Report what comic books you have read today--and tell us a little something about it while you're here!
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Report what comic books you have read today--and tell us a little something about it while you're here!
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They certainly did! It seems antithetical to have it all wrapped up with a bow, but wrapping it up was the job assignment.
I read a few pages of the Groom Lake: Gray Skies Above preview -- enough to know that it wasn't for me. The jokes didn't land, and the storytelling felt cramped.
The Penguin #9
I haven't read Volume 5: Mercury Retrograde yet -- which takes us back to book 1, from another perspective -- but I should note that Brink volume 6: Consumed has begun serialization in 2000AD a couple weeks ago, with Prog 2378! I'm so excited, I got a subscription!
Also, in my Earth-2 reread (mostly minus the re-, at this point), I just read the rest of Convergence, in which the Earth 2 heroes, pulled from their dying earth, play a part.
Short and sweet: The main series is largely hot garbage, but a couple things distinguish it: 1) The Warlord characters are featured prominently for a while, espeically Deimos. By the end, though, none of them are left standing, and most are dead. But it's done in such a who-cares way, and there's a reality reset at the end, that it's not worth fussing about. 2) There's a reality-reset at the end that allowed, most prominently, the post-Crisis Superman & Lois to return and eventually supplant the New 52 Superman and Lois, in a storyline that fails to make sense in any meaningful way, but everyone was just so happy with the result that no one kicked too hard about it. 3) The two-issue tie-ins, which I didn't re-read, are a lot more fun, IIRC, trying to mimic the tone of the original titles they're bringing back.
As for the Earth-2 characters themselves: The Thomas Wayne Batman dies, but Dick Grayson seems ready to pick up the mantle. Yolanda Montez is getting closer to adopting the Wildcat persona. And by the end of it, the planet Telos itself teleports back to where Earth was in the Earth 2 universe, and Green Lantern contacts the giant spaceships to return home to rebuild on the new planet.
Next up will be the 6-part Batman/Superman teamup flashback that closes out the Worlds' Finest title, and then I'll be moving forward again with Earth 2: Society... which I've heard might be actually half decent. Between Paul Levitz and Dan Abnett handling most of the writing chores from here on out (after a 7-issue run by Dan Wilson on Society), I think the storyline might finally start getting back on the rails.
NEW COMICS I HAVE READ TODAY LAST MONTH: Shadow of the Green Goblin #1; Captain America #8; Planet of the Apes: Fall of Man; X-Men '97 #1; Deadweights #1; The Bat-Man: First Knight #2; Wonder Woman #8; Animal Pound #8; Helen of Wyndhorn #2; Underheist #3; Beware the Planet of the Apes #4; Roxxon Presents Thor #1; Dick Tracy #1; Batman: Dark Age #2; Project: Cryptid #8; Ultimate Spider-Man #4.
How did you like Dick Tracy? I enjoyed it, but decided I could wait until the trade appears on Hoopla.
It was pretty much what I expected it to be: an adaptation into another medium. It was interesting to see which elements from a 4o+ year canon they chose to cherry-pick. (In that respect, it Remempnded me of Jim Lee's Fantastic Four.) I would say it is very much "based on" or "inspired by" Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, without being much like it. OTOH, I wish the Warren Beatty movie had been more like this.
Zero Point - This is an old familiar story, about an assassin who just wants to do one last job and then retire. When his current last job is killed by another assassin he is wondering what is going on. So our "hero" Bird talks to him mentor Crow about the situation and begins to dig into the situation. Like I said this is pretty well tread territory, but there was one part I should have seen a mile away but didn't catch on until the end. There was a very cool battle scene shown through one character's POV. This is a manga style graphic novel written and drawn by Agustin Graham Nakamura a Brazlilan creator of Japanese heritage
Hound - This is a WWI story in which a new recruit joins a group of British fighters called hounds because they are always wearing their gas masks. He soon finds out that his new mates have become cannibals. He rejects them and tries to keep his own humanity in the face war and other atrocities. Really good!
The Fox: Freak Magnet - A reboot of the old Red Circle character by Dean Haspiel and Mark Waid. He runs into other characters from Red Circle I have never heard of while going through some weirdness. This was okay, sometimes it was a little text heavy, but I thought the art was great.
Moon Knight: The Midnight Mission - Moon Knight is now protecting his own little slice of NYC. Including saving vampires who were turned against their will and don't really want to be vampires. Fighting against an entity who cal slowly take over others minds. He learns there is another Fist of Khonshu (who tells Marc it was pretty arrogant to think there was only one). Then finding out the person he thought was behind all of his problems, wasn't that person at all.
On Free Comic Book Day, I try to get to at least one comics shop that isn't my everyday place, so I went to one way out in the suburbs. I think the last time I was there was the last Free Comic Book Day.
Anyhoo, I got the third part of Batman: Three Jokers. I recently acquired the second part a couple weeks ago, and I know I have part one buried in a box somewhere. I did not dig it out or otherwise try to read it via other means, relying only on my sometimes hazy memory to carry me through.
I do vividly remember something in the first part that yanked me out of the story. The book is beatifully rendered, and there is a beautifully rendered scene in which Batman very dramatically enters an ambulance by kicking the doors in ...
--- which is impossible. You can't kick ambulance doors in. Ambulance doors swing outward. I've seen more than enough medical TV dramas to know that.
Anyways, the story has something to do with The Joker trying to create a "better" Joker by kidnapping various poor souls and dousing them in a swimming pool full of his Joker venom, as Batman, Batgirl and the Red Hood (Jason Todd) are on his trail, these three being directly traumatized by The Joker's past depredations. Oh, and he kidnaps a remorseful Joe Chill too, just to torment him and turn him into the "better" Joker, as he's the one who, so to speak, created Batman by killing the Waynes . It's dark -- although beautifully rendered -- but it dazzles you so you don't think about the holes in the plot.
Like the ending, which, unfortunately, made me think about one of the holes. Let's discuss ... but first let me throw this up:
Much has been made of the fact that The Joker's true name has never been revealed. On the last page, Batman tells Alfred. "I'm Batman -- I knew his name a week after we met." But he's kept it to himself because he needs to protect The Joker's wife and child. We saw her, pregnant, in The Killing Joke, and there's a callback to the scene from there when two detectives tell the comedian she died in a household accident. But there's a new scene ... she and her child are hustled that night into some kind of witness protection program, maybe the official one, maybe not. Anyway, Batman keeps silent about The Joker's identity so his wife and kid can have a new life without him, and so he won't come after them (since he's been told they are dead).
Fine ... but why were they hustled into WitSec right away, before the comedian became The Joker? He wasn't that important then, and nobody knew then he would be.
It's things like this that made me not hurry to read Three Jokers when it came out.
I don't think it's official WitSec. At one point, when his wife is complaining that he'll never let her leave him, one of the cops says, "It's okay, lady. The boys pooled together some money." I don't think it's a matter of him being the Joker yet -- I think it's a matter of the local cops recognizing him as a bad dude, and deciding to use some of their resources to protect this woman and her unborn baby. Get her out of town, and tell him a lie. Nothing meant to be a permanent solution, or a foolproof one -- just something quick, hoping his attention would turn elsewhere. (And it did! Unfortunately, it turned to mass murder.) Then, somewhere down the line -- and this isn't laid out, but I'm just guessing -- once he became the Joker, Bruce Wayne stepped in and used his resources to keep her location secret and make her new identity more secure.
That seems plausible enough to me, at least for comic books.
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