo Risso

Besides their genetically engineered origin, Orson and Carter share almost nothing in common.  Orson, though generally shunned because he's a Spaceman, yearns for community and recognizes the value of selflessness, or sometimes quite simply the value of people.  Carter is as self-serving as they come, quite literally amoral, willing to trade humans for a hefty bounty.  It's no wonder that Carter somewhat misunderstands Orson's arrangement with Lilly.  He sees it as the next best thing to sex, which of course he acquires for himself in all varieties.  For Orson, it's the next best thing to love.

In what is probably the most nightmarish perversion of a Kickstarter-style fund collection, Lilly's hired gun Lars has outsourced Tara's ransom to her fans.  Unfortunately for Tara, hostage situations make for compelling television, and her producers (and her "parents") are more interested in high ratings than her safety.

There are so many people in play in the kidnapping drama that it continues to be difficult to follow the plot.  Lilly, apparently within observation of Lars, intentionally overlooked Tara at the bridge in the previous issue.  The show producers continue to screw over everyone to get the most entertaining ending to the drama, including negotiating with current kidnapper Lars about the filmed "rescue" of Tara and initially unbeknownst to the police.  Her original kidnapper, the sheik, may or may not be employing Detective Wade's partner Cass to acquire Tara.  Alternately, his picture on her phone might mean she's tracked him down and is in no way in cahoots with any of the kidnappers.  Meanwhile, Carter—who is definitely hired by the sheik—doesn't kill Orson, despite stumbling on Tara's tracker with the corpses of the reality television crew and thus presumably not needing him anymore.  In return, Orson keeps Carter from killing himself on a booby trap, because, he says, he too might need Carter.  Whatever their differences, the two Spacemen seem particularly capable of working together.

The details of Azzarello's futuristic world continue to remain vague.  A few allusions in earlier issues to political turmoil and economic collapse may explain the abandonment of the Spaceman program, but the radical rise of the ocean, which explains the half-buried skyscrapers and underwater street signs must stem from some other perhaps environmental crisis.  Although one issue remains of Spaceman, I don't much anticipate these questions to be answered, nor do I find it particularly necessary.  Azzarello has postulated a world in which current dangers and close-to-home crises are each taken to their most logical extreme.  It makes the continuity of cultural distraction and the preoccupation with distant celebrity lives all the more resonant for the unfamiliarity of the city.

[September 2012]

Hawkeye #9

"Girls"
written by Matt Fraction
art by David Aja
colors by Matt Hollingsworth

Hawkeye proves romance can be brutal.  Fraction's series is quirky, clever and periodically hilarious.  Here Fraction shows he can really cut.  Clint's antics out of his Avengers uniform have landed him on the very bad side of the Marvel criminal elite.  He's battered, weary and depressed.  If an army of Tracksuit Mafia out for your head weren't oppressive enough, Cherry's—hereafter known by her real name, Darlene Penelope Wright, thanks to the killer spy skills of Black Widow—unannounced and physically affectionate arrival at the Avengers Mansion stirs up the women in Barton's life.

Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, is the first.  Given the title of "Work-Wife," she is refreshingly unconcerned about the romantic overtones to Barton's new dalliance.  She is overwhelmingly concerned only with identifying the woman and her motives, managing the consequences of the criminal (or probably criminal) actions of the couple, and minimizing the damage both to Barton himself and to his reputation as an Avenger.  She's all business, and despite her stunning looks and sincere concern, she's as far from a love interest as Fraction could write.  Instead, Darlene Penelope Wright reveals herself to be more emotionally invested than it might have seemed at the end of the previous issue.  She leaves the affair in a dust-cloud of frustration and with a number of mafia thugs and super villains on her tail, but her concern for her lover is easily as genuine as Romanoff's, even if her final message is itself a cryptic instruction as much as worry for his well-being.

Clint's romantic failures are, at least in his mind, all his fault.  No doubt, he's reluctant to commit.  Remember how long it took him to even unpack?  He's exceptionally guarded.  Kate seems to be the only superhero who knows where he lives in Brooklyn.  And he, like so many, is understandably attracted to mysterious and dangerous women.  She's amazing—driving a vintage muscle car, sending safe combinations by comic books, looking every bit like Faye Dunaway playing Red Riding Hood—but Cherry's a hazard to his physical and emotional health.  Bobbi Morse, his now ex-wife, who takes the initiative to finalize their divorce after seeing him kiss another woman, seems—here, at least—to be entirely unconcerned about distributing the blame.  Sometimes relationships don't work out, and when they don't, the fault is almost always mutual, if there is even fault at all.  These two share a bond and a rapport they'll probably keep as long as they know one another, but the divorce is right and amicable, even if it just highlights for Clint just another failure.

It's a cautionary tale against workplace romance.  As a non-regular Marvel reader, I have to admit I'm only partially informed about the details and status of Clint's relationship with fellow superhero Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, and I'm invested even less.  Whatever Jessica understands about their relationship and whatever Clint has led her to believe—she thinks she's his girlfriend, he labels her his "friend-girl," whatever exactly that means—there's little prior evidence in Hawkeye that there's another (current) significant love interest in his Clint's life.  It makes her stunned reaction to the arrival of Cherry, her hurt at Clint's fling with the dangerous bombshell, and her mostly selfish, overly hurtful, and at least partially untrue lambasting difficult to sympathize with.  Clint's clearly in trouble.  Cherry knows it, because she brought on a lot (but not all) of it; Natasha, Bobbi, and Kate all recognize it.  Jessica is too blinded by her own heartbreak to care about anything else.  She even manipulates Kate into giving up Clint's address, presumably out of concern for him, but really only to bitch him out for all his romantic wrongdoings.  Then she shows up at his door and slaps him twice, an inexcusable physical assault that I'm relieved Barton calls her out on.  Women shouldn't get that privilege any more than men.  She may have cause to be angry at his infidelity, if indeed they were an actual couple and not another case of superhero bed-hopping, but she has no claim to berate him for his now-ended marriage to Bobbi or cast judgment on his value as a person.  It's low and petty, even if it's familiar and emotionally credible.

Clint Barton—whom I hesitate to call the "titular character"—gets most of Hawkeye's face time, but Kate Bishop is its brightest star.  In an issue structured on Clint's relationships with the most important women in his life, Kate defies category, because unlike the others, she is not actually defined by her relationship to Clint.  As she so boldly, defiantly, and accurately declares to a haughty and departing Jessica Drew, "Oh, yeah?  Well, I don't hang out with him.  He hangs out with me!" (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 85 [9: 18]).  I would call for her to get her own series except I kind of hope that Hawkeye will periodically be it.

Fraction has commonly manipulated Hawkeye's chronology without a great deal of explanation.  Certainly "Girls" is told at least partially out of sequence, since Jessica and Kate's confrontation with Clint must precede Bobbi's, a strategy that allows Fraction to present the characters in their increasing importance to Clint:  Black Widow, Mockingbird, Spider-Woman, Kate, though according to their title cards, the final two could arguably be inverted.  However, it also casts interesting doubt on the chronological placement of its final rooftop scene.  In sequence, Barton would doubtless be going to write an apology letter to Drew, who had just blown up at him, but out of sequence it could just as easily be to Cherry, who left at the end of the previous issue after a similarly hostile disagreement.  But this mystery, however suggestive, is preempted by the sudden and, to me at least, unexpected shooting of Grills by a new face-painted villain, whose logo behind the issue's ubiquitous heart was also seen spray-painted on the garage door by the very street thugs Hawkeye previously chased away and who was subsequently seen in the background loitering around the building when Kate arrives.  Grills might have been a relatively minor character, but he occupied a very personal and close place in Barton's life.  He was, perhaps more than anyone but Kate and sometimes more than Kate, a confidant for Clint.  Perhaps because he's just a regular guy—one with good advice, strong personal loyalty, and apparently a new puppy that looks a lot like Lucky—his unceremonious death was a real blow.  Grills, you'll be missed.

[June 2013]

As collected in Hawkeye: Little Hits  (ISBN: 978-0785165637)

Crossing Midnight #3

"The Shrine"
(Part 3 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

The gulf between Kaikou and Toshi continues to grow.  As Kai is semi-abducted into another world by a poem, his lost childhood friend, and a dragon demi-god, Toshi steals a pistol from the local bad-boy and drug dealer.

Carey's pacing for his series is deliberate, giving away almost nothing in cheap exposition.  We readers, like his characters, discover this world and its mysterious stakes as Kai and Toshi slip farther and farther into this world that they don't understand.  Aratsu's smile at the end of the issue is all the more sinister because we, like Toshi, do not know exactly why or how his plans are coming to fruition.

"She though she saw Aratsu smile as he beckoned her to follow him.  And it seemed likely enough.  Because everything had come full circle.  And everything hd turned out exactly as he wished it."  (Crossing Midnight #3: 23)

It's all the more fearsome in light of the foreboding warnings Kaikou receives earlier in the issue.  Less a warning than a threat of death, Rinjin, the dragon demi-god, makes clear his desire that Toshi refuse Aratsu's final request, which of course she doesn't to save her mother's life.  Rinjin's information about Aratsu is useful if still somewhat vague and difficult to piece together, but it's Police Constables Sato and Yamada's crystal clear note, an unmistakable allusion to the unusual birth of the Hara twins on either side of midnight, that really rattles Kaikou. 

By the end of "The Shrine," Toshi has foolishly accepted the terms of her father's sacrifice before their birth, agreeing to become servant to Aratsu.  The mysterious "Master of Swords," as he calls himself, brings the story well into a world adjacent but entirely unfamiliar to the world in which Toshi and Kaikou were raised.  And Kai already feels the dissonance, the loss of normalcy which nearly brings him to tears.

[March 2007]

Dial H #0

"Sundial H for Hero"
written by China Miéville
art by Riccardo Burchielli

DC's "Zero Month" couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time for Dial H, since it interrupts the series just before its last issue in its first story-arc.  That said, "Sundial H for Hero" capitalizes on the mythology-building potential of, if not an "origin" story, an early chapter in its history to introduce some very compelling and substantial twists.

Laodice is a particularly fine protagonist, one that could easily carry her own mini-series.  Under attack by what at first seems to be an invading army but turns out to be a giant Middle Eastern dragon Mušhuššu made famous by the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, she uses the mysterious sundial to call up a hero to battle the beast.  Dialing one of the ten symbols each of four days at noon, despite being derided as crazy by her fellow citizens, she becomes Bumper Carla, a fierce, brassy heroine in jeans, polka dots, and an electrified bumper car, who defeats the devastating dragon.

And that's only half the story.  Years later Stratonice, a girl during the dragon attacks, returns from her travels seeking additional knowledge about the mysterious dial that saved their home.  She returns without success, but she attracted attention with her questions and arrives back home to find a strange prisoner asking about the Dialer.  Unfortunately, in the melee with the dragon, the Dial was inadvertently destroyed.  Thinking the stranger an assassin or a wizard who would be enraged with this knowledge, Laodice keeps her secret and refuses to speak to the prisoner.

The real surprise, however, is the arrival of Bumper Carla herself.  Before this, the Dials presumably had manifested superpowers for their users out of nothing.  Confronted with the very hero she dialed hurling accusations of theft and murder, Laodice—and, by extension, we readers—realizes that dialed powers are borrowed, or perhaps stolen, powers.  The consequences of Laodice saving her own people from the dragon is that many in Carla's world were killed.  To avenge them, Bumper Carla kills Laodice and willingly faces banishment to the "still zone" by Slim, unconvinced that her accusations of spirit theft could possibly be true.  In one deft swoop, Miéville has exponentially enhanced the stakes of his series.

Superheroes:  Bumper Carla, Dead Hood, Arrowmaid, The Needler, Power Squirrel, Nuclear Punch, Slim

[November 2012]

FF #4

"Escalation"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

The worst date saboteurs of all time make "Escalation" a delightful—and occasionally sober and a little sad—issue.  Alex Power is an idealistic teenager with a principled but unrealistic attitude toward superhero political intervention, and he ill-advisedly turns his idealism on Scott Lang, pushing buttons with a brazen, adolescent insensitivity.  And while the right to govern is a complicated diplomatic matter subject to cultural prejudices, Power's particular brand of idealism is poorly considered and overly simplistic.  Scott Lang's response is understandably, if equally unadvisedly, brusque and hot-headed.  Lang may be lovable to FF's readers, but as Jen Walters mentions to Wyatt, the FF is full of "kids that just are not taking to Scott, who's either too smothering or too aloof" (FF #4: 11).

Troubles at the FF aside, Jen's maybe-date with Wyatt Wingfoot is adorable.  The Moloids, who've attached themselves to Jen in the absence of the Thing, have also developed little crushes on She-Hulk, and when they find out about her dinner with a friend, they decide to team up with future mastermind Bentley-23 to sabotage the date.  Except everything they do ends up improving the date.  Trying to coerce the maître d' to do something "unimaginable" to them over dinner, he ends up footing the bill for the restaurant and giving a bottle of wine to every table.  Attempting to interrupt their date by stirring up Blarrgh the Lost Leviathan of New Amsterdam, they end up lighting up the ice under the couple's bridge in the snow.  Trying to light a fire with a stolen Fantastic Four device to distract them from their conversation, the saboteurs succeed only in turning up the heat in their bar and luring them onto the dance floor.  Upon discarding their failed plan, they light up the sky in a warm pink, providing a romantic light for the lovers' kiss.

The final reveal in the episode is certainly troubling.  Medusa, who earlier in the issue taunted the old Johnny Storm into losing his temper by questioning his identity, sneaks into Bentley-23's room, consoles him about the failure of his plans, and reassures him that she wants him to achieve his destiny, which as he understands it is to become a super villain.  Trouble may very well be underfoot at the Future Foundation, but it's not because of Scott Lang.

[April 2013]

Swamp Thing #6

"The Black Queen"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Marco Rudy

"The Black Queen" is about Marco Rudy's dark deathscapes.  The Parliament of Trees is burning, William is absolutely convinced of the Rot's victory, and Abby is being absorbed and cocooned by the Rot's dead emissaries, but it's the visions of destruction—the victory of the Rot—that propels this issue.  Cities of bones and rotting flesh, chess queens built of corpses, and swarms of undead birds attacking Holland provide the tone for the issue, since little happens in the plot.

Emotionally, Swamp Thing hits the right notes, even if they're not particularly deep.  They try to be, don't get me wrong, and I like the burgeoning romance between Alec and Abby, the echoes of simultaneously familiar and distant feelings.  However, Swamp Thing has had neither the time nor the story to earn the kind of dramatic turn it attempts here.  However, Alec's change of mind, his regret at failing to assume the mantle of Swamp Thing earlier, seems genuine less because the Parliament is falling than because he doesn't have the strength yet to defend Abby.  His pleading to make him the Swamp Thing is for her, to mount a rescue of her from the Bone Kingdom and to keep her from the horrible transformation that apparently awaits her.  Abby's plea for death is perhaps more difficult to accept just yet, but her defense of Alec as he makes his escape is not.

[April 2012]

Severed #4

Part Four, "Stealing Home"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
pencils and colors by Attila Futaki
inks by Bill Nelson

The monster now going by the name of Alan Fisher gets some kind of thrill out telling the horrible truth about himself and not being believed.  Still suspicious of the phonograph salesman with little knowledge of phonographs, Sam contacts the office number on his business card and arranges a meeting with Fisher's boss.  Unfortunately for her, Fisher is very savvy and lures her to a run-down diner far out of town before ambushing her and, by all indications, killing her and eating her.

Severed is a horror fable about vulnerability and the deep fear of not knowing whom to trust.  Jack Brakeman believes whom he wants to believe.  He wants to believe in his absent father and is willing to make excuses for him despite not knowing anything really about him.  He wants to believe that the old music man who gave them food and coddles his young ego is a helpful and honest man.  He mistrusts Sam, despite her consistently proving her trustworthiness, because she questions his credulous faith in strangers.  Unlike Jack, whose life with Katherine—whom he's treating with unacceptable disrespect—has sheltered him from real danger, Sam has experienced betrayal again and again, from family and strangers, and she has the bullet in her scalp to prove it.  After a brief falling out, Sam and Jack make up, and make out.  As a show of trust, he gives her his wallet, and when she leaves the next day with his fiddle to get it restrung while she's meeting Fisher's boss, he shows no doubt in her.  But when Sam fails to return with his things, he suspects the worst and takes her for a thief rather than worrying for her well-being.  When the man known as Fisher returns his fiddle with a flimsy story, Jack once again takes him at his word.

Jack is, it seems, more alone than ever and easily lost in the underground, friendless and without his mother even knowing where he is or where he's headed.  He's without his wallet and his independence, making him even more reliant on the child-eater Fisher to get to Mississippi.  And his instincts about people are as poor and unrefined as they come.

Starman #4

"A Day in the Opal"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Jack continues to bring his off-beat pop culture perspective to bear on his fledgling superhero career.  He may have grown up in a superhero family, but he never understood their world the way they saw it.  Instead, he makes sense of his own life through the things he loves:  pop artifacts from bygone eras, art house film, urban myth, and his city's art and architecture.

"What?  No.  Look, I hate to sound rude, but this is all a bit too...   ...Bergmanesque for me.  Weird, half-finished bits of sentences.  Strange stares.  Pregnant pauses.  That might work in a Calvin Klein commercial, but not with me.  Actually, I'm thinking of Felliniesque, aren't I?  Man, how embarrassing... getting my "esques" mixed up."  (Starman #4: 14)

And he's talking to just the right man:  the Shade, who also sees his own life in its relation to the art of his age, loves Opal City and its textured past, and suspects Jack might be something special that he doesn't even yet realize.

Robinson's prose can get a little purple; his description of the music of Opal City—admittedly in the florid imagination of Jack Knight himself—is humorously absurd.  But his ability to quietly give a fairytale tone to his superhero series is welcome.  This is nowhere more apparent than in his description of the mystical Hawaiian shirt, designed by mysterious artist Harry Ajax and supposedly showing the way to heaven.  Likewise, the shirt—never shown in the issue, but sold by Knight out of his new stock to a representative of Swiss businessman Albert Bekker, who disappeared (like Ajax himself) immediately after procuring it—is joined by another supernatural pop-art artifact, an animated street poster that sucks in a melancholy passerby.  Neither attracts much attention from Starman, yet, who's more preoccupied with re-establishing his shop.

[February 1995]

Colder #5

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

Apparently 0ºF is the perfect temperature for crazy.  Nimble Jack, having followed Declan and Reece back from the Hunger World and ambushed them in her kitchen, returns with Declan for the world's most sinister date night:  wine, candles, and conversation before Jack eats Declan's mind out of his living body.  Most of their dinner conversation is more of the same—Nimble Jack's malevolent and arrogant prodding and mockery, succulent but familiar—but it takes a turn for the interesting when they return to the asylum to revisit Declan's incarceration and the fire that let Jack into our world.

Declan's life before the asylum has remained a persistent mystery in Colder, but it's a mystery that Jack brings to our unsuspecting attention.  "Do you remember why you were brought here?  No?  You have a remarkable story, you know.  Oh, it's a happy tale of murders.  A hanging.  Betrayal.  And monsters, Declan.  Forty monsters.  Each one with a secret....  You were a monster, Declan.  An absolute monster" (Colder #5: 5).  Certainly, Tobin had dropped ominous hints about Declan's past, particularly since he was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, but Declan's potential for violence hasn't been fully appreciated in the story until this issue.  As yet, even when he does morally questionable things, he does his best to rectify them, but his battle with Nimble Jack is supremely violent.

Once Nimble Jack wakes him back up, Declan puts a wooden post through his eye from under his jaw; bashes a wine bottle down his throat, breaking most of his teeth with apparent glee; punches him viciously and with pleasure in his genitals; crushes him with a wine bottle again; lets loose the dog-monsters from Hunger World, which Reece has to look away from; and ultimately sucks away Nimble Jack's mind/life just as Jack did others.  There's moment—mostly as Jack explodes and Declan manically exclaims, "And after all those decades, after these past couple of days, after all those times of you telling me everything gets hungry...   ...did you still think you were the only one?" (22)—when he seemed dangerously close to assuming Nimble Jack's role, which makes it so relieving when he settles back against the wall with Reece and into an awkwardly sweet and embarrassing conversation about his feelings for her.

American Vampire #11

"The Way Out," Part Two
written by Scott Snyder
art by Mateus Santolouco

Despite Skinner Sweet's reputation and his seemingly never-ending feud with his inadvertent vampire makers, the existence of the American vampires Pearl and Sweet doesn't appear to have gained extensive currency among other vampire groups, who continue not to recognize Pearl and to be correspondingly arrogant prior to confrontations with her.  Pearl, almost single-handedly, destroys Little Feet Beale's entire blood-smuggling operation and the nest of vampires he caters to.  She's a natural and electric killer even though her lifestyle means she gives into that very infrequently.  And Henry does his part, chasing down Beale and his fellow bootleggers.

Pearl's constant fear that Henry will finally realize who and what she really is, that he already wants to leave her or is already almost gone, is sweet and sensitive to the very real problems with their romance.  Henry's response is equally sweet and considered.  He is growing old.  They've been married for more than a decade, obviously without children or hope of them.  His mortality is closer than ever, especially still bearing the bruises and wounds from their fatal altercation with Beale and his associates, and perhaps for the first time, both Henry and Pearl acknowledge that the idea of turning Henry has crossed their minds.  But not now, if ever, and not for fear.

Hattie, meanwhile, sporting her Black-Dahlia/Man-Who-Laughs smile scars, continues to hunt down Pearl, chasing her by memories she has of their friendship.  Hattie's status as an American vampire continues to go unexplained, so much so that I will likely return to the previous volume to double-check my recollection of her transformation.  In a pleasant surprise of storytelling chronology, Snyder pulls the rug out from under reader expectations on this one.  I had, I think not accidentally, assumed that the action in the two storylines was simultaneous, that Hattie would be waiting for Pearl and Henry when they returned home from Beale's bar.  Instead, the events at the roadhouse had taken place six months earlier, after which the couple had moved out and on.  Hattie's desired confrontation with Pearl is thereby averted for the moment.

Santolouco's work really jumps off the page in the second of the two-issue arc.  The two-page spread early in the roadhouse fight between Pearl and the other vampires is particularly fine, Santolouco's central figures breaking the panel boundaries around the remainder of the page.  This is, in fact, his best work so far in the series.

[March 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1401230692)

The Legend of Luther Strode #4

written by Justin Jordan
art by Tradd Moore
colors by Felipe Sobreiro

Jack is a connoisseur.  His style is acrobatic, flexible, and as sharp as his knives.  In contrast, Luther is dramatically blunt, relying on his raw strength and physical resilience, and for this issue at least, he matches Jack as they trade blows, but is unable to defeat him, even in the verbal sparring.  Especially in the verbal sparring.  Quite honestly, Luther should probably stop talking during fights altogether.  For Jack, conversation is the flavor to the fight.

"It is a blasphemy, I know, but I've always thought that was a shortcoming of the book... that it does nothing to instill a sense of aesthetics in students.  After all, what is life...   ...without beauty?"  (The Legend of Luther Strode #4: 5)

Apparently Jack is also an aesthete of the Pater variety, suitable to his late-19th-century era if not perhaps to Whitechapel.  Binder is a more faithful and orthodox disciple.  A believer.

During Jack and Luther's long and athletic brawl, Mike Hill's been a gruesome decorative fixture hanging from the balcony and matching the drapes, even in the first few panels, but he draws more attention later when Duvall returns home to find the young man strung up and disemboweled.  He and Petra once again find themselves unexpectedly on the same side, though the side may have changed.  After a quite delicate and knowingly resigned exchange between them, he quite helpfully directs her to the gun room.  Petra's beaming elation at the sight of the well-stocked armory is easily the issue's most delightful moment, but it's the unmasking of Luther by Binder and Jack that is its most surprising, a small mark of real defeat and a sign of his vulnerability.  As such, Petra—newly armed with a Cagney-style tommy gun and a collection of side arms—is poised, if precariously with Jack looming above her, to save Luther again.

Animal Man #4

"The Rot"
The Hunt, Part Four
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman
inks by Jeff Huet and Travel Foreman

Like Swamp Thing's Alec Holland, Buddy Baker finds his family, his personal life, caught in the crossfire of competing life (and un-life) forces, and unfortunately for him, his only teachers in the Red are the Parliament of Limbs, a collection of fused-flesh former avatars.  In the words of Ignatius, a.k.a. Socks, the avatar who chooses to leave the Red to help Baker and Maxine, "No price is too steep to protect the child.  You know that.  Your years here have made you complacent" (Animal Man #4: 14).  Though most may once have been human, they are no longer.  They see only the epic potential of young Maxine and cannot sympathize with Buddy's paternal love, though they have no trouble exploiting it.

She's extremely difficult to like, but the inclusion of Ellen's mother in the Baker family dynamic adds to the credibility of Lemire's Animal Man.  Baker's too damn lovable to warrant his in-law's unfettered criticism, but it can't be easy watching your grandchildren live so close to a world so dangerous.  The irony, of course, is that it's not at all Buddy Baker who's brought the danger into their family, but Maxine herself, for whose protection Buddy was granted the special powers he uses as a superhero.  It certainly undermines the possible validity of Mary Frazier's shrewishness.

Foreman has delivered excellent and creepy artwork for Lemire's unusual anatomical story demands, but here he really gets to shine.  The conclusion to Animal Man's fight with the two Hunters is all flesh and muscly sinews, but it's Maxine's full-page explosion of the Hunters over her father's bloated, misshapen body (4) is beautifully grotesque.  Likewise, the two-page spread illustrating the perversion of the Hunters Three, former avatars of the Red seduced by the promise of power beyond life, is a fine use of negative space and organic, fluid lines (11-12).

[February 2012]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #3

"The Paradigm Shift," Part Three
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

That's more like it, FBP!  After an excellent start and a solid—if heavily expository—follow-up, FBP delivers its finest early issue, a rapid action thriller and corporate conspiracy fable.

Adam's a little antagonistic, a little too rigid in his own rugged professionalism when it comes to anomalies in physics.  Part of it, no doubt, is cultivated federal-agency swagger and masculine bravado, but we learn here, part of it is personal, Adam's way of reclaiming his birth-father's profession and disassociating himself from his distant and unsympathetic stepfather.

"But the way I saw it, when your old man bails on your birth to go chasing quantum tornados and never comes back...   ...well maybe you've got some unfinished business with physics."  (FBP #3: 2)

Unfortunately for Adam, one of his few friends, fellow FBP agent and partner Jay, is a back-stabbing saboteur, whose dealings with shady corporate tycoons have cornered him into killing Adam and exploding the Bubbleverse into the real world.  Adam is, by his own admission, ironically saved by screwy physics.  Jay's unequivocally villainous actions are somewhat mitigated by his seemingly sincerity at having to betray his partner and his slouched and resigned demeanor at carrying out his criminal task.  Fortunately for Adam, another of his friends, though he would unlikely have considered him nearly as close as Jay prior to his most recent FBP assignment, Cicero is compulsively attentive to details and detects some of Jay's mysterious behavior as well as the strange departure of a truck from the Bubbleverse location, and correctly hypothesizes the nefarious meaning of those things.

Mr. James Crest, disgraced CEO and recent object of a lengthy, high-profile SEC investigation, is an interesting choice of target for Adam and a fine foil for Jay's bosses, who aim to force privatization of physics-related emergency response by catastrophically exploding the Bubbleverse into the real world thereby proving the FBP's ineptitude.  This is corporate espionage at its most violent.  Adam is diligent in his task to save the executive despite his obvious antipathy toward Crest and his business history.

Robbi Rodriguez's artwork continues to impress.  Admittedly, it's more about the pop art possibilities of alternate universes and Cicero's hair, but it's still damn fun to enjoy.  Rico Renzi's colors are unusually bold, but set a dynamic, flashy, otherworldly tone to the series.  Everything's just a little too technicolor to be perfectly familiar, our world but slightly unstable.  His colors pair excellently with Rodriguez's artwork, including full-page gems like Adam and Mr. Crest's escape from the Bubbleverse rooftop (15).

[November 2013]

Station to Station (one-shot)

written by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman
art by Gabriel Hardman

Physicist Tim, a researcher in San Francisco affiliated with Berkley, is one of a team of scientists that creates a machine to provide mankind insight into alternative timelines.  Unexpectedly, their machine allows creatures from those timelines to invade their research island, including one enormous, partially transparent, levitating, mind-controlling alien monster.

"I thought we were building a window....  It turned out to be a door."  (Station to Station: 15)

Station to Station is Bechko and Hardman's homage to classic, eerie sci-fi, in the vein of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and kaiju horror.  It's a tight-knit tale with enough collateral effects to make one salivate for more.

After the mysterious explosion which took out the Bay Bridge and seemingly all of Treasure Island, Tim emerges from unconsciousness amid the littered remains of other worlds:  an unfamiliar and creepy crustacean, a crashed alien spacecraft, a prehistorically large crocodile with extra-long teeth, and some kind of space gun that his friend and fellow scientist Luis claims to have just found, which considering the rest of the debris isn't too hard to believe.  Meanwhile, the mainland is at a loss to explain the explosion or the absence of life signs on the island.  Tim's proximity to the rift opened by his machine—a proximity which also gives him the sight of an imminent invasion of alien monsters ready to enter their world—provides him with a useful immunity to the creature's mind-control powers, but to the rest of the world, it remains entirely cloaked and imperceptible.  And it's using the island's surviving residents to rebuild a larger machine to facilitate their invasion.

Tim's heroic moment is the fantasy of young boys everywhere.  Stealing Luis's space gun and hitching a ride on a saddled pterodactyl, which similarly got sucked through the alternative-timeline rift, he uses the gun to improvise a bomb.  The force of the explosion temporarily reveals the monster—only for one frame in most video equipment—to the outside world, who are then able to target their military response accordingly.  The final twist Station to Station offers isn't particularly unexpected, but it's still so well-executed that it impresses.  Even more intriguing and delightful, the clean-up crews responsible for rounding up the timeline detritus, like stray dinosaurs, makes for humorous background illustrations and promising potential for future installments should Bechko and Hardman revisit this world.

Collects a story originally printed in Dark Horse Presents #19-21

Hawkeye #8

"My Bad Penny"
written by Matt Fraction
art by David Aja with Annie Wu
colors by Matt Hollingsworth

Oh my, Clint.  You've done it now!  This is what you would call a Valentine's Day issue.  Cherry returns and, once again, she brings trouble.  This time she's shot—but not killed—her husband, son of the oxygen-dependent leader of the "tracksuit draculas" over a red safe, whose contents are (apparently) a matter of life and death.  She's stunning and she's got quite a hold on Barton.  So it's no surprise, especially to his ex-wife—"Clint Barton, ladies and gentlemen.  The ever-unchanging Clint Barton" (Hawkeye: Little Hits: 51 [8: 4])—that he agrees to follow her to a sleazy strip club, beat up a bunch of patrons and employees, and risk incarceration and losing his Avengers membership to retrieve said safe.  No big surprise, all those things happen.

The real surprise comes when Cherry (real name: Penny) admits that the comic books she's been sending Clint are the key to opening the safe, since she doesn't actually remember the combination.  And Clint, fool that he is, actually read the comics and got them out of order.  Exasperated and a little huffy, Penny leaves Clint to pick up the mess he created for her.

Part of that mess: Clint Barton has landed soundly on the criminal radar.  Penny's father-in-law seeks approval from Kingpin and an entire boardroom table full of Marvel's criminal elite to kill Hawkeye.  Reluctantly, they grant it.  Though, to be fair, they may be less intimidating than the other women in Clint's life:  Black Widow, ex-wife Mockingbird, maybe-girlfriend Spider-Woman, and fellow Hawkeye Kate Bishop.

As always, Aja's work on the title is amazing, but this issue's standout is Annie Wu, the artist responsible for Cherry's romance comic covers:  "Doomed Love," "Mystery Girl," "A Girl Like You!," "Love Crimes," and "Love Fugitive".  In addition to being technically gorgeous and giving not-so-subtle hints about Cherry's bad-girl past, they strike just the right balance between comical and pulpy.

[April 2013]

As collected in Hawkeye: Little Hits  (ISBN: 978-0785165637)

Swamp Thing #5

"Dead Meat"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

If William Arcane's slaughterhouse beasts, the assembled parts of dead cattle and pigs, weren't disgusting enough, their evisceration by Holland's roots and trees is downright stomach-churning.  In lesser hands, Snyder's relatively sparse action sequence would have floundered as boring, but Paquette brings his lush illustration style to the grotesque party.  Details—including, for example, the boa and monkey in the opening illustration and the faces in the trees of the Parliament in the last—more than compensate for the sparse dialogue in the issue.

As before, scenes shared by Alec and Abby are periodically stellar.  The two, even when providing little more than exposition, show significant sparks, and for the most part, neither knows what to think or do about it.  Are their feelings any less real because they're somehow reliant on the memories of a dead former Swamp Thing?  Does he know her less because he knows her through another's experiences?  How much of her lover was always Holland, the consciousness Swamp Thing absorbed?  How much was not?  As Alec says, "This is a place between" (Swamp Thing #5: 6).  Either way, she remains the thing he's most willing to fight for.  Each of them, recalling memories of each other from their childhoods, before the other Swamp Thing ever was, feel certain they are warned to stay away from one another.  Perhaps their attraction is a result of each one's perverse stubbornness to resist the call of their respective dominions:  Green and Rot.  Perhaps, though, their perverse stubbornness is the result of their attraction.  Even as the Rot has invaded the Parliament of Trees and William is maniacally and gleefully certain of the Rot's victory, Alec and Abby share their first kiss, something their own and surely we are meant to see a victory, probably much greater, there as well.

[March 2012]