Dodo's Comic Year

2006 started feeling like the 90s all over again. Stash traffic hitting ballistic as I tunneled back in time to the rookie geek in me , buying everything in sight ,owning a lot of crap , culling them severely. Good news, though: 2006 ended like 2005. I’m back to collecting four non-sporadic monthly ongoing titles, my more-then-ten-year average- - - New Avengers (until Leinel Yu leaves), X Men(until Carey leaves or I get bored with them mutants,as I always do), Superman (until Busiek or Pacheco leaves) and Iron Fist (until either Matt Fraction or David Aja leaves) . The rest are either finite series or are so sporadic- - - Love and Rockets, Pop Gun War - - - they might as well be . And the ones closest to my heart - - -mostly stuff from Image - - - are the object of tradewaiting. My wallet, to put it mildly, is beside itself with glee.

My year in comics, then.



Limited Series of the Year / Book(s) of the Year: Long story short. Here are my favorite comics of last year. Finite. Ongoing. Unfinished. Whatever. The reads with headbutt. Unmissable and alphabetical.





A.L.I.E.E.N. (Lewis Trondheim, First Second) : McConey’s a minor gem. Moreso, Trondheim. More out than McConey , this is a bit of avant candy, like Happy Tree Friends without the store-bought brattiness.








DC Solo 12 (Brendan McCarthy, DC) : McCarthy’s underworked and that's the crime. So all manner of his narcotic strangeness foreclosing DC’s most audacious experiment smacks of making up. His Flash screams for an All Star treatment.

Elmer (Gerry Alanguilan,Komikero):Speaks to me in ways Maus wanted to but couldn’t. At turns funny, sad, profound, daring. And it’s only halfway done.

I Was Lost In Salasco (Josel Nicholas, Monkey Vs.Squirrel):The story behind the domestic indie breakout story of ’06 is that there’s no story. Josel still had stacks of this when the Komikon closed - - -shows you how rock and roll the scene really is. Underlooked lo-fi scratchy-punk social comment that does what every indie comic should : spits in your eye, kicks against the pricks. Aiming for literacy is a game for wussies.






Nextwave Agents of H.A.T.E. (Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen, Marvel) : Gutful of party-down irreverence weaponized into a silver bullet that’s a headful of manga tripout. Funnest superhero comic of ’06. So, of course, it gets cancelled.







The Night Trippers (Mark Ricketts & Micah Farritor,Image) : Everything a good comic needs - - - vampires, rock and roll, psychedelics and art that will lick your eyes.







Phonogram (Kieron Gillen & Jaime Mckelvie,Image) : “A rabid jackal of a comic, prckly and drooling” No better way of calling it. Phonomancy is the new black. Must.







Seven Soldiers (Grant Morrison,JH Williams III and Various,DC) : Chinese puzzle with interlocking ,independent pieces. Masterpiece of synergy. Instruction codes for crossovers with story surplus. Opiates.

Trese: Our Secret Constellation (Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo, Alamat) : In which Trese goes from a quasi-X Files bubble bath to something you shoot up and alters your chemistry a bit. Dangerous , brilliant, possibly sublime - - - the Darna inversion to catch up with. I start roadwork tomorrow. Damn you, Budjette.

Wisdom (Pete Cornell & Trevor Hairsine, Marvel MAX) : Turns out the Ellis-channeling's just smoke, residue. Cornell has his mojo down - - -it's very British, it's very weird and it's very bloody good.


Honorable Mentions:Arnold Arre's Andong Agimat - - -Tagalog could use a bit of spit and polish but this is still Arre's shining hour by way much. Matt Fraction & Gabriel Ba's Casanova - - -the faint undercurrent of Diabolik sucked me in and I am a Fraction-fanboy-in-progress. And Gaiman and Romita's Eternals - - -why few Gaimanheads have picked up on this is a mystery for the ages, could be the superhero walk-ons, could be that it's a Civil War crossover of sorts, could be that it's harder to dress up in public as Kirby characters, could be that Gaimanheads are just faddists.

Hero of the Year/Best In Costume/Best In Ripped-Apart Costume/Best In Body: Iron Fist. Iron Fist. Iron Fist. Iron Fist. Respectively.

Writer of the Year:Grant Morrison still had most of the old school biting the dust and eating his but Brian Wood's stuff on Demo and the bits of Local and Supermarket I read last year were knocks out of the park. And then there's Kieron Gillen.

Artist(s) of the Year:



















Top Row: Brendan McCarthy for - - - you need any more reason? Yoshitaka Amano for Hero .
Second Row: Micah Farritor , mostly for The Night Trippers and for making Strange Girl the Image comic I'm tradewaiting for with bated breath.
Third Row:Frank Quitely for the handful of All Star Supermans that left pretty much everyone in the lurch. Leinel Yu for snagging the clock-in art grunt job on New Avengers.
Bottom Row: And Bong Leal for being Bong Leal.


Company of the Year: Hands down Image Comics.


Worst (Or Mostly Just OK But Really Blah except for The Creeper which sucked eggs) Books :Oh god . . . the Johns/Donner Action Comics (but not the Kubert art), Eddy Barrows' art for The All-New Atom(but not Gail's writing) , Civil War (but not the McNiven art) and pretty much all its tie-ins except Robinson's Frontline , the Steve Niles Creeper reboot, the sleeping pill Dini made out of Detective , Infinite Crisis, Meltzer's JLA revamp and most OYL titles, Brubaker's New X Men but then mutants were never my thang, not all but parts of Siglo:Passion and its oh-so-corny coinage, Teen Titans , Carey and Portacio's Wetworks and pretty much the rest of Worldstorm - - -except Authority and Tranquility. I love superheroes but a lot of them put up a stink in 2006.

Famous Last Words: Crossovers suck.

Faye says: 2006 guilty pleasures

Happy new year! Ambilis ng panahon! Before you know it another story arc has ended. Here are the highlights of 2006 for me:

Persistent bad habit – Wolverine - I don’t have to explain myself.

Guilty pleasure of the year – Nightwing – I hate that I found myself researching his lovelife and seriously looking for TPBs on when he slept with Huntress, when he and Starfire were an item, where he broke up with Barbara, and when he slept around. Damn. I thought I was over reading romance novels but no – I just shifted to superhero soaps.
IT’S A GIRL THING, OK?!
Runners up - Christian Walker (Powers) and Mitchell Hundred (Ex Machina)


Favorite series – Birds of Prey – Hey, I’m not saying it’s the best. Peborit ko lang. Why? I can relate kasi to the main characters… *ehem* Gail Simone put nicotine in this series – its addictive. I was genuinely angry after reading issue #99 when Black Canary told Oracle that she was leaving. Goddamn Brad Meltzer to hell for pirating the character for JLA! But with an all female creative team and new operatives such as Manhunter things are beginning to look exciting!

Best series – X-Factor – I think the reason why this was the “best” for me is that I did not expect to fall in love with the Jaime, Rictor, Syrin, Monet, Guido, Rahne, and Layla. The series has an Angel Investigation feel (and yes I miss Angel). The character driven stories of Jaime’s dupes, Rictor’s attempted suicide, Syrin’s abduction and her denial of her father’s death, Layla’s (possible) origins, Guido’s murder of a man under his protection will make you forget that you are reading an X-men title.

Best Mini-series – Secret Six – Who would have thought I would love villains? The S6 are all unpredictable and that was the hook. Gago silang lahat! They do try to do right to each other but then they fail miserably. And by the way, I would also line up to have Catman’s baby… (Hehe!)

Series I wanna see on HBO – Y: the Last Man – I heard that New Line Cinema bought the rights but I believe only HBO can do justice to this book.

Biggest disappointment – Wonder Woman – for the fact that only THREE issues were released!

Thor Says: The Best of 2006 in Comics v.1

A year of crisis, a year of reboots. And I’m not just talking about my personal life. This is the best year to get back into comics. Continuities are cleaned up; storylines are brassy new, and our heroes learn how to be heroes again. And oh, all Civil War titles will have to be runners-up for now since shipping is always delayed. Heh.

Best Story INFINITE CRISIS
Epic, cinemascope storytelling. Taking root in the universe-spanning Crisis on Infinite Earths and the more recent crime drama Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis redefines taking a plunge with blind Juggernaut momentum. Johns and Jimenez take us from a nuclear detonation in Bludhaven to the imploding Rann galactica to a universe-bending portal powered by Black Adam and Power Girl among others. We might not always get it (instantly) but we are definitely swept away. By the palpable desperation of Superman. By the sheer bravado of the speedsters and the GL corps. By the sacrifice of a teenager in love.

Runners-up CIVIL WAR: Frontline (Marvel), RUNAWAYS: Parental Guidance (Marvel), TEEN TITANS: Titans Around the World (DC)



Best Book 52
A weekly comic by Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, and Geoff Johns. Cover by J.G. Jones. And there's no hype to live up to. Just writers telling stories and artists sketching the missing year between I.C. and the One Year Later jump all DC titles took before IC wrapped up. What was a gamble is now an extraordinary triumph of affected storytelling. And it lives up to its promise. Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman are not missed. At all. Instead we get to root for C-listers Renee Montoya, The Question, Steel, Booster Gold and Skeets, and almost forgotten fan favorites Animal Man and Adam Strange. And Lobo. The lost in space crew, the Black Adam family, the mysterious Batwoman, and Lex Corp.'s Infinity Inc. are all about to collide next year, and I'm guessing it will soon be time for JSA #1's opening panel World War III.

Runners-up FABLES (Vertigo), THE ULTIMATES 2 (Marvel), ASTONISHING X-MEN (Marvel), Y: The Last Man (Vertigo)

Best Hero IRON MAN
Because right now, he is both hero and villain and there's no one remotely more interesting in the Marvel Universe than this recovering alcoholic corporate mogul who cannot survive outside his armor. And Iron Man beating up Captain America, that's the sweetest. Turn around or not at the end of CW, he is the necessary catalyst that is changing the Marvel Universe.

Runners-up GREEN ARROW (DC), RENEE MONTOYA (DC), EMMA FROST (Marvel), BLACK BOLT (Marvel)

XXXX

Haven’t posted in a while, been real busy and Thor’s been bugging to catch up on my reading but today is a special day. Forget the deadlines, forget Sentry (the TBP I’ve been reading for two days now) – it’s comics day! Four X-titles were released: two of my favorite series and two limited runs.

X23: Target X
Writers: Kyle and Yost
Art by: Mike Choi and Sonia Oback

“What was X23?”

“She was a weapon.”

X23 was first introduced in Xmen Evolution then she next appeared in Quezada’s NY where she was a mysterious prostituted young woman with hardly any lines. Then came “X23” where Kyle and Yost told the heart wrenching story of her origin. In this limited run, they tell the story of the two years between the destruction of the FACILITY and the time she appeared in New York. The art was AWESOME – very realistic but not in the slutty Greg Land way. There was the obligatory flashback but it was not a cut-and-paste thing – Kyle and Yost added new snippets from X23’s training and how Dr. Sarah Kinney was beginning to care for her “daughter.” The last panel showed who was interrogating X23 and that will make you want to wish for a time machine this Xmas and fast forward to next month. Here’s hoping there’ll be no delays.

New X-Men: Mercury Falling

Writers: Craig Kyle and Chris Yost

Penciler: Paco Medina

“Tell me, is that a genuine emotion?” – Emma Frost to X23

New X-men after M-day has been brutal. Forty of de-powered students murdered in a terrorist attack and three students were assasinated. During the aftermath of M-day, Wolverine called her to come to the Mansion. I think Logan believed that after the tragedy she should not be alone. Emma thought allowing Laura to stay in the Mansion with other kids is a disaster waiting to happen. The new story arch begins with Emma’s doubts. Emma – being the bitch with good intentions - asked X23 to leave but X23 has made friends - she helps eavesdrop on their teachers, she has a crush on Julian, and well, she saved their assess too. She is the closest thing to becoming a teen-ager with the New X-men. In her first “girl-talk-in-a-coffee-shop” experience, true to form, the coffee shop was attacked and blown up by armed men. This has a very interesting twist in the end of the fighting and explosions. I have been told to drop some of my Xmen titles… this will not be one of them

X-men: Phoenix Warsong

Writer: Greg Pak

Pencils: Tyler Kirkham

“My little death machines.” – Emma on the Cuckoos

Cool cover! Zombies! Celeste giving new flesh to the Zombies! Celeste blasting the Zombies! Emma lobotomizing Celeste to block out the Phoenix! Stupid X-men for believing Dr. Sublime’s massive interactive databank of recording powered by an automated response program! Mr. Pak is ruining the story! Still the adrenaline high was worth it.

X-Factor: Multiple Issues

Writer: Peter David

Pencils: Pablo Raimondi

“X-Factor – putting the “fun” in “dysfunctional.” - Rictor

This is my favorite book. Stories about dysfunctional relationships and persons always draw me in (I think that’s why I love listening to Aimee Mann). Also, X-Factor reminds of Angel Investigations which I miss. I have forgotten about Monet, Syrin, Rictor, Guido, Rahne, and Jaime before I picked up this new run. They have always been practically second stringers – rarely taking the spotlight in the X-men titles until Peter David. David adding Layla Miller to the mix was genius.

Issue 14 does not have a single panel of heroes fighting their arch enemies (The few panels where Monet was hitting Jaime because a duplicate seduced her a few nights before while Jaime slept with Syrin don't count. Oh and by the way, I would hit him too.) There were three pages of male-bonding in a bar, four pages of Guido explaining to the wife of the man he killed that he was used by the Singularity, three pages of Jaime talking to a shrink…. You get the picture but the dialogue was priceless (especially the male-bonding part).

The art is better too – the coloring still maintains the feel and character of the book but the pencils are far better.

Holy Shit!

As seen on Geoff Johns' board: Titans East is just two issues away. The team has gone through a massive amounts of changes over the last year. They lost several members, they've tried to find new ones, it hasn't worked...but now new members are coming on to the team. They found one they thought was lost and Ravager's found a brother. Kid Devil's secret will begin to tear at his heart. Robin and Wonder Girl find new hope. This team might actually become a family again...

...but this new family is about to be challenged.

The beautiful cover to Teen Titans 45 by Tony Daniel...

52 Week Thirty

52 #30
Written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid; Breakdowns by Keith Giffen; Art by various; Backup features by Waid and various; Covers by J.G. Jones

The Ah-Hah: First, a moment of silence for this week's Ginebra bilog-inspired cover.

Then.

Batwoman: I'm Batwoman.
Nightwing: Definitely not a Batgirl.

Heh. The Bat Family takes center stage, and it's a stage filled with Bat flirting and hornyness. This time we meet a self-conscious Batwoman who knows her ass is being watched by Buttwing while she kicked, um, assess; quite far from the grim Batdyke that Montoya knows. The Bat banter hasn't been this fun since...um...let me get back to you on that.

And now for the good, sad part. Charlie really is dying. I'm still hoping for an ex machina stunt here because I love this guy. I love the Question and Montoya tandem. They are my heroes of the year. In the middle of all the Bat madness is a quiet slice of consciously restrained writing. Much like a sigh.

The Uh-huh: Batman has gone Bat crazy after IC and appears to have successfully killed his inner batness, which doesn't really amount to anything because we all know what happens one year later. And we all know that he IS psycho anyway. Quite unnecessary, but still nice to know. ****

We're making a list and checking it twice

Best in Dialogue. From superdickery.com

Greetings on the day Crossing Midnight #1 ships! It's that time of the year again when we go all Santa Claus on our favorite costumes, metas, mutants. Time for best of and (or worst of ) lists. Naughty or nice? Fuck of the century or snoozefest? Infinite Crisis or Civil War? We can do top 3 and bottom 3, all up to you folksies.

Here are few categories to think about:

Limited Series of the Year. CW is not yet over. 52 should never be over. One All-Star title is soaring. But I'm guessing Seven Soldiers.

Book of the Year. The OYLs feel like a Crisis hang-over. The Runaways lose and gain momentum. The Fables declare war in their heads. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are still on their asses gossiping. Much like the Eternals.

Hero of the Year. Nightwing? *wink, wink FAB*

• Best in Costume
• Best in Ripped-apart Costume
• Best Body (Male, Female, or Planet)
  

Team of the Year. The new new Thunderbolts. Heck, let's just call them Villains United.

Best single issue of the Year. The one comic book that wasn't a continuity sucker but had all you wanted in a comic. Could be part of a series. Or cheat and say Brave New World.

Writer of the Year. Dodo Dayao!

Artist of the Year. Post with pictures!

Publisher of the Year. Let's do this by label. DC. Vertigo. WildStorm. Marvel. Top Cow. Image. Dark Horse.


GAME NA!

52 Week Twenty-Nine

52 #29
Written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid; Breakdowns by Keith Giffen; Art by various; Covers by J.G. Jones

The Ah-hah: JSA. The old timers Ted, Jay and Alan being old and obsolete. Hurts. Moment of realization comes crashing down on the three when a Thanksgiving Infinity Inc. parade walks down the street outside their headquarters with new Infiniter Jade. Obsidian goes berserk. Meanwhile, on the island of Dr. Morrow, nothing much happens. This is one of the more stand alone issues, and this goes out to all those who have been missing the JSA, me included. More of a homage than moving the story forward. All the talk on respect and what makes a superhero hit home. Nostalgia minus the Meltzer breakdown. Matter of fact, even a little cheeky. Loved it.

The Uh-oh: The island of Dr. Morrow scenes are overwritten and painstakingly slow. Bad egg Egg-fu was fun to see again sans the moustache but forgettable, really. Even Steel's getting predictable; we all kinda knew (guessed) that Lex Luthor's for everyman brew wasn't permanent. And I just cant wait to see all those Infinity Inc.-ers die really horrible deaths. After that big reveal in week 28 I was kinda hoping for more on our lost-in-space crew and the Questions. But what's great is...there's always next week. ***

Komikaze

Hijacked from Is It Safe?.




The tendrils of my comicbook fetishism run kid-deep. When Dad handed those EC comics down, I was Saul on the road to Damascus. But what I became, only the choir gets.

Comics have become fad gadgets, the future of rock and roll, pop cultural effluvia. They’ve been called graphic novels, sequential art, graphic fiction, visual literature. But comics have always been comics to me. No superfluous, fancy-dress name to fix what ain’t broke - - - an endeavor I’ve always found . . . um, corny at worst. Marketing hoohah at best. Comics are comics, deal with it - - - my words to live by.

Comics are silly, kinky, freakish, sexy, shiny, narcotic, irrational, ecstatic. All of which describes the twelve below. The twelve comics I’d rescue from a building on fire. The twelve I’d take to a desert island. Not necessarily the twelve finest comics ever made but for the fact that they are. Why twelve? Why not? Well, ten plus one each from Alan Moore and Frank Miller, whom you can’t ignore. Geek lists like this are protean, variable. OK, fickle. And there are ,as always, the painful omissions. Bubbling under and bound to sub for what made the cut in an eyeblink: Enki Bilal’s The Nikopol Trilogy , Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (prefrably the entire colored Epic run),William Gaines’ Mad , Will Eisner's Spirit, Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, Paul Jenkins & Jae Lee’s Inhumans, Kirby and Lee's Fantastic Four, Neil Gaiman & Kelley Jones’ Season of Mists,Ted Mckeever’s Metropol, Morrison's Doom Patrol and tons of multi-volume manga. Crucially missing - - - homebrew. That deserves a list all its own.


BLACK AND WHITE Taiyo Matsumoto (Viz) : Certified manga nut here and still this yakuza mash-up's a charm for diamterically opposing all known manga forms while staying ostensibly Japanese, of which I'm even more psycho for.




THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS Frank Miller & Klaus Janson with Lynn Varley (DC) : Smacks a bit of picking Citizen Kane- - - a bit obvious, a bit lazy, a bit you could see coming a mile away. But no Miller comic ever had this much vigor. No Batman comic either. Or Superman at that.




ED THE HAPPY CLOWN Chester Brown (Vortex) : What's it all about? To codify Ed is to tabulate what's in it, so let's - - - UFOs, giant rats, cannibal pygmies, magic beans, dismembered hands that travel through time, penis grafts, headless presidents, monstrous piles of shit and a cow. The headtrip is when it coheres. And does it. Comicbook dada, that'll stick.



FLEX MENTALLO MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (Vertigo) : Reformats superheroes into opiates. Forms fracture. Tropes subvert. Noise gains color. Morrison & Quitely’s Jeet Kun Do’s always been weirder, meaning better, than Moore's , than Gaiman's , than anybody else’s. Here they are now, going sensei.


HELLBOY Mike Mignola (Dark Horse) : Oh, this is pulp - - - recombinant, supersized, prog-rock pulp. And Mignola draws like a motherfucker. So granted, it's vibrant. But I love it for the Kirby Lovecraftian monsters. Big ones. Gigantic ones. Up the kazoo.


LOVE AND ROCKETS: BLOOD OF PALOMAR Gilbert Hernandez and LOVE AND ROCKETS: THE DEATH OF SPEEDY Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics) : Gilbert's smalltown melodrama is so rich and layered, it's like Garcia Marquez, only sexier. Jaime's punk Mexican soap opera is so acute and immersive,it's like voyeurism, only funnier.



MADMAN Michael Allred (Dark Horse/AAA Pop) : Everything Allred signs his name on crackles with the joy, or a kind of amplified exuberance, that comics hooked me with forever. But this just sings like an acid trip , dig?



MARVELS Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross (Marvel) : Busiek’s in the know: nostalgia’s an aphrodisiac. What Lee & Kirby minted into prevailing tendencies he buffs to a sheen. Ross , at the height of his powers to floor, superconducts. Magic realism, then - - -with pictures that tick.



PLANETARY Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (Wildstorm):More a metacomic than you realize. Planetary combats the forces seeking to alter the shadow history of all our comicbook universes. And Elijah Snow 's a geek metaphor for every fanboy who's ever gone anal over continuity fuckups. Ellis's masterpiece.



POP GUN WAR Farel Dalrymple (Meathaus): The urge to draw parallels with Wings of Desire is there. But where Wenders was gazing at the quotidian through the eyes of gods, Farel’s doing the reverse, finding filaments of wonder in the supermundane.



SIGNAL TO NOISE Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean (Dark Horse) : Meditates on death without putting an ankh around its neck. Nothing here for weirdos to dress up as, good. Had Neil been a Beatle, this’d be his White Album - - - and 1602 is a Ringo solo record. Beautifully envisioned. Genuinely profound. Fucking brilliant.



TOP 10 Alan Moore and Gene Ha (ABC): Metahuman NYPD Blue - - -conceptually, it's blah Then you read it and it isn't Steven Bochco, dog. Nor is it From Hell , right, but superhero cop dramas will win me over any time. A whore job, some say. Beg to differ. Vastly underrated, more like it.

The Culling

It's cyclical with me. Bingeing on stash ,then my economy crumbles , and the cracks in quality I didn't see when I had money to burn start coming to relief, said cracked titles then get abandoned midway , owned copies resold or given away, and regretting mistakes I can't take back or even re-sell - - - Kevin Smith's DD and Green Arrow, Loeb/Sale's Daredevil:Yellow, Miller's Batman/Spawn, Grant's JLA/WildCATs, Gaiman's 1602 and both Deaths (you likey?) Time to cull again, sad to say. Number of reasons, mostly personal. Chief being my current salary of 0 pesos a day. Second being space,buying anymore means I have to give up my bed to make room. Thirdly,geek thresholds runneth over - - - I have outgrown this craving for continuity when I was 13 , and my collecting dynamic has always favored creators over characters, so this feels like so much backslide to me. Of course, I'm bound to be back here a year from now,swayed by the brouhaha. Oh well. Fourth, my current salary of 0 pesos a day. Fifth, and probably contradictory to all reasons aforementioned, is the spate of #1s I aim to sample - - - Iron Fist (second favorite character since I was 7 and foreskinned) , Tranquility, New Universal and Crossing Midnight- - -and I don’t want to dip into my insurance money to do that.

But mostly it's aesthetic. Something about these books just isn't giving me the rise and hook I need to evoke devotion. Hype brought them to me and hype almost always is a come-on with no follow-through. Twenty or so years of collecting comics, of Onslaughts and Heroes Reborns and Secret Wars and Crisis On Infinte Earths and DC One Millions and . . . I still haven't learned. Of course, if the busking and the begging on the streets and the whoring yields some cashflow and the withdrawals nag, I might give some of these castoffs a go still - - -Stormwatch,perhaps? Might. Otherwise, I either tradewait , torrent or just move on to better shit.

Like food.

Action Comics and Superman Confidential: I had to ask : self, do you really give a bat's penis if the kid 's Kryptonian ? Obviously, I got my answer. Geoff I like. But Infinite Crisis hurt my head. Hit/miss. Then there's Cooke. Breaks my heart to let a Darwyn book go. Moreso when my gut tells me he catches fire two, three issues down. (And I don't even think I'll be up for his Spirit revamp this December ,which would be a damn shame) What sold me was rummaging through my boxes being struck that I don't have too many Superman books - - -just the Alan Moore one, the 50s comp ,the Hulk and Madman crossovers and this ,still the Superman take that takes. Reason being . . . I am not a fan of Superman. Not the movies, not the TV shows, not the cartoons, not the John Byrne revamp, certainly not Smallville. And I feel a bit silly for buying three monthlies of a character I am not a fan of. Or much like. I'm buying All Star Superman for Morrison/Quitely. I bought Up Up and Away for Busiek/Woods. And I keep the Busiek/Pacheco Superman for roughly the same reasons. Busiek/Pacheco. Also, Bizarro Swamp.

All New Atom: Gail on this was ecstatic with possibilities. And Byrne still has the give,artwise. But he's gone, the arc’s going around in circles , the first vivid wave of oddness is starting to leak out and Eddy Barrows’ art is an eyepain.

Batman: Son of Batman was hot, fast, pulp brilliance. One more issue with Grant - - - the Joker story with John van Fleet (mismo!) - - - then the baton gets passed to Ostrander and Mandrake. I don’t care for Ostrander. I care less for Mandrake. I sit this one out for the four issues they're on. Then I see you all again in May where hopefully my career and economy will have risen from the grave like a dead Marvel superhero.

Creeper: Crap.

Deathblow: Prime ingredients. Master chef - - -Azzarello (so not a slouch) - - - cooking it up. Gorgeous plating - - - D'Anda on 11. You bite and it tastes . . . um, OK, even good. Also tastes not just exactly how you expected it to taste . . .but just like any well-made mercenary superhero comic you've read. New dish that tastes like comfort food. Hate when that happens. Goodbye.

Detective Comics: Runs on ostensibly old-fashioned, utterly conventional tracks. Total status quo. The stand-alone format justifies the rotating artists. But only makes it prone to really , really bad lapses in art. Dini can do his Busiek Lite shtick asleep and sometimes it feels as if he is. Not bad. Not much. In boom times, this already qualifies as fanboy indulgence. Now, it's like lighting cigarettes with your legal tender. Also , like Wolverine, Batman's starting to bore me, too.

Gen 13: Again, Gail. I'm torn, really. Gen 13 has always been a guilty pleasure. But that's the point. They've never been anything but. Not even in Ellis's hands. Intriguing, yes. But my stack of Gen 13s gathering dust needs no adding to. I'm with Ms. Simone for Tranquility. This? Sorry.

JLA: Identity Crisis went over my head. Better Than Bendis is not much to hang on to as a quality. But so far, that's all that Meltzer is to me. Better Than Bendis. Only slightly at that. And here ,not even. A little levity, please, Mr. New York Times Bestselling Author. My personal JLA nadir was Grant's 1,000,000. This feels even more of a slog than that. I'll never know, though. Good.

Stormwatch PHD: Played a bit like Wisdom. Except Wisdom was weirder, naughtier , snarkier, hipper and Brit. It's either Wisdom or this. I like Mahnke and I wish him and Gage well. Tradewait possibility - - - for the art.

Teen Titans: Never got into this. Not even when Perez was on it. Judas Contract? Sleeping pill. Can’t get into this still, despite quality signifiers saying I probably should, despite overextended Geoff being much better here. Feel the cartoon, though. Feel the cartoon massive.

Wetworks: Not for Carey. Not even for Whilce. Sorry.

WildCATs: Grant phones it in, feels like. Could be wrong but then, it's taking Jim Lee forever to draw this. Why'd it still come out looking rushed? A mystery for the ages.