Your job is to relax and enjoy it...and maybe to go hunting down the best comics.
The reviews of X-ed Out mystify me as much as the book did. There's almost no clarity in the book - none at all. We get a main character, Doug, who recites beat poetry while wearing a TinTin mask, has a crush on an artist, and who has flashes of memory back to the time when his relationship with the crushed-upon artist was just beginning. We also get a dream world character who is a stylized combination of Doug and TinTin, wandering a mystery world that has connections to the past with the artist.
I really have no idea what's going on in the story, and this is clearly (from the end panel's revelation that the TinTin/Doug character must visit The Hive to pursue the new queen of the dream world) the first chapter in a multi-volume story. All of the reviews talk about the story being mesmerizing, intriguing, multi-layered. That may be, but all I got from the story was that it was inscrutable and a lot more mystifying that mesmerizing.
It's one thing when there's a mystery as long as some resolution to that mystery is promised and delivered. Here, in this first volume of the story, there is no resolution in the least, not even a suitable first chapter kind of resolution. Instead, all we get is the mystery, and that's not fulfilling to me at all.
Oh, and apparently there's some kind of TinTin homage going on. I'm not familiar enough with TinTin to get more than that the dream world Doug looks like kind of like TinTin.
This volume collects the full five-issue run of the SWORD series with Beast and Brand as the main characters and are of a single story arc with Norman Osborne's lackey, Gyrich, being appointed as co-director of SWORD, distracting Brand, taking control of SWORD, and enacting his devious plan to rid Earth of every alien. The distraction takes place organically within the scope of the story, and the montage of alien arrests is well played here.
But the real story comes when Beast and Brand break free from the now-hostile SWORD and have to return to SWORD headquarters to reclaim their positions of leadership. It's a pretty standard story trope (lose control, regain control), but here it's well played, bringing together the four seemingly disparate story arcs of the early issues.
The real star here is the newly-minted Unit character, a long-term planner created by some distant alien race with the goal being to destroy all life in the universe. Unit is in SWORD's highest-danger prison cell but is used in an advisory capacity by all the characters here. His hugely long-term strategy paints him as a brilliant strategist who is able to solve most any problem that either side might have while still playing a long-term chess game (both literally and figuratively) in his goal of destroying all life. There's clearly an interesting story to be told with Unit, and it's sad that this series was cancelled before that story could be told.
The other high-value content in this series is the interaction between Beast (who is drawn with an exaggeratedly long face that I didn't at all care for) and Brand. They come off as a very natural, witty, highly capable and intelligent couple that merits its inclusion as one of readers' favorite comic couples out there. The banter between the two is written as natural and casual, something that rarely comes off well in comic books.
I'm a little sad that this series was canceled. The storylines weren't Earth-616-shattering by any means, but they were interesting enough and highly character-driven, making for a very engaging read.
Give it a try and know that you can get the entire run pretty easily.
It's becoming more than a little frustrating. As part of the New Krypton storyline (not really a crossover but more of a significant event within the Superman titles as well as a few min-series), this volume makes for an interesting but terrifically unsatisfying read as the issues collected here (admittedly the first of two Nightwing & Flamebird trades) is terrifically incomplete.
The premise is moderately interestign - seeing the suddenly grown-up Chris Kent (Clark & Lois's adoptive, Kryptonian son) and a New Kryptonian named Thara who have adopted the wildly over-used eponymous nicknames (complete with oddly Batman-esque chest logo) in a bid to help protect Earth from a conspiratorial New Kryptonian attack.
The ties to ancient Kryptonian mythology (the two leads are somehow ancient spirit lovers reincarnated) is moderately interesting and is well presented in the final volume of the trade, but in total, this is a volume that I would say to skip unless you're willing to read the totality of the New Krypton event.
Fables: Witches (vol 14) by Bill Willingham - It's tough for me to say if there's a better ongoing series than Willingham's Fables. DMZ might be, but I'm not willing to make that an absolute certainty.
Fables is consistently excellent, maintaining a type of long-term storytelling that is rare among comics while also taking the chance to pause from time to time and tell brilliant, beautiful, self-contained shorter tales. In that way, Fables is very much like the epic Sandman, telling long-form tales but also letting the greater story be moved along with smaller tales that, at first read, have nothing to do with the greater story but that turn out to advance and enrich the main storyline.
Here we get very beautifully-told an individual issue allowing the Dark Man to spin his background yarn, a few issues to relate the two main stories of Bufkin trapped within the business office and defending himself against a reborn Baba Yagga while Frau Totenkinder and the rest of the magical fables (now living entirely at the upstate farm) readying their defenses against the Dark Man, then two issues checking in with the kingdom of Haven where King Flycatcher has to mete out justice when a goblin kills one of the other Haven citizens.
At this point in the Fables world (ninety-plus issues into the run), every character has such a rich background character (I can't imagine jumping on to the series at this point without going back through and reading every issue - other than the forgettable Great Fables Crossover which really should have stayed in the Jack of Fables series) that every action is enriches and explained more richly than can be believed.
This isn't a climactic story arc. This isn't the equivalent of the Fables' invasion of the homeland. This is a 'readying for war' arc sprinkled with Frau Totenkinder's confident hold on her leadership of the Fables magical defense squad (while Ozma of Oz makes a clearly-to-be-regretted play for power of that organization). This is a chance to Bufkin (the winged monkey) to step up and defend the business office against Baba Yagga and a feisty djinn. This is a chance for Flycatcher to both wear the ever-heavier crown and to off-panel consummate his growing relationship with Red Riding Hood.
This is a great arc. If you're not reading Fables, you're not reading the best that DC has to offer, and that's a shame.
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