Secret Six #34

After the last storyarc sent the team to Hell, this issue is a much-welcomed rest break. The serial killer who’s kidnapped Scandal’s girlfriend Liana gets his meeting with the Six, and I don’t think it’s a big spoiler to reveal that it doesn’t turn out well for him. Scandal reconciles with Ragdoll, Jeannette sings an old Irish ballad, Bane goes on a date, and King Shark eats a turkey. But we’re warned that, as always seems to be the case with this book, more bad things are on the horizon.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Awesome dialogue, great action, wonderful art. Bane’s date is a bucket of pure win. King Shark is awesome, even though he’s only in one or two scenes. It’s sad, it’s sweet, it’s funny, it’s profane, it’s awesome.

How to improve this series: I’m not real sure you could improve on this. Gail Simone is one of DC’s best writers, and this is one of their best series. If they don’t preserve this for the Reboot, they’re completely insane.

Avengers Academy #14.1

What’s “14.1” mean? Well, Marvel’s trying to make sure there are some “0.1” issues for their series, to give new readers a chance to jump on board — so this issue is, in part, meant to be an introduction to the series for those who aren’t familiar with it.

After the Academy students battle the oh-so-1970s-weird Ruby Thursday, they decide they want to see how other young metahumans who were tortured by Norman Osborn turned out — Finesse quickly tracks down a kid named Jeremy Briggs, a super-genius matter-transmuter who is now running a very profitable chemical megacorp. He introduces them to some other former “students” of Osborn’s — a kid who used to turn into a monster whose transformations are now held in check with medicine; a healer keeping people healthy in third-world nations; and a cold-controller who, unfortunately, has just been killed trying to stop the Wendigo. And Briggs has an ulterior motive for talking to the Academy kids — he wants them to quit the hero-or-villain business and come to work for him.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a depressing little story, but it’s very well-told. Dialogue and action are good, and the characterization is excellent. I hope we get to see more of Briggs in the future — he makes a great foil for the team.

How to improve this series: Ya know what I think I’d like the most for this title? A new costume for Hazmat. I hate the way the helmet hides most of her face — makes it so hard to get anything but a vague impression of her emotions and reactions.

Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever #5

While Morgan tries to hold off a horde of undead bandits, Sir Edward ends up getting gutshot, and then seemingly killed by the witch Eris, who is bartering souls of Christians for colossal mystic power. But with one hero surrounded by unkillable zombies and the other shot full of lead and sitting in the Paiute land of the dead, is there any way to stop Eris?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A good end to the series. Absolutely gorgeous art by John Severin and Dave Stewart. Nicely suspenseful, too — it really looks like Sir Edward and Morgan are done for near the end.

How to improve this series: Can’t think of much you could do to fix this. It could’ve been an issue or two shorter, but that would’ve shortchanged the great interpersonal stuff between Sir Edward and Morgan that really made this series fun. We also could’ve found out more about Eris’ motivations and the weird mysteries behind Isaac. But that’s nitpicking.

The DC Reboot

In a way, I don’t want to say very much about this — all we really have to go on is DC’s press releases. There’s no way to tell yet what is going to work and what isn’t going to work and whether it’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing.

But I am not looking forward to this.

Part of it is that DC has tried reboots before — Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis — and they never last. Before long, readers and creators start jonesing for “classic” comics, and everything goes back to the way it was before. This one will be no different.

What else? I hate the costumes, and that’s something DC really pushed hard. Look at that Justice League cover above. The costumes are not good. Superman, Aquaman, and Green Lantern all have corny pop-up collars, and Wonder Woman’s choker is essentially the same kind of collar. And what the heck are those things on Flash’s and Cyborg’s chins? I don’t know a thing about art or clothing design, but those costumes look like garbage — and that’s what you get when you have one guy — Jim Lee, in this case — design all the costumes. His design preferences creep into everything so they all look alike. And these will be the first things that get discarded after the reboot. I mean, look at ’em. Superman looks like a complete dork. And look up the costume design for Green Arrow — it’s a direct copy from the “Smallville” TV series. A series that has been cancelled and which, honestly, was never all that popular in the first place. The costumes are bad, bad, bad.

I’ll admit I’m looking forward to some of the titles. Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang working on “Wonder Woman”? I’ll be buying that. But most of the others are just not filling me with very much enthusiasm. Gail Simone writing “Firestorm”? Okay, but why is she being saddled with Ethan Van Sciber as co-writer? It’s an insult to Simone’s writing skills, to be honest. Geoff Johns — a writer I’m rapidly coming to think of as DC’s version of Brian Michael Bendis — is writing too many series. Dan DiDio is writing another, and I’m pretty sure y’all know I’m not a fan of that guy. I don’t trust DiDio or Johns to do good work on these — their instincts tend to lie more with DC’s previous tired gimmicks of Silver Age worship and pointless, over-the-top violence.

The announcement of the reboot threw retailers into a panic, thanks to DC’s decision to release digitial editions of comics on the same day as they release the print versions. That’d be the equivalent of movie studios letting you rent DVDs on the same day they released the movies in theaters — and it had a lot of retailers worried that lots of readers would quit buying from stores in favor of buying comics for their iPads. On the other hand, DC wants to charge the same prices for print and digital comics, which has digital readers scratching their heads, because no one else charges as much for digital as they do for print. So DC managed to alienate both retailers and digital comics fans at the same time.

Another thing that bugs me is this seems more like a publicity stunt than something that’s going to lead to long-term increases in readership. There’s not much here that seems to be designed to bring in new readers — just a lot of stuff to make current comics fans angry. Sometimes, it seems like that’s all that DC or Marvel know how to do — stir up buzz by doing stuff to upset their current readers. Sure, it gets coverage in USA Today, but media coverage doesn’t necessarily lead to more readers, and that’s what DC needs.

And ya know, I’ve already gone on for a lot longer than I meant to on this topic. So I’ll reiterate — I don’t like the idea of the DC Reboot. It’s a bad idea at a bad time, and I worry it’s going to do long-term damage to the comics industry as a whole. I hope I’m wrong, of course… but I worry I might be right.

Dungeons & Dragons #7

We’re still in flashback mode, discovering how Adric Fell and his band of adventurers originally got together. Hired on to guard some wizards traveling to a magically lost city, their band is ambushed by a bunch of elves and eladrin. When the head eladrin (for those not up on their D&D knowledge, eladrin are basically elf nobles, while regular elves are, well, just regular elves) reveals that he’s willing to kill other elves and eladrin to protect the city’s magic, Varis turns on him. But there’s another ambush in the making, as they are all attacked by the Drow (again, for the D&D avoiders, those are dark elves). A small group of adventurers survives, but they won’t last long with all the Drow trying to bust into the small room they’re holed up in. Do they have a chance to escape certain doom?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nicely tense storyline, lots of claustrophobic, tense scenes, outstanding dialogue, and a picture-perfect Desperate Last Stand.

How to improve this series: Well, I enjoyed this flashback storyarc, but I’m fairly glad it’s over now, ’cause I really want to see more stuff with my two favorite characters, Bree the greedy sociopath halfling and Tisha the brooding but dishy tiefling.

Detective Comics #877

Batman escapes from a deathtrap set by Bixby Rhodes, a gunrunner/car dealer, and snags the crook even though he tries to escape on high-tech titanium super-legs. Dick learns from Sonia Branch, non-criminal daughter of the gangster who killed his parents, that her bank has had to deal with criminals wanting to launder money for years, but while the Mob usually respected her wishes not to cater to criminals (after all, they had plenty of other banks to turn to for dirty dealings), other crooks, including Rhodes and a smuggler named Tiger Shark, have refused to take no for an answer. Dick tracks Tiger Shark to his secret underwater lair, but what sort of dangers are lurking in the depths?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Very, very nice mystery storytelling. Love the dialogue and characterization by Scott Snyder. (There’s a great bit at the beginning where Dick Grayson talks about what he likes to do after dealing with human criminals all night — he loves nature documentaries, just because they don’t have any humans in them. That’s a great piece of character work.) And I love Jock’s artwork, too. Really, I’m loving the whole series.

How to improve this series: For starters, don’t get rid of Scott Snyder. The guy really is very good with mysteries. Other than that, I can’t think of a lot that would need to be fixed — this is one of DC’s best series.

Xombi #3

The Maranatha is a giant fiery monster of pure anger and hatred, and it’s whuppin’ the tar out of David Kim. Nun of the Above, Catholic Girl, and Rabbi Sinnowitz try to help out, but things look pretty grim once the monster bites David in half — and he doesn’t start regenerating. Well, not for a while. Eventually, he does recover, all while a ghost has this great monologue about what it’s like to be dead and to miss being alive. Will they be able to destroy the Maranatha? Will David be able to maintain his connections to the normal people while living forever? And where’s the mastermind behind this whole thing?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I had my doubts for a while, ’cause it was a lot of hitting and biting for a while, but once the ghost starts that great monologue while David slowly stitches himself back together, it’s pure magic clear to the end.

How to improve this series: Hey, I know you gotta have some hitting in superhero comics, but why don’t we let John Rozum spend more time writing awesome dialogue and characters, okay? That’s a ton of fun.

Today’s Cool Links:

• All anyone is talking about today is DC’s decision to reboot all their comics and republish everything from #1. I think this sounds like an utter disaster, and a great opportunity for me to read a lot fewer DC comic books — but let’s watch as Siskoid and MightyGodKing break it all down for us.

Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine #6

This has been an extremely fun comic from the beginning, but I hate to tell ya, it falls all to pieces in this last issue.

When we last left our heroes, they were stuck in the Mojoverse, time-diamonds stuck all over them to allow them to fight the Czar and Big Murder, when Wolverine gets possessed by the Phoenix Force. And this issue starts out with… Spidey, Wolvie, and Spidey’s new girlfriend living quietly in the Old West. Oh, and we eventually find out that Spidey defeated WolverPhoenix by… talking him down. Then mysterious portals steal the bad guys away, and after a while of, again, living quietly in the Old West, the time portals come back and we learn they’re run by the Time Cops, and they steal the heroes away, stuff ’em back in the present day, make Spidey’s girlfriend forget him, and everything ends on a deeply depressing note, where everyone’s efforts were completely useless and the heroes are left alone and lonely.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Seriously, it’s amazing how a series that was so very awesome for the first five issues just turned into a bucket of missed opportunites, illogical wrapups, and pointless nihilism in the final ish. At least the art was gorgeous.

How to improve this series: Well, the series is over now, but I definitely would’ve started out with Spidey stopping WolverPhoenix in some way other than just talking his ear off. I also would’ve loved to see an ending that didn’t rely on deus ex machina like the Time Cops and maybe didn’t try to be so relentlessly downbeat.

Super Dinosaur #2

Derek Dynamo and Super Dinosaur head out after the evil Max Maximus, unaware that he’s tricked them into pursuing Tricerachops and her master, a masked maniac called the Exile. And because the battle is going to take place in the Arctic, SD has to wear his special cold-weather armor. There’s a great deal of fighting and punching and missile-launching and suchlike.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I hate to say it, but it bored me. I know, what the heck is wrong with me when a comic book about a talking, armored T-rex won’t entertain me?!

How to improve this series: Well, for starters, I’m already feeling weighted down by a bunch of new characters who I’m not real familiar with yet. This series started out with a pretty large supporting cast, for an all-ages comic, and they’re already adding more villains. Jeez, guys, I can’t keep track of the people who are already there!

Green Lantern #66

Hal Jordan is wearing a yellow power ring, and Guy Gardner is wearing a red one, because the rest of the Green Lantern Corps has been taken over by Krona and mind-controlled into a bunch of lunatics. And a bunch of the Guardians have become hosts for the emotional entities. Sinestro is trying to escape from the Book of the Black, but Hal and Guy have been captured already, and Krona plans to turn them into Guardians, too.

Verdict: I must not be in the mood to like anything today, because this was a big thumbs down. I’m just completely tired of Geoff Johns’ endless, senseless, long-running mega-series. Plus, I was absolutely bored the entire time I was reading it. Oh, and I found out they actually blew up Mogo, the awesome sapient planet that’s a member of the Green Lantern Corps, in one of the other Green Lantern series, so I’m not real happy about that either.

How to improve this series: Stop letting Geoff Johns write it. Get away from the unending focus on boring cosmic stuff. Don’t blow up Mogo. I doubt any of that stuff is going to happen, so I may be giving this series up.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Snell does some fun geographical figurin’ to try to pinpoint the location of Gotham City.
• If you play the “Munchkin” card game, you may be interested to hear that they’re going to be publishing a Conan the Barbarian booster set.
• Here are some beautiful photos of deserted buildings.

The Tattered Man

Interesting little horror/superhero story here by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with artwork by Norberto Fernandez. We start with a trio of junkies on a Halloween home invasion. They’ve picked out an old man’s house because they assume he’s got something valuable stashed somewhere, but he doesn’t — all he has is a box marked with a swastika and filled full of rags. He tells the junkies about the box — he was a Jewish boy during World War II imprisoned in a brutal death camp, and at the end of the war, the Nazis decided to kill all the prisoners. He was the only survivor, and all those deaths summoned a monstrous spirit, clothed in the rags of the prisoners, that killed all the Nazis. Of course, the junkies don’t believe him, shots are fired, and a rag-draped spirit of vengeance is released on the modern world.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Good writing and excellent art. Palmiotti and Gray say they’d like to write more stories about the Tattered Man — hopefully, they’ll have the chance to make some more. Goodness knows, we need more worthwhile horror in comics.

How to improve this series: First, I’m not all that thrilled with the Tattered Man’s origin — the rags and Jewish background ended up reminding me of DC’s Ragman character a couple times, despite the very obvious differences. So yeah, the Nazi concentration camps were some of the most evil and death-shrouded locations in history, but there have been plenty of other places around the world where injustice and genocide were blots on history — why not use Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur? All would make for an interesting twist. In addition, I’m not real thrilled with the idea of the character as a vigilante superhero — it tames the concept too much, for something that should be wild and uncontrollable. Still, it was good fun, and I’m looking forward to more.

American Vampire #15

The squad of military vampire hunters sent to Taipan have gotten ambushed by hordes of the native vampires — blind creatures far more savage and less human than any they’ve ever encountered. The squad member who has fallen has already been fully converted to vampirism — a process that normally takes hours. And even Skinner Sweet is in over his head. They’re barely able to escape into the hidden basements under the village. Their only chance is to make it to a Japanese base on the island where the vampires seem to be coming from. Meanwhile, Pearl, concerned over her husband Henry, has convinced the Vassals of the Morning Star to send her to Taipan to try to help out.

Verdict: Thumbs up. As always, Scott Snyder’s writing and Rafael Albuquerque’s art are killer. The Taipan vampires are pretty creepy — nice to see that there’s still something out there that can put the hurt on a super-badass like Skinner Sweet.

How to improve this series: Can’t think of much — this is still one of my favorite comics out there. Maybe more vampy goodness with Skinner and Pearl, but that’s really just nitpicking at near-perfection.

Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #3

While Anguirus tears stuff up in Texas, Godzilla makes his way into the Korean DMZ, and a Lady Gaga clone called Girly Yaya advocates for Monster Rights, most of the action takes place in France, where a couple of creepy telepathic twins nurture a giant monster egg of their own, eventually helping it hatch into Battra, one of Mothra’s siblings. Does humanity have secret allies in the Mothra priestesses?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m entirely in favor of giant monsters, and the heavy doses of political and pop culture humor that Eric Powell is plugging into this series is keeping the atmosphere fun to read. Love the creepy twins — hope they stick around for a while instead of just getting crushed under some monster’s oversized foot…

How to improve this series: There are still some weird writing quirks going on here. The way the UN representative just picked all the monsters’ names out of the air kinda yanked me out of the story. And I’m having trouble believing that so many completely normal people would think they have a shot at taking down a giant monster all by themselves.

Today’s Cool Links:

• It’s Bully the Little Stuffed Bull’s sixth blogiversary!
• These two videos are both hilarious and very, very wrong. I’m not the biggest Star Wars fanatic in the world, but I doubt any of those characters should be dancing. Ever.
• This video about dark matter was very entertaining and informative — and accessible, even for non-scientists like me.

Zatanna #13

Zatanna gets a visit from a magic cat with a crystal eye painted in the fur on its back. It is apparently a regular visitor to her home, as she knows it’s only there to deliver messages about the future to her. And the messages this time indicate that she’s about to have to deal with Brother Night and the Spectre. While Zee pays a visit to the Spectre to see whether he has some sort of grudge against her, Brother Night is making his magic-aided escape from prison, despite Detective Colton’s attempts to stop him. After mind-controlling prisoners, police dogs, and random commuters, Brother Night takes over his old headquarters, making plans for the future.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Brother Night is wonderfully creepy, Zatanna’s back-and-forth with the Spectre is better than I expected, and the revelation about Detective Colton’s past is pretty good, too.

How to improve this series: Believe it or not, less magic. What, less magic in a Zatanna comic? Listen, I really love Brother Night as a villain, but he’s been in almost every issue, and the ones he hasn’t been in have also focused entirely on magic-users. But Zatanna guest-stars in other comics, too — why not start bringing the rest of the DCU, magical, mundane, and superheroic, into this book, too? This book needs a connection to the rest of DC’s heroes.

Herc #3

A supervillain jailbreak sends Man-Bull, the Griffin, and Basilisk to New York, along with a mysterious amnesiac woman. As Hercules meets (and gradually gets frustrated by) his newest neighbors, the villains go rob a bank. Herc shows up to kick their tails — but he switches sides when Kyknos, Son of Ares, and the Ares-worshiping Warhawks show up. It’s not that he’s really on the supervillains’ sides — but Kyknos is willing to kill all of them. And what’s the amnesiac’s secret, and how does it tie in with Marvel’s “Fear Itself” crossover?

Verdict: I think I’ll thumbs this one up. Good dialogue and several wonderful jokes getting tossed off here — the last couple of issues have been much too serious for a couple of writers as wonderfully funny as Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente.

How to improve this series: More humor, for one thing. And fer cryin’ out loud, give Herc all of his powers back. There are more than enough street-level heroes in the Marvel Universe — why add another when Herc makes such a great world-beater?

Today’s Cool Links:

• How bad was the Joplin tornado? These before-and-after shots will ruin your day.
• ComicsAlliance’s newest “Great Comics that Never Happened” is one of their funniest yet.
• This trailer really, really didn’t go where I was expecting it to. Don’t know if this is good marketing, bad marketing, or just plain crazy marketing.

Tiny Titans #40

The series’ brutish antihero gets his chance to shine, as Kroc eats the erasers at school, milks the cows, brings a burping pet lizard to class and causes a panic, eats everything he can in the cafeteria, causes havoc in the Fortress of Solitude, and leaves a… present… in the janitor’s closet.

Verdict: Thumbs up. So very, very crazy, and so very, very funny.

Avengers Academy #14

While the Avengers are taking care of a volcanic eruption in Italy, a report comes in about an attack by Electro in France. Reptil is convinced that the team is ready to handle more work in the field, and he lobbies to let the Academy take care of the villain. Unfortunately, once they teleport in, they discover that Electro isn’t alone — the entire Sinister Six is on hand, including Dr. Octopus, Sandman, Rhino, Mysterio, and the Chameleon. And while the kids make a decent showing against the bad guys, they still get stomped, and Doc Ock uses the Avengers’ teleportation technology to complete their heist in France.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The Academy taking on the Sinister Six kinda comes out of nowhere, but it makes for a good story. Several of these guys have gotten serious upgrades recently, particularly Doc Ock and the Chameleon, and they serve to give a nice reminder that, for all the Academy’s recent success, they’re still very inexperienced. And it’s interesting to see how well the team dynamics of the Sinister Six are depicted — many of them don’t like each other, but they’re all seasoned professionals who manage to play the Academy and the mostly-absent Avengers like well-tuned fiddles.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Audio from yesterday’s tornado in Joplin, Missouri. Terrifying stuff — the video quality is essentially nonexistent, but the audio is perfect.
• Snell has dug up an old Batman story from the ’50s about a secret consortium of Batmen that doesn’t end the way you expect it to.
• I still think this is one of the most awesome things that Macho Man Randy Savage ever did.
• Sometimes, I wonder if DC Comics is doing this crap on purpose.

Now looka here, it’s been another rough-and-tumble week, and I think we’re all needing what little break we’ll be getting from this weekend. Hope y’all are going to spend it wisely — and no, that doesn’t mean catching up on your doily collecting, cooking up tons of rutabagas, or sitting around on Saturday waiting for the world to end. I mean getting down and dirty, starting with… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s battle comes from March 1966’s Fantastic Four #48 by Stan “the Man” Lee and Jack “King” Kirby, as Ben Grimm gets into a slight disagreement with a fellow New Yorker and settles it in the traditional Big Apple way — by giving him the finger!

Now I do expect y’all to be polite to folks you have a disagreement with this weekend and refrain from rude gestures. We do all want to be polite, right? (hands out the stabbin’ knives for everyone)

Rocketeer Adventures #1

Dave Stevens‘ “Rocketeer” comics were great retro-cool stories. They had excellent action, beautiful artwork — especially his acclaimed good girl art — and simple but cool stories. He died much too young in 2008. And IDW — bless their hearts, rapidly becoming one of my favorite comic book publishers — is starting a short series of comics paying tribute to Stevens’ stories.

What we’ve got here is three short stories about the Rocketeer and his friends — a spectacular little number by John Cassaday and Laura Martin, in which Cliff Secord has to save his Bettie-Page-lookalike girlfriend Betty from getting shot into space by, ironically, trying to shoot her into space; a story by Mike and Laura Allred focusing on Cliff and his supporting cast; and a tale by Kurt Busiek and Michael Kaluta that puts the emphasis on Betty — while Cliff is fighting the good fight overseas during World War II, Betty works on keeping spirits high stateside by performing in patriotic shows on Broadway. Plus there are pinups by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart and by Jim Silke.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Great high-flying adventure. My lone complaint about this issue? No reprints of any of Stevens’ classic stories. One of the covers features some of Stevens’ artwork (the one pictured above is by former Lubbock resident Alex Ross), but this is the kind of project that would benefit from letting us see the man’s storytelling for ourselves. Nevertheless, despite that one little quibble, it’s a great comic, and you should go grab it up.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #1

Looks like I’ll be taking a break from the “Batman and Robin” title, ’cause DC done gave that hack Judd Winick a shot at writing it, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s that hack Judd Winick. So here’s a Batman miniseries to keep us all happy ’til the hack’s gone again.

Someone’s stolen a heck of a lot of explosives and smuggled them into Gotham, and before Batman (in this case, Dick Grayson) can find out where it is, someone uses it to blow up three bridges in the city. Dozens of people are dead, despite the best efforts of Dick, Red Robin, Damian Wayne, and even Cassandra Cain, much beloved former Batgirl. In time, Dick learns that the Penguin probably had the explosives brought into the city for another buyer — but Oswald Cobblepot says he had no idea what the explosives for — and if he had, he wouldn’t have let the bombings happen, as one of the bridges was originally named for his family. In fact, the three bridges were once known as the “Gates of Gotham,” and the second bridge was once tagged with the Wayne family name. The third bridge’s original name, however, ties it to someone even more dangerous than Cobblepot.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Scott Snyder does some pretty good superhero mystery writing. My least favorite part of this is the end, when we bring in a villain I’ve never much cared for.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Superman vs. the Sugarhill Gang
• DC is doing Wally West wrong.
• Worried about the end of the world? It’s been predicted many times, and the doomsayers have never been right yet.
• But if the end does come… Well, like George Romero told us: “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.” So the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants to help keep you safe from the zombie apocalypse.
• And finally… Chicken.

Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One

Awright, lookit this here. It’s a colossal 400-page graphic novel that pretty much came out of nowhere last year, by a guy named Adam Hines, who has little formal art training — and he’s planning on making another half-dozen or more parts of the story over the next quarter century.

Man, where to start with this? The scope of this story is dauntingly huge, especially for a guy like me who’s used to doing light-speed reviews of single-issue comics. But the story, plotline, characters, and artwork on this are all amazing — and the moral questions raised by the story are really a little bit terrifying. How the heck to deal with the entire thing…?

Let’s go with the general background of the story — namely, talking animals. The story is set in a world much like our own, but animals — all animals — have human-level intelligence and can speak. You’d expect some massive changes to the world, right? And there are some — one of the main characters is a wealthy gibbon named Voltaire who runs a megacorporation and lives with his human lover. Animal rights legislation is hotly debated in Congress, and the leading animal rights terrorist organization is, appropriately enough, run almost entirely by animals.

If you’re a sci-fi fan like me, you go into some kinds of stories with certain expectations. We’ve all watched “Star Trek,” right? When the Enterprise encounters a new sapient life form, what do they do? They recognize that it has certain rights and privileges that it gets just because it’s able to think and reason intelligently. But things don’t work like that in the world of “Duncan the Wonder Dog.”

There’s a scene early in the story that I saw reprinted elsewhere, and it really sold me on getting and reading the book. It’s just a short vignette with a human fisherman and a water bird who are working together. The bird is upset because the fisherman isn’t upholding his end of the bargain. The deal was that the fisherman would get the big fish and the bird would get the small fish. The fisherman says, too bad, I need all the fish today — you can have the small fish again tomorrow. “I’m one of the only fishermen who will work you without a snare, but I can put one on if I need to.” The bird knows he’s beat, and he says, “I want… I want to eat today.”

Just that little bit — just five panels all together — completely tore my heart out.

This isn’t a world where humans accept that animal sapience entitles them to equal rights. This is a world that operates almost exactly the way our world works normally — just with the added cruelty that they know their hamburgers came from someone who can think the way they do. In fact, there’s another scene where a couple of men try to persuade a cow on a trailer to go walk into that building over there — all your friends are in there, they say, it’s not like we’d feed you and take care of you and then just send you into a building to be killed, would we? And the cow eventually reveals that she noticed lots of hoofprints going in and none coming out, so she knew it was a slaughterhouse. That’s a sharp, deductive mind in a freakin’ cow — and people in that world valued her only as a steak.

Adam Hines is certainly interested in animal rights, but he doesn’t go and make all humans the villains and all animals the heroes. The story’s most prominent and frightening antagonist is Pompeii, a Barbary macaque who leads the terrorist group ORAPOST. She bombs a university and murders multiple humans in cold blood. In a flashback, after a human ally of ORAPOST is killed, she declares that she wants to cut out the dead woman’s unborn baby to keep for her own. She later discovers and reads a woman’s diary detailing a loving and complex family life — including great amounts of compassion and love for the family’s pets — Pompeii destroys the diary, unable to deal with any evidence of humans and animals living together cooperatively.

To be honest, I see a lot of what drives the story forward — and certainly affects how readers respond to it — as being less about animal rights and human rights, and more about simple empathy. If you have empathy, it’s easy to put yourself in the, um, paws of creatures that have the intellectual capacity of humans but are considered, at best, property. If you don’t have empathy, you don’t see what the fuss is about.

In a way, it’s a story about human slavery and cultural conflicts. We can be a heartlessly cruel species to each other — it used to be you could own and sell people, and there are still people who think other kinds of people are worth less than others. There are countries where the under-privileged are as crushed, as abused, as exploited as valuable pack animals. Are the humans in the story who are comfortable owning and eating sentient creatures really all that different from the rest of us?

I could go on and on about this forever, but suffice it to say — the philosophical and moral background of this story is absolutely fascinating to me.

Art-wise, what’re we looking at? I gotta say, it’s definitely something else. In places, the art is cartoonish — not a bad thing, as we’ve discussed before. Simple cartooning often does a better job of communicating emotion than detailed artwork. But the detailed artwork is also in here. There are deeply beautiful landscapes here, abstract images that go on for page after page, and portions of the story told through typography. And again, this was all created by one guy, over the course of several years, just because he wanted to tell the story and draw the artwork.

Verdict: I think it’s fairly clear this is a thumbs up. Great art, great story, and mind-expanding philosophy? Go pick it up.

Love and Capes: Ever After #4

The Crusader may be the most powerful superhero on the planet, but in his civilian identity as Mark Spencer, he’s an accountant — and tax season is driving him nuts. His wife Abby, meanwhile, has found herself in charge of the Merchant Association, and she has big plans for special events. Plus Amazonia is about to meet Darkblade’s parents for the first time — and both are profoundly nervous about it. Can everyone get through these low-key crises with their sanity intact?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nothing real earth-shattering here, but we get some fun art, good jokes, and nice story.

Batgirl #21

Batgirl is fighting the Reapers’ newest high-tech assassin, the sonic-powered Harmony, and she’s doing a pretty good job of it — but she has to rescue the Grey Ghost, her completely unwanted and useless sidekick/stalker. Wendy Harris is having deep conversations with her dead brother and decides to travel to Nanda Parbat to see if there’s an alternate method to get her walking again. And the Grey Ghost, convinced that only he can keep Batgirl safe, works up a dangerous plan of his own.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved Bryan Q. Miller’s story, as always. Loved Dustin Nguyen’s artwork. Loved the dialogue, loved the action, loved everything about it.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Arthur Suydam has an interesting story about how he started reading and drawing comics.
• Hey, everybody, look! Marfa, Texas!
• This is a really nice cartoon about becoming an artist.