Okay, it’s way, way after Independence Day, but some stuff is just too good to pass up. You wouldn’t want me to save this a whole year for next July 4th? No way, we’re doing this right now. Buckle up, kids, it’s time for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

From 1976’s Marvel Treasury Special: Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles #1 by the King himself, Jack Kirby! For all the marbles: Captain America vs. Hitler!

Best way to start the weekend: beating the snot out of Nazis.

Captain Marvel #1

The much-anticipated new series starring the former Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers. She has a shorter haircut and a new costume that’s more similar to Marvel’s classic Captain Marvel character. After she and Captain America stop a rampage by the Absorbing Man, Cap persuades her that it’s time for her to take up the name Captain Marvel as a tribute to the original. After that, she spars with Spider-Man, takes a short flight into orbit, visits her old friend Tracy Burke, who is now apparently fighting cancer, and reminisces about her hero, Helen Cobb, a pioneering pilot.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A fairly low-key beginning for the new series — nice to see that every new comic doesn’t have to start with a giant cosmic crossover. We get some action, some downtime, some great character moments. Kelly Sue DeConnick writes a great issue here. The big surprise is Dexter Soy’s art — if you expected traditional comic art like what’s on the cover, Soy’s work isn’t what you thought you’d see. He’s more of a painter, and on first glance, his work looks a bit muddy. But you get adjusted fast, and Soy really shines when it comes to faces. It really is pretty beautiful stuff. Hope you’re going to give this one a try.

Batwoman #11

Sune has shapeshifted into a completely different person, Maro, with plans to kill Batwoman and take over the Medusa organization. Maro manages to escape with a bunch of kidnapped children, leaving Batwoman and Cameron Chase to escape from Killer Croc and Maria, the Weeping Woman. Meanwhile, it’s looking like Bette Kane may never wake back up, and the doctors are making plans to take her off life support. Is there anything Jacob Kane can do to save her?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Mainly, to be honest, for Jacob Kane and his niece Bette. The Batwoman stuff is fine, but it’s mostly slugfest stuff. Jacob and Bette have all the heart in this issue.

Wonder Woman #11

Hera has hired Apollo and Artemis, the gods of the sun and the moon, to abduct Zola, and only Wonder Woman, Hermes, and Lennox are available to stop them. And the good guys get absolutely stomped. With Lennox out of the picture and Zola in Hera’s fiendish clutches, can Diana and Hermes do anything to help?

Verdict: I think I’ll give it a thumbs up. It’s not a ton of fun to watch the heroes get effortlessly pulverized by the bad guys, but there’s some good character stuff in here, we get Hera scheming, we get our first looks at Artemis and Demeter, and we get more fun with Strife being a hilarious loon.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Holy cow, news about this shooting at the Denver theater showing the new Dark Knight movie is horrific. What is wrong with people?
• What this world needs is less corporate-sponsored, marketing-tested Olympics and a heck of a lot more of the awe-inspiring athletes of the Paralympics.
• How one superfan steered Batman away from the campiness of the ’60s to today’s Dark Knight.
• You wanna see ten minutes of the Punisher being awesome and violent and amazing? Yes, you do. Yes, you really, really do.
• Holy cow, Limbaugh was right! “The Dark Knight Rises” really is a slam on Mitt Romney!
• No, seriously! Bane totally equals Bain!

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score

Wow, I had no idea this was coming out ’til I got to the store last week — a brand new Parker graphic novel by Darwyn Cooke. Set me back more than I was expecting, but it was worth every penny.

What do we have here? If you’re new, there was a mystery writer named Donald Westlake, and while writing under his pen-name of Richard Stark, he came up with this guy named Parker, a cold-hearted conscience-free bastard who specializes in heists. He doesn’t like to kill but he’ll do it if he has to — and he sure won’t feel bad about it afterwards. Darwyn Cooke got Westlake’s blessing not long before he died to turn some of the Parker novels into graphic novels, and this is the third in the set.

It’s 1964, and Parker is brought in during the planning stages of a job he has some serious doubts about. It’s being organized by an amateur named Edgars, he thinks the job may need 30 people to pull off, and he wants to rob an entire town — the small mining town of Copper Canyon, North Dakota. Though several of his more trusted associates are interested in it, Parker is inclined to nix the entire job — until he’s convinced that with the right planning, it could actually be possible.

The rest of the book focuses on Parker and his 12-man team of crooks as they make preparations for the heist, then follows them as they effortlessly and perfectly pull the job off. Wait, did I say effortless and perfect? Nope, something big goes wrong, and Parker has to salvage his team and the money so they can all make their escape.

Verdict: Oh, you know it’s a thumbs up.

Let’s talk art. Well, it’s got Darwyn Cooke doing the art, so you know it’s gonna look awesome. An interesting change for this book — instead of the black and blue ink of the previous two novels, this one is done with black ink and orange ink. Does a lot to make the book look hotter and more distant from the city. It does a lot to this story — so much more over-the-top than the previous ones — to make it pop off the page. It’s great art, but we knew that going in, didn’t we?

Writing-wise, there’s lots of good stuff here — good characterization for almost everyone, with several of the bandits getting their own sections of the story all to themselves as we get to learn more about them, why they rob, what they love doing. We get a nice long bit with Grofield, the charismatic, wise-cracking actor, and it’s great fun. We even see some of Parker we never knew about before, particularly the fact that, when dealing with hostages, he drops his cold persona and uses simple psychology to keep people calm and cooperative.

My one complaint was that, for all the planning that got done before the heist, no one ever stopped to consider who Edgars was and why he wanted the town robbed. He admitted at the beginning that it was personal, but once everyone started thinking about that quarter-million-dollar payoff, everyone forgot about that loose end. Of course, if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been much of a story, but I may have said too much now, right?

It’s a good book. No, it’s a fantastic book, one that you’re going to absolutely love reading. Go pick it up.

Saucer Country #5

New Mexico Governor and presidential candidate Arcadia Alvarado pays a visit to shady hypnotherapist Dr. Glass with a specific plan — to let him hypnotize her so she can learn more about what happened when she was abducted by aliens, and at the same time, to lie to Glass — yes, even under hypnosis — to make sure that the revelations he got from her ex-husband’s hypnotherapy session are discredited. Glass is, of course, furious, but his conspiracy-theory co-conspirators seem to be happy with what little they’ve learned. Meanwhile, Gov. Alvarado and her staff begin making plans for how they can use the campaign as cover to investigate the aliens and find more evidence.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Good story, interesting dialogue, nice characterization. Lots of interesting stuff happening here — just five issues in, and we’re already seeing the main characters taking control of their destinies, whereas in many other comics, they’ll spend at least six issues reacting to everything…

American Vampire: Lord of Nightmares #2

Agent Hobbes of the Vassals of the Morning Star reveals to former Agent Felicia Book that the secret that had previously been kept under the organization’s London headquarters was… Dracula. Well, maybe not the fictional character, but the first and most powerful of the Carpathian vampires, able to control the mind of almost any Carpathian, able to survive being staked through the heart and even able to control minds while dormant. The Russians are about to get their hands on him — they don’t want to revive him, they just don’t want the Brits to have him — but Tommy Glass, the bespectacled American Renfield, has a plan to help revive his master — and if he’s successful, the whole world is in danger…

Verdict: Thumbs up. A lot of exposition here, but it’s all really interesting exposition, and it’s balanced with plenty of plot movement, too. Wow, this Dracula vampire sounds like serious bad business, don’t he?

The Massive #2

Callum Israel and the crew of the Kapital continue to search for their missing shipmates and for their sister ship, the Massive, which vanished during the world’s environmental and economic breakdown — all while trying to avoid attack by pirates off the coast of Kamchatka. Amongst all this, we also get flashbacks to the crew’s visit to a partially submerged Hong Kong, as well as some quick looks at all the different ways the ecological collapse messed the world up.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Still a fascinating look at how the world goes on after the world ends. Great tension in Kamchatka and action in Hong Kong, and the brief looks at how the Crash affected everything from ships at sea, satellites in the skies, and fuel supplies in North America.

Atomic Robo Presents Real Science Adventures #4

More short stories in this Atomic Robo anthology. The Sparrow runs into serious trouble behind German lines. Robo learns that Bruce Lee has some more tricks up his sleeves, and he tries to pick up his comic book habits from his youth during the grim-and-gritty ’90s. Plus a visit to a Japanese Atomic Robo, and a look at Jenkins’ past.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Good stuff all around. Not quite as amazing as the previous issue of this book, but still a lot of fun.

Batman #11

Batman faces off with Owlman, who claims to be his brother, Thomas Wayne, Jr. For the most part, Owlman repeatedly cleans Batman’s clock, while Bats gets a number of pretty lucky breaks. Then Bruce and Dick Grayson sit around and try to figure out whether Owlman was really who he said he was.

Verdict: Ehh, sorry, but thumbs down. It was a slugfest, followed by a talkfest, and neither one was particularly entertaining.

Today’s Cool Links:

• The Final Word on why Marvel movies are better than DC movies.
• One is starting to think that Dan DiDio just doesn’t really think women belong in comics.
• I bet most of y’all have seen Cookie Monster’s “Share It Maybe” video, but here it is anyway…

Wow, what a week. Just nothing but chaos and responsibilities and not anywhere near enough rest or fun. I hope like heck that this weekend is going to help relieve that a little. But we gotta get things rolling, and the best way to start off a new weekend is with… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s battle comes to us from October 2009’s Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #39 by Paul Tobin, Horacio Domingues, and Craig S. Yeung. The Rhino has decided he’s tired of having to hang out with crazy psychotic supervillains, but he doesn’t want to just turn himself in to the cops — he wants to go out with style — and that means he’s gotta get stomped by a superhero. But when Tigra is the hero who shows up, can they team up to make this fight look properly punishing?

That’ll do it for me — see you guys on Monday!

Punk Rock Jesus #1

Well, yes, I had to get it. I’m at least 98% evil, after all.

Here’s the basic gimmick: in the near-future, a mega-wealthy TV network hires a genius genetic engineer to harvest DNA from the Shroud of Turin and clone Jesus Christ. Then they hire a telegenic new Virgin Mary to be the baby’s surrogate mother, tweak the baby’s DNA to make sure he looks Caucasian and not like some awful brown person, and put the whole thing on TV as a reality show. Holy urine-soaked crucifixes, that’s downright sacrilicious!

Having said all that, it’s not nearly as evil as it sounds. Nearly all the players here people I’d classify as good guys. There’s the razor-edged security expert who’s working off the bad karma of years as an IRA terrorist, the genetic expert who’s doing the job mainly for the funding she can use to help save the oceans, the teen mother who’s going through this mainly to pay off her family’s debts and who worries that she’s a bad mother for even agreeing to all this. Our one serious villain is the TV network exec who thought up the whole scheme and who seems to have a completely nonfunctional moral code. To list all the awful things he does would constitute some major spoilers, so you can discover those for yourself.

The story is pretty brainy, too. If you know anything about the Shroud of Turin, you know it’s almost certainly not Jesus’ burial cloth — carbon dating places its age at around 750 years old. And this is actually addressed in the story — a scientist and a very excitable preacher debate that, and several of the “J2” project members admit that they don’t think the baby is actually the Son of God.

My primary objection is that there’s a certain level of strawmanning going on for most of the religious folks. They range from the furiously angry near-terrorist group that protests the J2 project to the excitable preacher in the debate who has no grasp of either theology or science — he’s really only there to get slapped around by the scientist.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yeah, seriously, not saying that just to be a contrary little cuss. It’s a great little concept — how would Jesus — or a clone who’d been raised as a Jesus substitute by the mass media — grow up? It’s a pretty sure bet that he’s not going to be the blond mild-mannered martyr from “Baby’s First Bible” — after all, the comic is called “Punk Rock Jesus.”

I enjoyed the initial focus on Thomas McKael, the ex-IRA terrorist/security chief. We get a glimpse of his terrible, terrible childhood, then meet him all grown up and razor-edged.

I like all the other characters, too — with the very, very notable exception of Slate, the utterly rotten TV executive. He’s definitely someone you’re going to love to hate.

I love Sean Murphy’s art, probably more than I do his writing. It’s all black and white, amazingly expressive. If there’s a single moment that really strikes me as remarkably good art, it’s when Gwen, the baby’s mother, having an anxiety attack just before she gives birth, sorrowfully frets that she’s a bad mother. The next panel features razor-edged security goon Thomas McKael with just a very subtle hint of sadness on his face. It’s a beautiful moment, considering his childhood, and a great piece of characterization.

All that, plus the twist in the final pages is pretty amazing.

Batgirl #11

Batgirl faces off against a team of supervillains called the Disgraced — winged warrior Katharsis, acid-secreting Bleak Michael, superstrong Bonebreaker, and the leader, Knightfall. They want her to join them, and of course, she says no. They attack, and she does pretty well for a bit, but they get her down, they get ready to kill her — and she gets rescued by Det. Melody McKenna, a Gotham cop who actually hates Batgirl’s guts. She gives Batgirl the low-down on socialite Charise Carnes, Knightfall’s alter ego — and she reveals that there’s another member of the Bat-family who’s coming after her.

Verdict: Thumbs up. For once, I didn’t even mind Barbara not being able to beat up her attackers — after all, there were four of ’em, so she did alright. Good action, good dialogue, some very, very ominous stuff happening back at her apartment, and a very interesting team-up on the way next issue.

Today’s Cool Links:

• This is the only way to get me to enjoy baseball.
• This is definitely a sentiment you won’t see from Marvel or DC anymore…
• Pee-wee Herman meets Batman (for the first time since “Batman Returns”)

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

Well, huzzah, finally a chance to review some more superhero prose fiction.

This one is “Playing for Keeps” by writer and podcaster Mur Lafferty. It was published back in 2008 and won the Parsec Award for Best Novel. It focuses on the heroes and villains of Seventh City — and on the Third Wavers, the people who have the most useless and ridiculous of powers. They’re legally banned from dressing up in costumes, taking superhero names, or fighting crime. They’re distrusted by civilians, ignored by villains, and held in utter contempt by the superheroes.

There’s Peter, who has a superpowered sense of smell; Tomas, who has superstrength in five-second bursts; Michelle, a waitress who can carry any tray, no matter how overloaded, without dropping it; Alex, who can heal one square inch of an injured person at a time; Collette, the world’s greatest chef; and Ian, who can shoot powerful jets of, well, poop.

And there’s Laura “Keepsie” Branson, our lead character, a bar owner whose power makes it impossible for anyone to steal anything from her.

The action gets started early when Keepsie is briefly kidnapped by a supervillain called Doodad, who secretly slips her a strange metal sphere. And then every superhero and supervillain in Seventh City is desperate to get that metal sphere away from Keepsie. What makes it so important? No one will tell her. But they’re all willing to dish out plenty of pain and suffering on any Third Waver who gets in their way. Will the Third Wavers discover the secrets behind the world’s superpowered beings? Will they be able to survive attacks by the most powerful people in the world? Will they be able to keep Seventh City from being destroyed?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Really enjoyable characters — Keepsie, Peter, Ian, Tomas, Michelle, really all the Third Wavers. And the villains, especially Clever Jack. And all the superheroes, even though you hate all of them and want them to die in agony. Good action scenes, too — as desperate and frantic as you’d expect from a bunch of people with lousy powers facing off against people with really good powers. Good dialogue — nothing spectacular, but I was happy with it.

And it’s a nice brainy story, too. All the Third Wavers have useless powers — but of course, they’re not all that useless. If they can be leveraged the right ways, they become very, very powerful. I’m not telling you what they can do, ’cause that’d spoil too much of the surprise. But it’s often really good and really unexpected.

If I’ve got any complaint, it’s that the setting is a lot bleaker than I generally prefer in my comics-based stories. I mean, society seems to be functioning pretty normally, but nearly every single superhero we’re introduced to is a psychotic, willing to torture the Third Wavers and murder scores of civilians. Laws have been passed to prevent anyone designated as a Third Waver from using their powers to fight crime, and even nicknames based on their powers are frowned upon. That’s a pretty dark, grim setting, once you think about it a little.

Still, that’s a small complaint for a story that is, on the whole, exciting, fun, engaging, dramatic, and grandly written. Go pick it up.

Dial H #3

The local mobsters are after Nelson Jent — and without getting to his magical phone booth, he’s got no powers. He does have a protector — a woman who calls herself Manteau. She extracts him from the attacking gangsters, and he’s able to remove the dial from the old phone booth. Nelson learns that Manteau gets her own random surreal powers from her own version of the dial, but she’s able to keep her own memories and personality intact with her cloak and silver mask. In fact, Manteau has found evidence that nearly all early research into telephones and telegraphs was encouraged and assisted by someone known only as “O” — and O appears to have created the dials that Nelson and Manteau use. Meanwhile, Ex Nihilo and the Squid are after a man with a connection to other dials, and a dark figure from another dimension is stalking Nelson and Manteau. Will Nelson be able to help Manteau stop the bad guys? And will he be able to handle the shock when his dial turns him into a woman?

Verdict: Thumbs up. China Mieville’s superhero/horror series is all kinds of surreal. There’s still a lot of stuff here that confuses me — the bad guys’ motivations, for one, but I also trust that’ll be revealed eventually — but I’m also enjoying the revelations we’re getting. Manteau is a very interesting character, frequently changing form and yet remaining reliably constant as a person.

iZombie #27

We’re very near the end of this outstanding series. Gwen has found her long-lost brother — only minutes before she needs to kill everyone in the city to save the rest of the world from the monstrous god Xitalu. And she rapidly discovers her parents and all her friends and allies, all right where Amon has told her she needs to absorb every soul in the city — and then Amon plans to feed her to Xitalu to force it from our world for another few centuries. Will Gwen go along with the plan — or is it already too late for everyone?

Verdict: Thumbs up. The tension gets cranked way, way up. The final issue comes out next month — and I really don’t know if this is going to have a happy ending or not. Still looking forward to seeing how Chris Roberson wraps up his work at DC…

Today’s Cool Links:

• Ron Perlman is THE BEST.
• H&R Block, of all people, put together this infographic that compares the financial situations of Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker. Entertaining? Yeah, but also enlightening in ways you might not have expected.
• Here’s a short cartoon that works to explain what the Higgs boson is, and why it’s so important to physics.

It’s not too far past the Fourth of July, is it? I can still shoehorn in some properly patriotic pummelling here, can’t I? Then hold on to your stovepipe hat, ’cause it’s time again for… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Today’s battle comes to us from July 2011’s Secret Avengers #13 by Nick Spencer, Scot Eaton, Rick Ketcham, Jaime Mendoza, and Frank G. D’Armata. The scene? Nazi war machines have invaded Washington, D.C.! And there aren’t enough superheroes around to stop them? Luckily, we don’t need superheroes when we’ve got… THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL!

Stand up and salute, citizen! Any country so dedicated to beating up Nazis that it’ll spontaneously animate its memorial statuary is a country that deserves your unending loyalty! Now head over to Spacebooger’s place so you can vote… Vote… VOTE for your favorite battle!