New Comics - May 3rd - Part One

I don’t think it’s coincidence that the weekend that includes Free Comic Book Day is the week that the two biggest company cross-over books came out. I’ll go ahead and start with those.

• Infinite Crisis 7 (DC) – The final issue to this title that supposedly affects the entire DC universe. It’s probably just me, but this is the first issue that actually made sense most of the way through. There are still a few bits that I didn’t care enough about to try to figure out what happened, and the set-up to the One Year Later titles didn’t seem like such a big deal to me. It seemed that if you’re going to use it as a story focus for 30% of your line, you should at least make the build up worth it. Maybe that’s why they brought the One Year Later titles out before they explained the set up.
• Civil War 1 (Marvel) – The first issue in what it billed as Marvel’s “event” of the year, that will “alter the course of [the heroes] lives forever!” The first thing I’ll give Marvel is that the art surpasses that of Infinite Crisis. Series artist Steve McNiven is one of my favorites in mainstreamland these days. I just hope he actually draws every page of every issue. Infinite Crisis, even with talented artists like George Perez, Phil Jimenez, and Jerry Ordway, apparently suffered from deadline crunches, because there are panels and pages that appear quite rushed. I’ll let you find them for yourself, and instead offer an example of Mr McNiven’s clean, attractive art.The storytelling, for me, is just the opposite of Infinite Crisis. Real world settings, modern day influences, and a clear through line in terms of event following event, each setting up the next. Mark Millar is not one of my favorite writers, but here he seems to have thrown off the shackles of trying to out-do Ellis, Ennis or Morrison, and instead is focusing on the plot driven action and setting up character-based story conflicts. I enjoyed it, and look forward to a good mindless Summer read.
• Haunted Mansion 3 (Slave Labor) - Boy, I like the idea, but I wish they could get better artists.
• Holed Up 3 (Avatar) – This is what I mean by better artists. Avatar and Slave Labor are clearly companies that have to get artists that are not yet ready for the bigs. If they had an artist that was doing such a great job as to get notice from the pro’s, they would certainly lose them in a quick draft. This title’s art, by Gonzalo Martinez, is solid and clear, with character designs that are clean and well-delineated. The story is a little rough around the edges, though, and I think I would have been able to tell that the writer, Rich Johnston, was from somewhere other than America. The Americanisms seemed occasionally forced. Maybe it was because I already knew that Mr Johnston was British, but the dialogue probably needed a stronger editor.
• Fury Peacemaker 4 (Marvel)- This title gets to the meat of the plot, and it’s a doozy. Garth Ennis digs in and brings (in my limited knowledge) well-researched war history to the Marvel Universe.
• Ulimate Spider-Man 94 (Marvel) – This title is heading towards 100, and it looks like it might provide the perfect jump-off point for me. This is a prefect example of a solid creative team starting to lose a reader because I know the characters have to remain generally static. There is a tease this issue that we might get a little character-driven meat to the relationships, but it finally fizzles into another lucky break for our hero, and a delay from real (melo)drama for this reader.
• Detective Comics 819 (DC) – More great potboiling from Robinson and company. I’d like to point out how strong the back-up story was as a great way to handle a supporting character, but I don’t want any spoilers. Instead I’ll just illustrate the way that DC manages to get their artists to focus on storytelling and manages to create a house style, which is the main thing that I think the comic buying public generally bases their buying patterns on. Leonard Kirk, Andy Clarke, and Wayne Faucher art (right).
  

What I mean is, Marvel tends to outsell DC, and I think it frequently has to do with the fact that Marvel lets their artists hold their style, even when the story suffers for it. DC, to the opposite effect, always keeps the focus on the story, and occasionally snuffs out the individualism of the artist. This means that the best case scenarios are when an extremely talented artist has a distinct and unique style that still lends itself to DC’s story-based edicts. Eduardo Risso, Ed McGuinness, P. Craig Russell, Tim Sale, and Brian Stelfreeze come to mind.