SWAMP THING #1
Written by SCOTT SNYDER
Art and cover by YANICK PAQUETTE
On sale SEPTEMBER 7 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
One of the world’s most iconic characters has returned to the heart of the DC Universe, and every step he takes will shake the foundations of the Earth!
Alec Holland has his life back…but the Green has plans for it. A monstrous evil is rising in the desert, and it’ll take a monster of another kind to defend life as we know it!
Alright, look: am I happy about the reversal of those fantastic Alan Moore Swamp Thing comics from the Eighties? No, of course I'm not: have you ever read those comics?! Alan Moore wasn't yet then the dark wizard he is today, and he was brand new to American readers, but that stuff is brilliant and terrifying and brave. The Swamp Thing's realization that he wasn't actually Alec Holland? The portrayal of the Justice League as gods looking down on the earth from high above? Thinking about it gives me chills.
Now, of course, all that is undone. The Swamp Thing is indeed Alec Holland, and he has his life back! Hurrah! How utterly boring, oft-tread upon ground is this? Rich Johnston has suggested that one of the major effects of the relaunch will be to de-AlanMooreify the DC Universe and, if that's the case, then it is a sad era indeed, for the legacy of one of the great writers of all time is being erased. Still, if we have to swallow this load of crap, at least it's being written by the unimpeachable Scott Snyder, who has a knack for writing the scary and supernatural that apparently shows through in American Vampire (as, unfortunately, I still haven't gotten around to reading it, I'm relaying the opinion of people that I trust) and whose work on Detective Comics for the last few months has been fantastic.
Snyder, though, is not why I'm excited for it. This is:
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Written by GRANT MORRISON
Art by RAGS MORALES and RICK BRYANT
Cover by RAGS MORALES
Variant cover by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS
On sale SEPTEMBER 7 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
The one and only Grant Morrison (ALL-STAR SUPERMAN) returns to Superman, joined by sensational artist Rags Morales (IDENTITY CRISIS), to bring you tales of The Man of Steel unlike any you’ve ever read! This extra-sized debut issue is the cornerstone of the entire DC Universe!
I hate Superman.
But here's the score: if Grant Morrison's writing it, I'm probably going to buy it. And putting Grant Morrison on Superman? That's a stroke of genius, and one that comes with a pretty good guarantee. Grant Morrison gets Superman (in a way that someone like a certain superfan who has the initials JMS doesn't), because Grant Morrison gets archetypes, and that's the sort of writer that Supes needs, a mythographer rather than a fanboy. We know that Morrison is such a writer because the Scot already rebooted the big blue boyscout once, and All-Star Superman is, to my mind, the best Superman comic in decades (and maybe the only decent one in just that long), and it's the best Superman comic in decades because Morrison was playing with expectations and mythology. Grant Morrison is going to write a Superman good enough to wash the taste of Grounded out of our collective mouths-- and that alone is worth the $3.99.
WONDER WOMAN #1
Written by BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art and cover by CLIFF CHIANG
On sale SEPTEMBER 21 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The Gods walk among us. To them, our lives are playthings. Only one woman would dare to protect humanity from the wrath of such strange and powerful forces. But is she one of us – or one of them?
It's not that I don't like Wonder Woman, exactly, it's just that I've never thought she was very interesting: the WW stories from the past couple of years haven't helped this perception, exactly. Putting Brian Azzerello and Cliff Chiang on the relaunched book, though, that's crazy enough that it just might work.
Actually, let me step back: putting Chiang on WW was a no-brainer, and someone should have done it years ago. No one, no one, in comics today is an iconographer of the quality that Chiang is: look at the way Diana stands out from the background of that cover, like she's made of halo, separating her from her surroundings as if to say "Yeah, this one's different." And Wonder Woman should be different. She should be a hellraising, badass, Amazon warrior stuck between two worlds, prepared to do what it takes to defend those who need it from forces way beyond their control. And Chiang, if the cover is any indication (and I know it is) is the man for the job.
If Chiang was an obvious choice, Azzerello was a stroke of mad brilliance: at first glance, a man known primarily for his killer crime comics is not the man for this job. But there is some precedent for it: the only Superman comics I own besides Morrison's are Azzerello's and they're pretty good (not great, but pretty good), and they're pretty good because Azz took an old kind of story, a classic, almost a cliche (a man wanders away from home briefly, and comes back to find that everything has changed) and he put Supes in a position he had never been in before, a position for which there was no good solution, no tall buildings to leap in a single bound, no flying around the world backwards. If he could pull the same sort of trick with Wonder Woman, if he can strip off the lasso of truth and the invisible jet, then this book will be an instant classic.
1 comments
YES PLEASE.
