Atomic Robo – Fascination Place

This Week’s Haul

A big week this week, and it turns out this month, not last month, is Dan Jurgens’ last hurrah on Booster Gold.

Booster Gold #32, by Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Brightest Day #0, by Geoff Johns, Peter J. Tomasi, Fernando Pasarin & many inkers (DC)
Fables #94, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
Flash #1, by Geoff Johns & Francis Manapul (DC)
The Unwritten #12, by Mike Carey & Peter Gross (DC/Vertigo)
Secret Six #20, by Gail Simone & Jim Calafiore (DC)
Powers #4, by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming (Marvel/Icon)
Irredeemable Special #1, by Mark Waid, Paul Azaceta, Emma Rios & Howard Chaykin (Boom)
B.P.R.D.: King of Fear #4 of 5, by ike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
Star Trek: Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor #1 of 5, by John Byrne (IDW)
Chew #10, by John Layman & Rob Guillory (Image)
Atomic Robo and the Revenge of the Vampire Dimension #2 of 5, by Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegener (Red 5)

	Chris Sims rips Brightest Day #0 a new one in his review column this week. I think he’s a little harsh, but only a little; this is not a good comic book. The conclusion of Blackest Night showcased the return from death of a dozen DC heroes and villains, including Deadman who, well, is supposed to be dead. Brightest Day is supposedly going to explore why they came back to life. I think the hope is that they’ll capture some of the fun of 52, the weekly series from a few years ago, which was hands-down DC’s best weekly series so far. This issue is the lead-in to that, and it’s basically just Deadman – thanks to the white ring on his finger – checking in on each of the other characters who came back to life. Which means it’s one little character piece after another – bits which might work well enough as an aside in a character’s regular series, but which strung together like this make for one pretty tedious issue. Worse, this is a continuity-laden comic featuring characters with convoluted backstories. Okay, Hawkman at this point is firmly grounded in his convoluted backstory, it’s basically a key part of the character, and honestly that’s not such a bad thing, since the core premise is easy to explain (Hawkman and his beloved Hawkgirl have been getting reincarnated for thousands of years) and the details are unimportant. Sims points out the problem with all this continuity without really trying to do so: Take Firestorm. Johns and Tomasi make it clear that Ronnie Raymond is meant to be back from the dead from the moment he died in Identity Crisis. So why does he act like he did thirty years ago? Why did he ask where Professor Stein is, when Stein hadnâ€™t been part of Firestorm for years at that point? Why does Ronnie, a recovering alcoholic, blow off Gehennaâ€™s funeral to go to a kegger? And why, if the union between Jason and Ronnie is meant to be the new version of Firestorm, as seen on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, does Ronnie get control of the body? Well, I know the answer to that one: Because if Firestorm still had the body of a black man, he wouldnâ€™t look like he did in 1978. Firestorm died in Identity Crisis? I read that piece of trash, but I’d forgotten that. Ronnie’s a recovering alcoholic? Firestorm’s tying in somehow to the Brave and the Bold cartoon? Yeesh, this is all the sort of BS that needs to get sliced away and discarded (or else I’ll be trying to figure out why Firestorm isn’t still a fire elemental, like John Ostrander revealed him to be), the sort of thing Geoff Johns did well in Green Lantern, picking the pieces he wanted to play with and ignoring the rest. You can repeat this for most of the other characters herein, and then there are some new bits that make no sense at all (Aquaman being reluctant to go into the water, for example). There’s some potential here, but the cast is too large, and this is really a horrible lead-in to the series. My guess it that it will be better than Countdown to Final Crisis (it could hardly be worse), but not anywhere near as good as 52 was. On the art side, Fernando Pasarin’s art is pretty solid, though unspectacular. This seems to be DC’s house style these days: Clean, solidly-rendered, judicious use of shadows, lots of details, somewhat generic faces and expressions. More than a little evocative of George PÃ©rez and Dan Jurgens, without being as distinctive as either. (Nicola Scott and Ivan Reis are similar.) I might try the first couple of issues, but Brightest Day will have to come out of the gate strong (assuming that this issue is it just getting into the gate) for me to keep reading.
	On the other hand, I think Sims is far too kind to the new Flash series. He is right about this: Bringing back Barry Allen was completely unnecessary, especially as Wally West has been such a great Flash for the last quarter of a century (wow, has it really been that long?). Then again, bringing back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern was not exactly essential either, and that’s worked out well. The difference is that Barry’s death occurred at the lowest point in the character’s creative history, and he died heroically in a much-beloved series (Crisis on Infinite Earths), whereas Hal was killed off awkwardly after becoming a villain for no good reason, so bringing Barry back actually cheapens his death (and his return hasn’t been handled with anywhere near the style of the other resurrected hero whose return has previously been verboten – Ed Brubaker bringing back Bucky in Captain America was orders of magnitude better than this, as I said last week). But, Barry’s back, and he’s been given a new series, and that’s how it goes. In any event, this issue is no better than Brightest Day above. To start with, this story is just bogged down in continuity, explicit or implied: The Flash has been dead, and presumably everyone knows that, but now he’s back. And so is Barry Allen, but it’s unclear whether everyone knows that the two are the same guy, and you’d pretty much have to be an idiot not to have figured it out, if you knew Barry personally. Johns blurred the line in Green Lantern about whether everyone knew who Hal was – you could almost believe that everyone did know, and just didn’t care – but here it seems like all of Barry’s friends are idiots. (Never mind that his wife Iris had disappeared for years, too, and came back, and then apparently got 20 years younger. Good trick, that.) Johns wants to push past all the getting-back-to-his-life stuff and get to the story, but I just don’t buy it, especially since Barry and Iris were the stereotypical midwest, middle-American couple, living in a cute little ranch home and working their day jobs, and that life is so far from where the characters are starting now, it’s impossible to credit. The plot involves one of Flash’s villains (of his so-called Rogues Gallery) showing up dead – only it doesn’t seem to be him. It’s just the barest hint of the story, so there’s not much to review there (though there’s atwist on the last two pages), but most of the issue is given over to Barry getting back to his life. And that’s a yawn-fest. The big knock against the issue is the art: Francis Manapul was just good enough on Jim Shooter’s recently Legion of Super-Heroes run with his uninspiring “Image-esque” style helped by some clean linework, but his style here is a lot more cartoony and sketchy, and I think it just looks awful. The characters all look kind of childlike, with indistinguishable faces (which look deformed whenever the panel is composed looking up at the face), the inks look more like pencils, there are unnecessary speed lines everywhere (yes, even for The Flash they’re unnecessary), and on top of that the colors look washed out. I almost passed on this series because of Manapul’s presence alone, and this first issue makes me think I should’ve gone with my first instinct. (I’m not really sure who I think they should have gotten to draw the series. Ethan Van Scyver was not a great choice in The Flash: Rebirth, even though I like his art a lot better. Dan Jurgens doesn’t have the right dynamism. But the series needs to look more grown-up and solid than the look Manapul gives it here. Norm Breyfogle might have brought the series a similar look but more weight – he did a good job on the criminally-overlooked miniseries Flashpoint ten years ago.) Flash after one issue has all the indications of being a train wreck. To be sure, Green Lantern got off to a very slow start, but at least it had lovely artwork to fall back on. Flash needs to get much better on all fronts very quickly for me to care enough to stick around.
	Is John Byrne doing the best Star Trek comics of the last 20 years, or the best Star Trek comics ever? It sure is hard to tell. Other than the quirky and unsatisfying Assignment: Earth series, every Byrne Trek comic at IDW has been pitch-perfect, wonderfully illustrated stuff exploring the fringes of the original cast milieu. Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor follows the irascible surgeon as he embarks on a voyage to the Federation frontier to help people with his skills, in the period between classic Trek and the first feature film, so it’s a medium for Byrne to spin a few clever science fiction yarns. Less ambitious than his Romulans series, but that’s hardly a problem as Crew had a similar approach, and I think that’s the best of his series yet. If I have a criticism it’s that his rendering of the good doctor seem slightly off to me. Granted, McCoy’s got a full beard here (as he did when he first appeared in The Motion Picture), but something about his eyes and his mouth make him appear a little older and grumpier than even he ought to. Still, the issue as a whole is fun stuff, and I’m looking forward to the rest. (I wonder if Byrne has aspirations of doing a truly epic Trek series at IDW at some point, something on a grander scale than even the Romulans story? That’s be something to see.)
	This month’s issue of Atomic Robo and the Revenge of the Vampire Dimension doesn’t feature any vampires, nor any dimensions (well, other than the usual three). It does feature Atomic Robo and also revenge, although the revenge isn’t by vampires. False advertising? Anyway, this one takes place in Japan and is yet another homage to Japanese monster movies, which means (this being Atomic Robo) it involves a lot of smashing, interspersed with snarky remarks by Robo. It’s a pretty good issue, actually, but sameness is starting to set in to Atomic Robo I’ve been hoping that writer Brian Clevinger would start pulling together Robo’s long backstory (he was created by Nikola Tesla) into a larger drama, but it’s basically one slugfest after another. The previous volume, Shadow From Beyond Time, was the best one yet precisely because it was a carefully-laid-out story arc, but Revenge of the Vampire Dimension reverts to the one-offs of the previous two volumes. This could be such a great series, and it’s really frustrating that it can’t rise above the level of lightweight adventure stuff.

This Week’s Haul

Batman and Robin #4, by Grant Morrison, Philip Tan & Jonathan Glapion (DC)
Blackest Night #3 of 8, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis & Oclair Albert (DC)
The Brave and the Bold #27, by J. Michael Straczynski & Jesus Saiz (DC)
Ex Machina #45, by Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris (DC/Wildstorm)
JSA vs. Kobra #4 of 6, by Eric S. Trautmann, Don Kramer & Michael Babinski (DC)
Hercules: Prince of Power HC, by Bob Layton (Marvel)
Wednesday Comics #11, by many hands (DC)
Unthinkable #5 of 5, by Mark Sable & Julian Totino Tedesco (Boom)
Star Trek: Romulans: Schism #1 of 5, by John Byrne (IDW)
Atomic Robo: Shadow From Beyond Time #5 of 5, by Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegener (Red 5)

	J. Michael Straczynski starts his long-awaited run on The Brave and the Bold this month. The comics blogosphere’s reaction to this assignment was basically, “Wait, DC signs one of the biggest names in comics and assigns him to a book whose sales were in a slump the last time big name creators were on it, and has been slogging along through limbo ever since?” B&B was thoroughly Mark Waid’s book, and honestly it should have been cancelled when he left it (although some of the interim stories have been decent). But why put Straczynski on it? Did he request it, to be able to have his own sandbox to play in? Who knows? The story itself is merely okay. It features Batman and the extremely obscure character from the original Dial H For Hero, and it’s a thin story with a rather simplistic moral about doing something with one’s life. I’ve written several times before about my criticisms of Straczynski’s comics work, as much as I loved Babylon 5, and this issue is towards the lower end of his comics work. If all he’s going to do in B&B is write a few unconnected stories, then I don’t think it’s going to be worth it. Meanwhile, we’ll see how well he keeps up with the schedule, inasmuch as Thor was consistently shipping late and The Twelve – perhaps his best comics work – seems to be on hiatus. And, more importantly, whether he has a plan for what to do with a series with such a scatterbrained premise.
	It’s a little hard to believe that Wednesday Comics is coming to an end after one more issue, given that some of the stories feel like they’re not even close to being done after this issue. Superman, even though it’s been a terrible story, feels like it’s about to turn into the second half of the story after the cliffhanger here. Supergirl has been much better, but with her facing down aliens as her super-pets arrive on the scene seems like it’s setting up for several more pages, too. And then there’s Hawkman, which has a climactic moment this page, but then Kyle Baker’s over-the-top writing in this story has featured a climactic moment every other page. But I don’t see how Baker’s going to pull together Hawkman, Aquaman, an alien invasion, and DInosaur Island together into a satisfying finish in one more page. Of course, the writing’s been on the wall for weeks that Hawkman would be a terrible story. In other episodes, Strange Adventures has a neat touch in dealing with its villain this issue. And although I haven’t read Wonder Woman in weeks, this week’s page finally makes good use of the large-page format with a nice 2/3-page spread. Too bad I’ve long since stopped caring. Next week we’ll see how things finish up, and I’ll revisit all of the stories in their totalities.
	Among the most fun comics I can recall reading were Bob Layton’s two Hercules mini-series from back in the 80s. Hercules, the Greek demigod of myth, had returned to Earth and adventured with The Avengers for quite a few years; although a good guy, he also had a tendency to get drunk and pick fights, and – being a god – was able to shrug off the consequences of his actions much of the time, sometimes leaving a trail of carnage and/or sadness behind him. In short, having Hercules on Earth didn’t seem quite fair to everyone else. Layton tackled this challenge in novel fashion: Hundreds of years in the future, Hercules angers his father Zeus – again – and Zeus exiles him, but this time he exiles him to outer space, where there are plenty of beings who are Hercules’ equal, or more. This helps Hercules gain perspective on his place in the universe, but Layton also uses it for a series of absolutely hilarious adventures. Accompanied by a Recorder, a robot charged with observing everything he does, Hercules wades through a series of entertaining adventures, before finding himself suddenly aging, and learning that things have recently gone quite poorly for the gods of Olympus, forcing him to return home before he dies of old age to find out what’s going on. Although at times a moving drama, Layton never relinquishes his light touch on the material, and Hercules generally comes across as a nicer guy – and a more mature one – than the one currently appearing in The Incredible Hercules (although that series is not bad). And now that Marvel’s collected this in a handsome hardcover volume, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a good time. (It looks like Layton’s other Hercules-related stuff, including the sequel to these stories, will be collected in a second volume later this year.)
	Unthinkable was one of three series from Boom! Studios that piqued my interest this year, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as either Irredeemable or The Unknown. The premise was that author Alan Ripley joined a government think tank after September 11 to try to come up with other unlikely scenarios that terrorists might use to attack America or other countries. Which sounds fine until the think tank is disbanded and some of their scenarios come to pass. It’s a nifty high concept, but a tough one to pull off, since it plays its premise largely straight, which means having to thread a needle to make it seem plausible in the face of, well, doing the impossible. Writer Mark Sable gives it a good try, but I don’t think he pulls it off; the ultimate story behind the unthinkable events feels a little too simplistic, really in much the same way the climax to Watchmen didn’t quite hold up. I guess when you’re being compared to Watchmen – even flaws in Watchmen – you’re doing something right, but still the story didn’t really work for me. A worthy try, though. Artist Julian Totino Tedesco isn’t really my kind of artist; his sketchy linework over highly realistic layouts remind me of Jackson Guice, but darker. I think he could have used an inker with a strong sense of line coherence, a Tom Palmer sort, to pull the pencils together. But that’s just me.
	I’m not sure what to make of John Byrne’s Star Trek series for IDW. Assignment: Earth followed the adventures of Gary Seven and Roberta Franklin in the early 1970s, and then Crew followed the career of Number One prior to becoming Captain Pike’s first officer on the Enterprise. Now Romulans: Schism appears to involve the shaky Klingon/Romulan alliance circa the end of the classic Star Trek TV series (or maybe a couple of years after that, although not much later since Star Trek: The Motion Picture takes place at most 5 years after the end of the series, and the designs here are mostly classic Trek). Number One appears to be back, a little grayer, and the Commodore commanding a Constitution-class ship. What’s confusing to me is that Byrne usually has a method to his madness, a larger story that the smaller ones fit into, but it’s awfully hard to see how these three series fit together. Assignment: Earth was a set of mildly entertaining short stories, but the characters and plots weren’t really all that exciting. Crew was considerably more entertaining, but seemed to end just as it was about to get really good. Now we’ve jumped forward to focus on the two main villainous races in classic Trek. So where’s it all going? Or is Byrne just content to tell a few independent short stories, and enjoy playing in the Trek universe on his terms? Maybe it’s not going anywhere. On the bright side, Byrne captures the visuals of classic Trek perfectly; the thing looks beautiful. And Crew was a very well-told set of stories, while Romulans: Schism is off to a good, if rather ominous, start, with a solid cliffhanger at the end of this first issue. Despite being perplexed by Byrne’s ultimate goal – if there is one – this is some of the best Trek material I’ve read in decades, and that makes it worth the price on its own. (Hmm, on further review, it looks like this might be a sequel to an earlier two-part Byrne story, The Hollow Crown, which I hadn’t heard of before. So apparently I’m missing at least one piece of the puzzle.)
	I’ve been conflicted about Atomic Robo since it began. I appreciate the premise – Nikola Tesla creates a sentient robot who lives into the present day and fights big monsters – and also Brian Clevinger’s wacky sense of humor in setting up the situations and writing the dialogue. Of course, the parallels between Robo and Hellboy are obvious; Robo’s personality is a little more extroverted, but they’re both strong monster-fighters with flippant tongues. The problem is that while Mike Mignola’s stories for Hellboy can be a little erratic, each individual story holds together pretty well, and when the story trails off at the end, it’s usually evident that that’s what Mignola was going for. The first Robo mini-series was a collection of vaguely-linked short stories, and the second one purported to be a single story but scattered to the four winds at the end. All that said, Shadow From Beyond Time is a solid step forward for Robo. It starts with Robo, Charles Fort, and H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s fighting a Lovecraftian creature. The problem is that this creature comes from outside time, so Robo fights it over and over in the following years until it all comes to an end in this issue when he figures out a way to deal with it, and even loops back to the beginning to bring some closure to the first chapter of the story. It’s easily the best-told story in the series so far, and it makes me optimistic that things will keep getting better. Which is good, because as amusing as Robo can be as a character, it’s difficult to get invested in a series which is largely told in retrospect, and whose setting (Robo’s team and organization at Tesladyne) is left, at best, fuzzy. Madcap adventure can only take you so far.

This Week’s Haul

You’d think this was the all-Geoff-Johns week given what I picked up:

Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #4 of 5, by Geoff Johns, George PÃ©rez & Scott Koblish (DC)
Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War TPB vol 1, by Geoff Johns, Dave Gibbons, Ivan Reis, Patrick Gleason & Ethan Van Sciver (DC)
Green Lantern #40, by Geoff Johns, Philip Tan & Jonathan Glapion (DC)
Justice Society of America #26, by Geoff Johns, Dale Eaglesham & Nathan Massengill (DC)
The Literals #1, by Bill Willingham, Matt Sturges, Mark Buckingham & Andrew Pepoy (DC/Vertigo)
Madame Xanadu #10, by Matt Wagner, Amy Reeder Hadley & Richard Friend (DC/Vertigo)
Avengers/Invaders #10 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Kruger, Steve Sadowski & Patrick Berkenkotter (Marvel)
Nova #24, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning & Andrea Divito (Marvel)
RASL #4, by Jeff Smith (Cartoon)
Invincible: Ultimate Collection HC vol 4, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)
Atomic Robo: Shadow From Beyond Time #1 of 5, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener & Lauren Pettapiece (Red 5)

Geoff Johns ends his run on JSA with a charming issue focusing on Stargirl’s birthday, which the whole team celebrates over at her house. No fights, just a lot of talk and a cute little ending. And a three-cover painting by Alex Ross that you can view in its entirety here.

Despite this issue being a pleasant surprise, Johns’ run on the series has been shaky: The team is too big and has too many marginal characters to really work as a team book. Character development has been nearly nonexistent. The story arc “Thy Kingdom Come” had some good bits, but it also stretched itself too thin (the Power Girl/Earth 2 stuff was a big disappointment), and the climax was rather a big nothing. The series has pretensions of being about a big family, but the strength of character just isn’t there for it to work (or matter). Of course, it’s living in the shadow of the outstanding All-Star Comics run of the 1970s, which did everything this series did, but better, but Johns never seems able to give the book its own identity. I think he’s just not very strong at managing a large cast of characters (which admittedly is one of the toughest tasks in comic books).

Bill Willingham takes over the writing duties soon. I generally enjoy his work, although it might be too dark or cynical for this team. Then again, after this series and the previous one, a change-up is probably just what the series needs.

Speaking of Willingham, this year’s first entry into “least necessary event” is “The Great Fables Crossover”, which this week is into its third part of nine in the first issue of The Literals. The premise is that a guy named Kevin Thorn is able to change the world by writing in his book, and he wants to re-write the whole world, but he’s not sure what he should write. The titular character in Jack of Fables contacts the other Fables so they can try to stop him. Unfortunately after three issues the story’s barely budged, and boy howdy is it hard to care about Jack at all (which is why I dropped his book in the first place). It’s not nearly as good as what’s been going on in Fables recently, so the distraction is not welcome.

I guess the Literals themselves are the embodiments of various genres which Kevin brings into existence here. An ignominious beginning of so: Shoved into a supporting role in the first issue of their own comic.

Nice artwork by mark Buckingham, as usual. That’s hardly enough, though.

I really want to like – even love – Atomic Robo, but it’s just been so hit-or-miss thus far: It’s got a fun-loving, goofy attitude, but the stories are the lightest fluff, and the characters only slightly thicker than tissue paper. The premise is that Robo was Nikola Tesla‘s greatest invention, a robot created in the 1920s and who since that time has been a scholar but has mostly fought weird menaces, such as giant robotic mummies. That and a lot of punching sums up the first two mini-series: If you like a lot of punching and things like giant robot mummies, then Atomic Robo is for you. Myself, I’m looking for more than that.

This third series gets off to a promising start, though: Charles Fort and H.P. Lovecraft show up on Tesla’s doorstep in 1926 hoping for Tesla’s help to deal with a terror they’d fought years before, but only Robo is there, and he has no idea what’s going on. Clevinger plays the whole thing for comedy, so the reader overlooks the fact that a conversation that should have lasted a few sentences instead goes on for pages, before Robo finally learns what the threat is. It works fairly well, and makes me encouraged that the rest of the series will be as weirdly amusing as this one.

What the series really needs is to stay focused for a whole story, and not go spinning off into tangents like the second series did at the end. Hopefully this series can hold itself together, stay focused, and have a big finish; that would go a long way to making Atomic Robo feel like more than disposable fluff.

(Robo is one of Greg Burgas’ favorite series, so it’s no surprise that he likes this issue more than I do.)

This Week’s Haul

The Brave and the Bold #20, by David Hine, Doug Braithwaite & Bill Reinhold (DC)
Top 10: Season Two #3, by Zander Cannon & Gene Ha (DC/America’s Best)
Hulk #9, by Jeph Loeb, Arthur Adams & Frank Cho (Marvel)
The Immortal Iron Fist #21, by Duane Swierczynski & Timothy Green (Marvel)
Thor #12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Oliver Coipel & Mark Morales (Marvel)
Gigantic #2 of 5, by Rick Remender & Eric Nguyen (Dark Horse)
Mister X: Condemned #1 of 4, by Dean Motter (Dark Horse)
The Umbrella Academy: Dallas #2 of 6, by Gerard Way & Gabriel BÃ¡ (Dark Horse)
Invincible #57, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)
The Astounding Wolf-Man #11, by Robert Kirman, Jason Howard & Cliff Rathburn (Image)
Atomic Robo: Dogs of War #5, of 5, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener & James Nguyen (Red 5)

	I think this is the end for me for this run of Hulk: Three issues to tell two trivial stories of the green Hulk and the red Hulk is a lot of time wasted, and I’m not sticking around to see if Loeb gets on with it anytime soon. The series started out with a bang, but quickly ran out of gas. It’s doubly disappointing since Greg Pak did such a great job with the Planet Hulk/World War Hulk stories in the previous Hulk series. Anyway, the two stories wrapping up here are the green Hulk fighting a horde of Wendigo in Las Vegas, and the She-Hulk and a group of female super-heroes fighting the Red Hulk, and getting pwned by him. The Art Adams art on the first story is fun, but the story doesn’t give him any great panels to draw. The Frank Cho artwork on the second is pretty much Frank Cho drawing a whole slew of buxom women in tights, which is pretty much what you’d expect. At this point I don’t understand why I moved to this book rather than sticking with Greg Pak when the previous series became The Incredible Hercules. Don’t I know that I should stick with creators, not characters? Oh well.
	The Immortal Iron Fist continues its trend of punctuating its major stories with one-shots about Iron Fists from different eras. This one features the Iron Fist of 3099, who’s sent to save the dying world of Yaochi from its oppressive tyrant. The story’s pretty good, and Timothy Green’s artwork is fantastic: Elegant layouts with lines for shading rather than use of blacks, giving it a little bit of a European look. The final panel, a 2/3-page spread, is terrific. Even if you’re not reading Iron Fist regularly, you might want to check this issue out.
	The original Mister X series came out back when I was still pretty much only reading superhero comics, and it was so not a superhero comic. Although it’s been collected, it doesn’t hold up terribly well: The story arc is sketchy and the artwork is erratic. So what is Mister X? Well, creator/writer/designer Dean Motter has done a trio of comic book series about three cities which all have a retro-futuristic architecture, a mash-up of styles from the 20s to the 50s and what those decades thought the future might look like stylistically. Mister X was the first, Terminal City the second (and the best), and Electropolis the third. Mister X takes place in Radiant City, a dark place whose architecture drives its citizens mad, earning it the nickname Somnopolis. Mister X himself was the designer of the city, now a lone renegade who’s driven to try to fix the city, although he has mixed results. This second series opens with Radiant City’s leadership hiring demolition companies to take out the more rotten parts of the city, but they’re not entirely in control of what’s happening, and things start going awry, and people get killed. Then, Mister X reappears in the apartment of his old girlfriend, Mercedes, asking for the plans. Motter isn’t the most versatile artist, but his esthetic and layouts are enough to carry the story, and this issue is a good place to get acquainted with the character. Time will tell if the advances in storytelling that Motter displayed in his later projects carries over to Mister X, but it’s off to a good start.
	The second Atomic Robo wraps up this week, and the last issue is a bit of a letdown after the first four, with a single-issue adventure to stop the Nazi scientist Skorzeny in 1944. He gets captured and is rescued by a Scotsman with a very heavy accent, who steals the show from Robo in his own comic. It feels so disjointed from the rest of the series that it feels like a throwaway issue, just when the series seemed to be hitting its stride. Oh, well. It features an epilogue with a later meeting between Robo and Skorzeny, which is better than the main story. As I said when I reviewed #4, I think better character development is the key to this series taking off. Robo is not much of a character, and the supporting cast is mostly too sketchy. They need to develop a few more characters and make them memorable. Until that happens, the series is just going to feel like a set of vignettes, ultimately not going anywhere. (For a dissenting opinion, see this review at Major Spoilers.)

This Week’s Haul

Running almost a week late, as happens from time to time.

The Brave and the Bold #19, by David Hine, Doug Braithwaite & Bill Reinhold (DC)
Ex Machina #39, by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark (DC/Wildstorm)
Fables: War and Pieces vol 11 TPB, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha & Niko Henrichon (DC/Vertigo)
Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1, by Peter Tomasi, Fernando Pasarin & Mick Gray, and Geoff Johns & Scott Kolins (DC)
Tangent: Superman’s Reign #9 of 12, by Dan Jurgens, Carlos Magno & Andi Tong, and Ron Marz, Julio Ferreira & Mark McKenna (DC)
Terra #2 of 4, by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray & Amanda Conner (DC)
Avengers/Invaders #6 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, Steve Sadowski & Patrick Berkenkotter (Marvel)
Marvel Masterworks: Iron Man vol 107 HC, collecting Iron Man vol 1 #2-13, by Archie Goodwin, George Tuska & Johnny Craig (Marvel)
Castle Waiting #13, by Linda Medley (Fantagraphics)
Invincible #55, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)
Atomic Robo: Dogs of War #4 of 5, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Joshua Ross & Jonathan Ross (Red 5)

Don MacPherson covers the uncomfortable opening pages of Terra in which the heroine – having been lying naked on a table while Dr. Mid-Nite examined her after she was brought in unconscious following a battle – gets dressed while arguing with him and Power Girl about her privacy being invaded. It’s a little weird that the previous thing I read by Conner – the Power Girl story in JSA Classified a few years back – also featured a sequence in which the heroine was getting dressed. It’s not clear to me why Terra was nude in the first place – it’s not like her costume covers her up very much – so it just seems gratuitous. Not that I don’t appreciate Conner’s drawings – she does draw very attractive women – but still, it feels gratuitous. (There’s another scene toward the end of the issue in which the presumptive villain is having a talk with his girlfriend while she’s showering, and it’s almost as awkward.)

Okay, that aside, Terra is taking an unusual storytelling tack: The heroine is fighting one threat after another (here we have the Silver Banshee, a random Sumerian monster, and a horde of zombies) but none of them seem related to one another. Rather, they’re a foil to explore Terra’s personality and – presumably – eventually get to her background and her seemingly self-imposed mission. It appears that she’s a clone of the original Terra, inhabited by a spirit (or something) which is using her earth-manipulation powers for good. I’m interested to see how this plays out, but overall the art is outstripping the story so far.

The fifth volume of Marvel’s Iron Man Masterworks shipped this week, and I think that’ll be it for me. Iron Man wasn’t really among Marvel’s A-list material until David Michelinie and Bob Layton took over the book in the mid-70s: It started off illustrated by Steve Ditko, followed by Don Heck, Gene Colan, and in this volume George Tuska. Colan’s run is something of a revelation, perhaps the best work I’ve ever seen by him, but Ditko seemed to be phoning it in, neither Heck nor Tuska have been among my favorites. And the stories were never that exciting, either. This volume is written by Archie Goodwin (Stan Lee wrote most of the earlier tales), who was a very good writer, but it looks like it’s another series of undistinguished adventure yarns. So I think I’ve run out of gas on this one.

At this point I’m still buying the Avengers and Spider-Man Masterworks, and I’d buy another Nick Fury one if they print it (which they really should, to get the Steranko stuff in hardcover). But I’m just about out of gas on all the others I’m buying, and a couple have basically collected all the issues I want. But after over 100 volumes, I think Marvel has just about mined their silver age catalogue for the stuff worth collecting.

It took a little while, but with this latest issue I think Atomic Robo is really coming together. And it’s mostly because of the interplay between rivals/reluctant allies Robo and the British agent The Sparrow, which not only makes the chase and fight scenes more fun, but the humor works much better with two characters invested in the action. She’s basically the first real supporting character in the series, and the series is much the better for it.

This issue just about wraps up Robo’s mission to destroy the Nazi armored battle suits in 1943, with some collateral carnage along the way. I guess next issue with be a denouement. The short back-up stories are also entertaining, although very lightweight. This series has been an improvement on the first series so far, but I’m hoping it will get weightier in future series.

This Week’s Haul

Action Comics #868, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
Booster Gold #11, by Chuck Dixon, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Sparks #3 of 6, by Christopher Folino & J.M. Ringuet (Catastrophic)
B.P.R.D.: The Warning #2 of 5, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man #2 of 3, by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben (Dark Horse)
Atomic Robo: Dogs of War #1 of 5, by Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegener (Red 5)

Atomic Robo is back with a new series, this time taking place during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, in which Robo is dropped onto the island to take out a group of mechanized suits which the Nazis have been using to decimate Allied forces. I had mixed reactions to the first series: There was a lot to like in Wegener’s clean artwork and the wacky inventiveness of it, but the stories felt like a series of vignettes and thus the series as a whole felt rather lightweight. So I’m encouraged that Dogs of War will be a more substantive long-form story with a little more meaning behind it.

Fundamentally, though, Atomic Robo is cut from the “big monsters smashing each other” cloth that Hellboy comes from. I don’t know why Hellboy – at least the earlier stories – felt more substantive than Robo has so far, maybe it was because it was new and different at the time. Maybe the characterizations felt deeper, as I really still have no feel for who Robo is as a character, other than a big metal smart-ass, much less any of his supporting cast. In any event I’m hoping this new series will show some significant growth over the first one.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 12 March 2008.

Booster Gold #7, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
Countdown to Final Crisis #7 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Keith Giffen, Tom Derenick & Wayne Faucher (DC)
Countdown to Mystery #6 of 8, by Matthew Sturges & Stephen Jorge Segova, and Steve Gerber, Justiniano & Walden Wong (DC)
Salvation Run #5 of 7, by Matthew Sturges, Joe Bennett & Belardo Brabo (DC)
Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #7 of 8, by John Ostrander, Javier Pina & Robin Riggs (DC)
Annihilation Conquest #5 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
Nova #11, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
B.P.R.D.: 1946 #3 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
Locke & Key #2 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Atomic Robo #6 of 6, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener & Nic Klein (Red 5)

	Booster Gold has been pretty well received by the comics blogosphere. Although it’s a continuity-obsessed time travel yarn, it works because of its solid characterization – you know who all the characters are and they all feel distinct – and Dan Jurgens’ always-clean artwork. That said, being a continuity-obsessed time travel yarn does rather drag it down. Currently the story is wrapped up in the events of Infinite Crisis from a couple years ago, specifically the Maxwell Lord/OMAC stuff which I neither know much about, nor care. It’s the sort of book I enjoy as light reading: It doesn’t insult my intelligence, it’s basically fun, and it feels like it’s going somewhere. In a sense it’s like Geoff Johns bucking to become the new Mark Gruenwald. This may seem like faint praise, but given the legions of crappy books out there, you could do a whole lot worse. By the way, if you enjoy Booster Gold, I highly recommend you week out Justice League America #72-75, from Jurgens’ run on JLA in the “post-bwah-hah-hah” era. It’s one of the best alternate timeline stories in JLA history.
	Speaking of doing worse, Salvation Run has turned over its creative team since the first issue: Bill Willingham left after #2, turning the book over to his Jack of Fables co-writer Matthew Sturges (note: I stopped buying Jack of Fables after a year), and now Sean Chen – the reason I bought the book in the first place – has been replaced by Joe Bennett. Remarkably, the story is still fairly cohesive. Pedestrian, but cohesive. Of all the mini-series which have come out during Countdown to Final Crisis, this one’s probably the least essential.
	Speaking of Sean Chen and creative turnover, Chen was the original artist on Nova, which was awesome, but the replacements since he left have been pretty good, too. Now Paul Pelletier takes over as penciller with #11. I was a bit worried about this, since I wasn’t impressed with his work on Fantastic Four, finding it rather under-rendered, and with the impression that he took some shortcuts in drawing the faces and expressions (his Invisible Woman looked downright weird, for instance). But his art here is better than I’d feared; a little soft in the backgrounds maybe, but the figures are quite good. I suspect inker Rick Magyar has something to do with that, as he tends to bring a good feeling of texture and shading to everyone he inks, but it looks like Pelletier will be okay. Maybe he was just mailing it in on FF. Meanwhile, the current story is coming to a head, and I suspect that next issue may be the big climax. Stay tuned!
	And as for something that has nothing to do with any of that, Atomic Robo wraps up his first mini-series this month (a second one is being advertised for later this year). Having now read the whole thing, I can definitely say that this falls into the category of “pulp-oriented action-adventure, Hellboy sub-category”, which is to say, if you like Hellboy and B.P.R.D. (or, for that matter, The Perhapanauts), then you’ll like this, as it has a very similar tone and style. Even though Robo is science-based, he’s the same sort of powerful, unique smartass that Hellboy is. I imagine the creators might be a bit tired of being compared to Hellboy, but the similarity is so strong that it’s unavoidable. This issue does tie the series back to its first issue, so it wasn’t quite a series of vignettes, but it’s not a fully cohesive whole. And it’s clearly a broad instruction to the character, who’s been around for 80 years and thus has a lot of history. Although my feeling is that they could have led with a stronger, more hard-hitting story as the opener, I can live with this. I do like Scott Wegener’s artwork, though. It reminds me of Mike Mignola, but also of Michael Avon Oeming, yet it seems cleaner and more dynamic and either. If the human characters’ faces were a little more nuanced, then I could really groove on it. (Wegener seems to go for the “a few broad strokes” approach to faces.) Anyway, I’ll have higher expectations for the sequel, that it will be more than just a pulpish adventure yarn, since as I’ve said recently I’m getting kind of tired of pulpish adventure yarns. Showing how Robo has changed the world – and how the world has changed Robo – ought to be one of the central facets of a series like this. I hope the future holds some character development.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 5 December 2007.

Okay, last week’s haul. I’ve gotta stop being so busy on Thursdays-through-Sundays…

Countdown to Final Crisis #21 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen, Jamal Igle & Mark McKenna (DC)
Justice Society of America #11, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham, Ruy Jose & Drew Geraci (DC)
Annihilation Conquest #2 of 6, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Tom Raney & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
Marvel Masterworks: Spider-Man vol 86 HC, collecting Amazing Spider-Man #78-87, by Stan Lee, John Romita, John Buscema & Jim Mooney (Marvel)
Invincible #47, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)
Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #4 of 5, by Mike Mignola & Jason Armstrong (Dark Horse)
Rex Mundi: Crown and Sword vol 4 TPB, by Arvid Nelson & Juan Ferreyra (Dark Horse)
Atomic Robo #3 of 6, by Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener & Joshua Ross (Red 5)

Although I’ve been down on the two most recent issues of The Brave and the Bold, the first 6-issue story arc was killer: Batman and Green Lantern in Las Vegas, Green Lantern, Supergirl and Lobo in space, the Book of Destiny, the Lords of Luck, the Fatal Five, and Batman outsmarting the whole Legion of Super-Heroes. And of course that gorgeous George PÃ©rez artwork. Now you can own the whole story in a spiffy hardcover collection with a few pages of annotations by writer Mark Waid.

Or you can wait for the inevitable paperback edition. But I didn’t.

Rex Mundi seems to be coming together – at last – with this latest volume. Juan Ferreyra’s a good artist, although maybe not detail-oriented enough for my tastes (lots of panels relying more on coloring than linework for their backgrounds, for instance), but the range of facial expressions he draws is impressive. Mainly, though, Arvid Nelson’s story is finally really moving. To recap, the story takes place in an alternate Europe in 1933 in which the Protestant Revolution failed, and sorcery works. Our hero, Dr. Julien SauniÃ¨re, is seeking the answers to a centuries-old mystery about the Catholic Church and the kings of France. With both the Church and the Duke Lorraine following his every move, he seems to be getting closer, even as the fecal matter hits the fan in the form of war breaking out across Europe. Nelson turns the Axis/Allies alliances on their heads, although the Axis in this setting bears little relationship to the one from our World War II.

So my interest has been revived in the story. I think it would wear a bit better if the story were more character-oriented, although if Nelson has a bang-up ending in mind for the overall story then it could be just fine. I tend to be rather cynical when it comes to ongoing comic books, since it seems like nothing ever gets resolved (I have this problem in spades with TV shows, too), and it’s hard to see the current story going on for more than 2 or 3 more volumes. Nelson could throw a wrench in the works and send the story off in some substantially different direction, but that would be odd since so far the story has tracked steadily in a single direction. But it could happen.

There’s something about Atomic Robo that I don’t get.

The problem might be that it’s just one of several books being published today with the general theme of “adventurers with nonhuman backgrounds who tackle scientific/supernatural threats”. The best-known of these is the burgeoning Hellboy franchise at Dark Horse, of course. But Burlyman’s Doc Frankenstein is right in there, as are The Perhapanauts and The Umbrella Academy. All of these books have more of a pulp-magazine adventure feel than a superhero feel, and the characters often act on their own or outside of the public eye. I think Hellboy is the most popular mainly because he predates the rest of the current generation by a decade or so (plus he’s been in a feature film).

But Atomic Robo doesn’t really stand out. It seems to focus on the outright mayhem part of the adventures more than the other titles, but that doesn’t leave a lot of room for characterization, and the plots are very simplistic.

Robo himself is a smartass, and a little melancholy about some elements in his past, but that’s about all I’ve gleaned about the long-lived protagonist of the series, who was constructed by Nikola Tesla in the early 20th century. The stories don’t have much of a period feel, and this issue – about a mobile pyramid threatening Egypt – takes place in the present day. (It also ends with a big explosion, so abruptly I wondered there were pages missing.) We’re getting very brief vignettes about Robo, but not much depth. I think the creators have greater plans for the character, but I don’t think they’ve led with their best foot forward in this mini-series.

Still, with three issues to go there’s still time for that to change.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 3 October 2007.

Countdown #30 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Keith Giffen & Jesus Saiz (DC)
Metal Men #3 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
Welcome to Tranquility #11, by Gail Simone, Neil Googe & Irene Flores (DC/Wildstorm)
Annihilation Book One TPB, by Keith Giffen & Mitch Breitweiser, Scott Kolins & Ariel Olivetti, and Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Kev Walker & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
Ms. Marvel #20, by Brian Reed, Greg Toccini & Roland Paris (Marvel)
Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #2 of 5, by Mike Mignola & Jason Armstrong (Dark Horse)
The Boys #7-10, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
Atomic Robo #1 of 6, by Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegener (Red 5)
Modern Masters: Jerry Ordway TPB vol 13, edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington (TwoMorrows)

I feel like Metal Men is getting a little too byzantine for my enjoyment: It’s becoming harder to figure out what time period events are occurring in, and why they’re all part of the same story. There’s the present day, a few years ago, and then quite a few years ago back when Will Magnus was creating the Metal Men. Rouleau’s art is really neat, but I think the story’s structure is essentially reducing the characters to caricatures (Magnus’ final line in this issue – “you jerk!” – ring completely false for him). There’s still plenty of time left for everything to work out, but I wonder if Rouleau’s ambition has exceeded his writing talents here.

Having enjoyed the current Annihilation Conquest event at Marvel, I’m picking up the trades of the first Annihilation series. I haven’t finished this first one yet, but it sure does have terrific artwork. As with the current series, I like how Giffen and company have carved out this space in the Marvel Universe to play in so they can tall big, character-changing stories without needing to tie closely into the main Marvel continuity.

I think Ms. Marvel #20 is the last issue of this series I’ll be buying. There’s just been too much thrash and not enough progress. In many ways I think this series was just cursed by the Civil War, but it also feels like writer Brian Reed doesn’t have a firm idea of the direction the series is going in. After 20 issues, I feel like the story should have gotten somewhere, and it hasn’t. The last page suggests that it might be getting close, but only regarding one of its many story elements. The central theme of the series’ launch – that of Ms. Marvel trying to become one of the premier superheroes in her world – seems to have been lost along the way.

For an opposing opinion, here’s Aaron Glazier’s review at Comics Nexus. It’s like we’re reading different books: I hate how Machine Man is portrayed here, I find the characters weak and the storylines very muddy and directionless. I do agree that the art is quite good, but that’s not enough for me.

The Boys #7-10 comprises the third story arc in the series, and it’s a lot worse than the first two (which are in the collection I reviewed last week). It opens with Tek Knight, a superhero with a severe sexual dysfunction – but this one not only feels gratuitous (and not a little bit ridiculous), but it’s almost entirely irrelevant to the overall story. Here, Butcher and Hughie set out to find some justice for a young gay man who was found dead in the street some weeks previous, taking them on a short odyssey into the personal lives of several local heroes. That part of the story is actually rather good, and it throws some light on a particular dark facet of what superheroes might be pressured to do through their public image as do-gooders. But the Tek Knight elements are just superfluous. It’s like Ennis felt the story wouldn’t be shocking without the sexual deviancy, but even if less shocking, it would have been a much better story had it been shorted and focused to just the investigation of the presumed murder.

Atomic Robo is pretty neat: Early in the 20th century Nikola Tesla builds an atomic-powered sentient robot who (the book’s introductiont tells us) helps shape the rest of the century. This issue introduces the character in 1938, who at that time is not yet considered a free person, but basically the story is an adventure: He’s sent to the Himalayas to stop a Nazi plot. Although the dialogue is full of anachronisms, the book generally taps the same sense of fun and period adventure as Captain Gravity and some segments of Hellboy. Wegener’s art of reminiscent of Michael Avon Oeming’s at its best (Oeming did the cover of this first issue), although many panels are background-free. Overall it’s a fun issue, and there’s plenty of promise here, although there’s definitely a sense that this might just be a frivolous adventure yarn without a greater purpose. But that’s not the worst thing in the world.

(Why is it that I can enjoy a book, and yet lament that it doesn’t feel like something that will be cohesive in the long term, or have some ultimate direction or destination? Can’t I just enjoy it for what it is? Well, I can enjoy it, but it’s the books that deliver more than their basic narrative that end up sticking in my memory.)

Lastly, if you’re a fan of comic book art in general, I do recommend TwoMorrows’ Modern Masters series. These slim paperback volumes consist of extensive interviews with their respective creators, and a large collection of often-previously-unseen-or-rare artwork by those artists. So you learn a lot about the artist’s career and philosophy, and get to see a lot of art you might not have seen before. I’ve been cherry-picking the volumes of the artists I’m really interested in, which means I’ve picked up about half the volumes.