Batman: Jekyll & Hyde - excellent...dark, impressive artwork from Jae Lee, one of the bright stars of comic art right now...wonderful exploration of Harvey Dent's background, aspects of which hadn't been written before but fit seemlessly and should probably replace any origin that's come before...little more psycho-drama with Batman/Bruce than I would've cared for, but still a very strong entry into the canon...
Superman: Last Son - I dug this one, too...two for two this week...Richard Donner (director of the Superman & Superman II Christopher Reeve flicks) writes this with Geoff Johns who seems to be all over DC for the past couple of years...basic plot - General Zod and Ursa have a son in the phantom zone...son comes to Earth and is taken by US government...Supermans steals kid back to raise him with Lois...General breaks free from phantom zone and wrecks the place...Superman ultimately prevails but not without a heartbreak...
the relationships worked for me, the sadness between Superman and Lois that they can't have a kid but that this might be their chance at having one...Chris's sudden affinity for his new father after years in the phantom zone (though I'd think there would be some psychological problems if he's willing to glom onto Supes in like two panels)...the fight scenes worked for me (though the lack of one when Zod & his crue take over the entirety of Earth and whup the JLA seems a glaring oversight)...
the artwork worked...Kubert does a great job of using facial expressions to tell the underlying story...and the 3d section worked, too...neat way to distinguish the phantom zone from the "real world"...
and I dug bringing back Mon-El in the phantom zone...
we could have another interesting time in the DC universe with the melding of golden/silver/modern age aspects into something really cool if things keep up...
I understand the complaints lobbed at the book, however...apparently the delays were bad in initial publishing (not a problem in trade paperback)...the logic of how the phantom zone is breached (and that breach subsequently sealed) is really shaky at best...the presence of the JLA coupled with the fact that they exist in the story for like two panels is befuddling...Jor-El's inability to recognize his son...
all are correct criticisms...
and the story still worked really well for me...
Batman: Lovers & Madmen - reprinted from Batman Confidential #7-12...origin story of the Joker with a lot of new elements...should work because it's plumbing depths that a hundred other writers have dreged until there shouldn't be anything left...and it's the best thing I read this week...marvelous, wonderful story of Batman and the Joker beginning their dance...
I'm just going to reprint a review from Buffalo Rising Online because they say it very well...
Let’s get something straight right off the, well, off the bat, here. Alan Moore’s Batman: Killing Joke is damn near as perfect a Batman story if ever there was one. In addition to The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller, Lynn Varley), Batman: Year One (Frank Miller, David Mazuchelli), Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison/Dave McKean) and more recently, Batman: Year 100 (Paul Pope, Jose Villarubia), there is none better. Each one of these titles raised the bar on the adult graphic novel in a way that their contemporaries weren’t capable or talented enough to brush the bottom of. And along comes Batman: Lovers & Madmen.I would actually put this one above Batman: 100 Years as the best Batman tale I've seen come out in a few years...excellent, revelatory stuff...
This handsome hardcover hits the soft reboot on the Joker’s origin story in the same fashion that Batman Begins flipped the film mythos on its ear. When I saw that Michael Green (the screenwriter of NBC’s hit show Heroes) penned the story, I went into it with low expectations. And believe you me, I’ve read more than my share of Batman stories. In my mind, the Joker is the main character of the series and Batman is the garnish. So it takes a lot to impress me, but I keep buying the onslaught of hardcovers and graphic novels and one-shots, praying for that original rush. Lovers & Madmen hits the brain like a sledgehammer and doesn’t let up.
Much like a folk story, comic legends can change within the structure of the original construct. One great story can ripple back and add a new dimension, a separate viewpoint on the basic premise. In Lovers & Madmen (the working theory being that the Joker and his arch-nemesis are both full-tilt lunatics), we get a different take on how a sociopathic criminal thug with a warped sense of humor and little regard for the death of others, as well as his own, turned into perhaps one of the greatest supervillians of all time. Superhero stories are built on their criminals. This is why The Flash, Wonder Woman, and so many other footnotes are less popular, because their enemies aren’t fleshed out as well as the main protagonists. Michael Green writes the Joker so convincingly that it puts a lot of the other greats into serious question. Denys Cowan’s pencils complement the tale beautifully and grittily, with a rough style and a rugged landscape.
And I’ve got to agree with Brad Meltzer’s (Identity Crisis) introduction. There’s a panel shortly after Jack climbs out of the pharmaceutical drainage ditch to be reborn as the clown prince of evil where he looks at the moon and sees a bunny etched into the middle of the moon. Batman shows up and he calls him Bunny. It’s preposterous and brilliant at the same time. The Joker’s dialogue switches over in color as well as content to a sort of free-rambling bohemian ecstasy throughout the rest of the book, and his cavalier manner of super consciousness is bone-chilling and mythic.
The book closes out with the hypothesis that Batman created the Joker. That if he hadn’t eradicated the petty thieves, middlemen and power brokers in the underworld, there wouldn’t be a philosophical impetus for a villain with super powers, an unquenched bloodlust or an unmarked streak for vicious mass murder. And in turn, the Dark Knight Detective comes to the conclusion that he is his brother’s keeper, and that he’s responsible for rehabilitating the Joker whenever there are pieces to pick up.
As food for thought, it’s an all you can eat buffet. Bravo, Michael and Denys. This is the best Batman story I’ve read since Paul Pope’s Year 100. With the new film out, march into your local comic retailer and buy a copy before the bandwagon drives the price and the value of this precious volume through the roof. It is that good.
Hulk vs The Marvel Universe - all unconnected issues in which Hulk takes on various folks (Spider-Man, Thor, FF, Thing, Silver Surfer, Wolverine, Daredevil (?), Dr Strange, Fin-fang-foom) from around the Marvel-verse...boring...
most of the fights are abortive attempts by people who clearly wouldn't have the power to really stop the Hulk unless the writers wanted them to...or people who are just trying to talk the Hulk down while contradictorily smacking him around...
the collection stinks and is boring, especially after I read World War Hulk this past summer...WWH was much, much better than this uneven, era-hopping piece of crap...
Though my interwebs searching for a link did lead me to Ratchet's Hulk Collection which is really neat to skim through...
The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck - entertaining stuff...bringing back the old-school crossover stuff that George Perez draws so marvelously well...in my head, Perez is the artist for DC comics...as I've said before, the Golden Age of Comics is whenever the comic reader in question started reading them, and when I started, DC was all about George Perez...hence, I'm a little inclined to like this one...
and the collection doesn't disappoint...great use of the team-up format with the various teams nailing the characterizations spot on, especially the Supergirl-Hal Jordan pairing...and bringing the Legion of Super Heroes into the tale is always a good thing for me...
dig it...fun reading...
Batman: Going Sane - this one probably suffers badly from comparison to the far superior Lovers & Madmen...it's not a bad story of Joker & Batman, but it's certainly not as good as that other one this week...Batman "dies" at the hands of the Joker in the first issue, and the Joker is sent into a spiral of sanity as he realizes that he has finally achieved his life's only goal...an issue later, he wakes up and finds himself looking normal, living a normal life, dating a quiet girl from down the hall, and getting flashes from time to time of his former life...before Batman finally comes back to strike the final blow to Joseph Kerr's new mirror-tale life...
there's too much of the elongated-face Joker, the Joker in funny costume with corncob pipe for my tastes, but knowing these issues came about in the 80's helps me to understand...plus the tacked-on and only barely connected issue at the end of the collection doesn't help things at all...
skim it or skip it entirely...
Seven Soldiers of Victory - I have no idea at all how I would've read this story without having it collected...apparently the tale is told across seven four-issue series and two single-issue book-enders in whcih the seven soldiers become a kind of non-team team...each mini-series has a different artistic team - with the one from the Shining Night being far and away my favorite, though the very different Klarion is a close second.
each mini-series focused on the one character and their journey to finiding out and then battling the Sheeda, the whole tale's major villians...
in the collection, it's tough enough to read as the collections each gather issues 1&2 from one series and intersperse them with issues 2&3 from another...the reading is, therefore, very tricky, but I would imagine that reading them as the separate series themselves would have been equally as tough as each would tell the story to a certain point, then you would start the next series which would tell a concurrent tale from a different point of view, a tale that wouldn't intersect until somewhere along...
and if the tale weren't an engaging one (at least through the first two collections that I've read), it wouldn't be worth the struggle to keep the tales both separate and together in the mind...
I'm hoping to get the next two collections, because I'm currently two trades in and have no real idea where things are going other than the team of un-teamed heroes (necessary for reasons that a shadow guardian explains at the end of the second volume) have to save the world...
it's interesting, but I warn you that it'll be a tough read as it does seem disjointed for a very long time before the tale starts to come together...
Once I get through the other two volumes, I'll have to read all of the Collected Editions reviews...but I'm holding at the first two so far...
which is really tough...
And I think that's enough for me for now...I've got some comics to take back to the library...and I've got more reading on reserve...
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