This is mostly just a few new books that have cropped up in the last couple of months. Assume my opinions haven't changed on anything else.
Albion 1: (Leah Moore and John Reppion, part 1) I don't know the characters and often can't tell them apart. I don't know what's going on. I have only a glimmer of interest in finding out. Not recommended.
Wild Girl 1-2: (Leah Moore and John Reppion, part 2) I picked this up out of the back-issue bin to give it a chance. At least I can tell mostly what's going on, which goes a long way toward kindling my interest. Art, you see, is an indispensable component of comic-book storytelling. There's a big difference between Shawn McManus and Shane Oakley in terms of clarity. No recommendation.
Batman: Dark Detective 3-5: This continues to be entertaining, if weirdly inked and moderately over-talky. Recommended.
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight 192-193: I know a guy who knows Dan Johnson well, so when he mentioned that Johnson had a big Batman story coming out, I figured I could do worse than take a look. Johnson's regular collaborator J.H. Williams III contributes to the story, but not to the art, which is, of course, sub-optimal, given Williams' phenomenal talent, though Seth Fisher's art is adequate to the task. This appears to be a combination of the Animated Series origin of Mr. Freeze with Batman experimenting with a pulp hero-style group of operatives. The former, of course, is a great story. The latter is going to end badly. Mildly recommended.
Astro City: Dark Age 1: Mostly exposition, with not a lot of meat. I'm not yet interested in the two focus characters. Mildly recommended.
Between Didio's Infinite Crisis, McDuffie's Justice League Unlimited, and Busiek's Dark Age, we're getting a lot of norms-hate-and-fear-superheroes. Yeah, um: Yawn. They're superheroes. They selflessly save people. They go around stopping other people from using weird powers to subjugate humanity. So, y'know, hating and fearing them is irrational. It's not particularly fun to read about.
The Dead Boy Detectives: The cover art is so cute as to temporarily overwhelm my cuteness receptors, rendering me incapable of rationality. Inside, it's pretty much exactly what I expected, which is a light and entirely absurd story with excellent cartooning by Jill Thompson, who is sufficiently whimsical as to deserve some sort of national medal. Recommended.
Girls 1-2: I like it. I think I like it marginally less well than Ultra, at least so far, and I think the Luna Brothers may be on the verge of believing their reviews a little too much. Nonetheless, whatever these guys are doing, they're clearly doing it well inside my entertainment zone. Recommended.
Dream Police: A one-shot by J. Michael Straczynski and Mike Deodato from a special imprint of Marvel which, remarkably, does not say "Marvel" on it. Some kind of experiment, presumably. It's a fairly obvious fantasy riff on Dragnet, especially if you've read Sandman. It kept my attention throughout. Deodato's art has evolved considerably since his early days of mimicking the Image founders, and generally for the better; here, he looks remarkably like Brent Anderson, which is a good thing. Recommended.
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: This collects the original twelve-chapter biography of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. If you like duck comics, this is an extraordinary example of the art. If you don't, there's probably not much hope for you. I would like to see the half-dozen or so interstitial chapters that Rosa has subsequently added collected, but then I'd happily queue up for any Rosa collection. Highly recommended.
Posted by Greg at July 11, 2005 11:15 AM