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Comics Out 28 December 2006

Comics Out this week: Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men 19 and Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and David Aja's The Immortal Iron Fist 2. I will review something tonight in the comments, once I have read them.

Plus a great bonus: Casanova #1 -- THE WHOLE ISSUE -- is up at Newsarama to read for free; so if you have heard me go on and on and haven't got the book, check it out. Subsequent issues don't get significantly better or worse -- the first issue is a good representation of the book as a whole, a good way to judge if it is for you or not.

Review. Discuss. Recommend.

EDIT (4:31 Dec 28): Brad Metzler and Ed Benes's Justice League of America 5 is also out today: I got thrown -- in this topsy-turvy world of All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, Planetary, and the Ultimates -- by an issue coming out only two weeks after the previous one.

Grant Morrison’s New X-Men 114 (Part One of Two)

After Monday’s post some folks suggested I look closely at Grant Morrison’s whole New X-Men run. It seems like a good idea since it is such a mixed bag, the best and the worst art I have seen, an ambitious failure by a writer I am completely familiar with. I don’t know how well this will go or how long it will go on for before it busts or gets boring, but I am going to try, as often as I can, to give each issue its due. Here is my review of issue 114, the first part of E for Extinction.



With the new title, the freshly designed reversible logo, and an eerie, badass cover including newly designed and unbelievably hip uniforms New X-Men 114 announces loudly its commitment to shaking up the status quo. Everyone is fantastically tall and lanky, like runway models (Quitely characters don’t often look this thin). Inside Xavier will say of Cassandra Nova “are these words from the future?” and Morrison’s aim is to make the whole book feel like an artifact from a future time.



Turn the page and you get hit with a wonderful two page spread that economically introduces the whole X-Men concept to the kinds of new readers Morrison was after (see my earlier post on Morrison’s New X-Men and Cool -- just hit the New X-Men tag): Mutants will replace humans as humans replaced the Neanderthals. If you already know the concept your attention will be held by the bizarre and wonderful Cassandra Nova, a herald of a dark future who (in a design stroke of evil genius) wears a pith helmet and matching attire – she will kill mutants as the British upper class killed elephants in Africa on Safari.

Turn the page again, and you get hit with an even better two page spread. Each main character gets an extreme close up highlighting a unique detail: Cyclops’s visor, Jean’s surgically precise telekinesis, Emma Frost’s high collar, the Beast’s cat eyes and glasses, Wolverine’s claws emerging (you can see small drops of blood flying, a detail that was removed from the poster version), and Xavier’s weird eyes, gleaming with one red and one blue X-Men logo, his dream. Even the font for the title card looks good.

This is part one of two because I want to keep posts bite size. More next time. Future reviews will be one post per issue; because a discussion of the first issue has to take into account all the new designs, it is a double post.

From John Ashbery's "Soonest Mended" (Commonplace Book)

Don't worry about the meaning of this passage at first. Just read it out loud a few times and listen for the rhythms, and the vowels, and the subtle shifts in tone. It seems quite goofy (brushing teeth?), and then the last four lines punch through your defenses making you feel sentimental and hopeful and sad without having any idea what was just said.

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing
Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made -- well, in a sense, "good citizens" of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept
The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Free Form Comments

Free form comments. Self-promotion, suggestions, anonymous criticism, any random thing you think we should know about.

Got a new blog, Powerword, from a friend of mine and his buddies (link to the right). The first post was a topic I wish I had thought to bring up myself: the debate Astronauts vs. Cavemen, featured in the season 5 episode of Angel where Illyria first appears. The genius of the debate is the total lack of context -- are the cavemen here? are the astronauts there? do the astronauts have weapons or their ship? -- so that the debate becomes, in large part, about imagining contexts. The genius of Whedon is how he opens the episode after the debate has been introduced -- characters at various points around the office, occupied with other duties, keep cycling back to it as an unfinished topic, keep thinking about variations to add in or ask about. And without spoiling the episode -- a very good one written by Whedon himself -- Whedon, of course, leverages this geek debate to establish the theme of his story; this nerd debate comes back in a heartbreaking way at the end.

I'm a caveman guy, myself.

On an unrelated topic (this is free form comments, after all) if you know of any freelance writing or speaking I could do let me know; I am always looking for ways to get extra cash (however paltry) while beefing up my resume and doing what I like to do anyway.