I dunno...reviews...er...sumpin...

Buncha reading lately...'cause it's what I do...

First up, Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares...

• Echos the film, allowing Marvel to connect with new readers who might come to the comics thanks to interest in the movie.
• In spite of this, it's a heck of a good read.
• Good artwork, interesting story of Obadiah Stane's son plotting to kill Stark & Stark Industries.
• Pepper Potts pretty front character, again, echoing the movie.
• Stark still head of SHIELD but showing cracks of trying to hold that all together - SHIELD, Stark Industries, general superheroing, women, etc.

Next up, Batman: RIP...

• Here's another review - more from the middle of the story arc
• I dig the art style - nice lines, very vibrant colors, brilliant colors honestly.
• The impressionistic story-telling style, though, was a bit off for me. You really had to pay attention and make a few leaps between the story bits as the writer certainly wasn't leading you by the hand or making anything terrifically obvious for us.
• Love the use of Bat Mite as Batman's last bit of reason speaking in his head.
• The weirdo lack of resolution is frustrating to me and just drags the whole storyline out further than it needs to be.
• We're dropped smack dab in the middle of the story with Batman/Bruce Wayne already being in love with and having revealed his identity to Jezebel Jet - making it even tougher to follow things. Maybe this has all been building in the regular series for a while, but for a wait-for-trader who's picking this up without knowing all the background, it's really tough to follow.
• Apparently the rest of the storyline is being collected in Batman: Heart of Hush - maybe that'll help me understand what's happening.

Then there was Death of Captain America vol 1...vol 2...and vol 3...

• Spreads over three trades, taking up eighteen issues from the whole series.
• Opens with Cap's death in the first issue then goes through the huge plot - Red Skull, Dr Faustus, Kronas, AIM, Hydra, lots more - to kill Cap & throw the US into total chaos.
• Very interesting read and one that would've produced a lot of drama if I'd had to wait a month for each next issue to come out.
• I agree with the various reviewers who point out that Cap won't stay dead and won't be permanently replaced by Bucky, but who cares? It's a good story, and that's what I'm in for.
• Marvel's done a nice job of keeping the pro- and anti-registration heroes at subtle and sometime open odds with each other. Here the existence of two separate wakes for Cap works well, especially with a couple of heroes having to split time between the two.
• Good to see Falcon back as an active part of the Cap world. His presence has been on the wane since the early 80's, and he's an active part of this.
• Dig the Black Widow's connection to both Stark and Bucky here. Sets her up as a nice bridge between those two characters.
• The more I read of the after effects of Civil War, the more impressed I am with the plotting that went into and has come out of that event.

And Catwoman: Crime Pays

• The aftermath of Catwoman/Selina Kyle after giving up her baby in the previous arc had so many possibilities...and this volume lets 'em all slip right away.
• I actually had to cover this issue up with other trades while I was checking things out of the library because of the stupid and pointless cleavage on the cover. It's embarrassing to read a comic like this - especially considering that the character is supposed to be a world-class gymnast - a demographic not known for being particularly pneumatic.
• Two story arcs in this collection, making it less cohesive than most collections. First one is simple if lightweight Catwoman stuff - bad guy stalking Catwoman trying to kill her to establish his credibility. Second one ties in to Salvation Run with Catwoman taken off-planet with the rest of the DC villains.
• The second one, in particular, is much too far from the core of this character as being a part of Gotham City, particularly of her semi-protector roll in the East End. The Catwoman character simply works better on the small scale as thief/Gothamite. Whenever she's taken to the JLA satellite, to a distant planet, to the Injustice League's helmet-shaped headquarters in a swamp, the character and the entire series loses its focus.
• It's a shame that this series has been canceled because it's been a highlight - even having one of the finest collections from DC in the past half dozen years: Relentless.

There's Green Arrow/Black Canary: Road to the Altar

• This one's a bit of all over the place as it's collected from disparate issues in different series.
• The Birds of Prey issues in which Canary & Babs talk (too slow) and then Sin is written out of the series are the strongest of the collection.
• There was no way to keep the adopted daughter in the picture of a superheroine who's part of the Justice League, and the writers did a nice job writing out that character but making the ending mean something.
• I'm more okay with the choice of Canary to marry Arrow "because I love him" than some are, but I think that's because the writers have been writing GA as much less of a playboy/ass since he came back from the dead. He's been a mayor, a father figure, and a true hero since his resurrection, and that makes the choice of Canary to say yes much more acceptable in the framework to me.
• The last issue - the wedding planner thing - is truly embarrassing as it vacillates between Canary being too preoccupied to plan a wedding and being a thorough girl - something we've rarely seen in this character - and taking her super girlfriends lingerie shopping - which is very weird to read, by the way.

The worst comic this week is Superman: Camelot Falls vol 2

• I would be happy if I could never again see these cliches in a comic book...
  • Superman doubting himself because of something a supervillain says.
  • Superman resolving that doubt only after he saves a cute kid from dying (typically from falling out of a window.)
  • A character getting information from the future about an event he wants to prevent and then somehow setting that very event's creation in motion by mistake in the course of trying to prevent it.
  • Zatana in a pair of thigh highs and a corset - not her costume, just some sort of kinky lounging around outfit.
  • Superman flying above the world trying to clear his thoughts.
  • A superhero looking into the eyes of a monster that he's fighting and recognizing - via the eyes - that the monster is really one of his friends who's been transformed by magic/science/plot.
  • An alien who's pissed off at humanity because of how he's been treated/experimented on and killing people the whole time while announcing that he's pissed off at humanity because they experimented on him.
  • An alien getting kicked in a place where human gonads are. (Sorry, that's not in this volume, but it's still annoying to me.)
  • A last panel revelation that what the hero had made sure wasn't happening was actually really happening, just in a deeper cave than the one the hero searched.
  • A collection that is made up of singular issues, all of which contain a one- or two-page recap of the main story arc.
• This story arc bored me.

And the last one is Neil Gaiman's Eternals

• Love Neil Gaiman's work...love it.
• Love the first three quarters of this volume, too.
• The basic set-up is that the Eternals (with whom I'm not really familiar but about whom enough background is given in this volume that I was okay with) have been tricked into forgetting that they're Eternals. So they're living regular, if a bit higher than average, lives.
• The artwork is very blocky - typical Romita, Jr. stuff - and works well in this Kirby-based work and world.
• The revelations of the characters' discovery of their true nature make for a bit of mystery feeling that works well.
• The ties to the Eternals' masters - whatever they're called (had to look it up, they're the Celestials - work well, too, as the true natures of the Celestials and the Eternals are also presented in dribs and drabs.
• The appearances of the Iron Man and other Marvel heroes ties this in to the 616 world more than I expected it to as I began the volume.
• Then comes the final volume. All of the Eternals have been awoken. The Golden Celestial has risen but hasn't woken up yet. And we're ready for a big climax...that never comes. Instead, we get the impression that the whole story arc has been building up to a craptacular ending of "and we'll go exploring to see what happens..." It's the anti-ending. It's the line at the end of the movie that effectively negates all the suspense that's been building and says "we'll meet again." It's the end of the crappy Anne Rice witches book that I read.
• I recognize that it's a set-up for an ongoing series, but that's not how the whole volume reads up 'til the last few pages.
• Gaiman sets things up marvelously, but he clearly wasn't able/allowed to end them well at all. There's not even any sort of dramatic mini-climax as in the ending of a lot of first-part movies (see Fellowship of the Ring among others).

And the only non-graphic novel this week: Netherland...

• I love this introduction to a review from The Atlantic...

  On the face of it, the story of an expatriate Dutchman obsessed with playing cricket might not seem to have the makings of a quintessentially American novel. But at its heart, Joseph O’Neill’s new book, Netherland, is about rehabilitating one’s life and chasing the American dream, albeit at a time when that dream has lost a bit of its gloss.

• I picked up Netherland after hearing it described on NPR as "a story about post-Sept. 11 New York City as viewed through the scrim of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby."
• Having visited NYC last summer made this resonate even more for me as I knew the layout of the world in which the story took place.
• Describing the plot of Netherland is a tough challenge as little happens in the traditional rising action-climax-falling action sense of plot. Instead, it's a book about a Dutch-by-way-of-London man in New York City whose marriage falls apart in the aftermath and fear of September 11th and who finds himself swept up in the wake of a force of nature immigrant hoping to bring the glories of Cricket to New York to save the country and make a few bucks.
• It's a story to be read not for the plot but for the words, for the glory and poetry of the prose. There were a number of times when I - listening to the novel on cd - found myself losing the narrative thread and just floating away on the words as read by the marvelous reader, Jefferson Mays.
• The book can be a bit tough to follow at times because it isn't necessarily arranged chronologically but rather almost as a stream of consciousness laid over a thread of chronology. The main character relates the story in a series of often stacked flashbacks and remembrances. For example, from The Washington Post...

  Netherland doesn't turn on plot. In both form and content, it questions the idea that a life can be told as a coherent story. It is organized not chronologically but as a series of memories linked by associations. For example, Hans remembers a day during his last cricket-playing summer in the city:
  
  "This time Chuck drove. It was a fine day. The East River from the Brooklyn Bridge was a pure stroke of blue.
  
  "I thought of my mother, whom I thought of whenever I crossed that bridge.
  
  "Two weeks after Jake was born, she made her first and last visit to America."
  
  Hans goes on to recall bicycling with his mother to Brooklyn, a memory that summons his boyhood in The Hague delivering papers, his mother filling in for him on the route and meeting her "gentleman friend," Jeroen, which then evokes an encounter with Jeroen after his mother's cremation, upon which Hans returns to Chuck, who is still at the wheel and headed for Green-Wood Cemetery.

• The book is marvelous and gorgeous and beautiful, full of longing and memory and absolutely perfect.
• It's easily the best work of today's reviews.
• My favorite passage from the book, late in the book as Hans's (the main character) wife questions his friendship with Chuck Ramkisoon, the cricket-promoting Trinidadian immigrant:

  [O]ur dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it’s the same quality that enables me to thrive at work were so many of the brisk, tough successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are – in some – desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy.
  
  This chronic and - I think – peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I. Neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.