Wednesday's New Things: The Uncanny X-Boondoggle


1) I usually use this space to write about a book that I'm going to buy this week. Today, something slightly different, at least at the top-- I don't think I'll be buying Battle of the Atom, and I don't think I'll be buying any of the comics that I usually buy that tie-in to the crossover. This isn't the first time I've abandoned an onerous X-crossover, but Marvel did a really good job of making this one easy for me. For one, Infinity is running basically concurrently. Multi-author crossovers are very rarely good, and, although I very much like Jason Aaron's Wolverine and the X-Men and have been surprised by the quality of Bendis's work on Uncanny, Jonathan's Hickman's single author event has been worthwhile. Given that, if I decide that I can purchase only one wallet consuming crossover that'll mean buying comics that I don't typically read and don't typically want to read, which one am I going to pick? How about if only one is running, but I decide that I can afford to purchase precisely no expensive event comics? I often actually find that the coming of a crossover decreases the amount of money I'm spending on Marvel books for the duration thereof. This must not be true for the whole market, since Marvel is running crossovers for the foreseeable future, Matt Fraction's Inhumanity following Infinity, and I presume that means that such event comics are profitable. I think that these comics make money despite their inevitable dearth of quality means something interesting about market preferences, but I would have to take some time to figure out exactly what that something is. 

2) Speaking of Hickman, does he have a time turner or something? I'm counting six books out by him this month, and that's just off the top of my head. The new one is the Avatar-published God Is Dead, illustrated by Di Anorim. I think that it's sort of in the spirit of Warren Ellis's Supergods from a couple of years ago. Unlike some of the other more recent pieces of superhero deconstruction, this one's at least a little interesting off the bat, since it removes the allegorical element, trading out the godlike superheroes in deconstruction's question-- what would happen if godlike superheroes were real-- for straight up gods. I can't find a preview, but expect the art to be competent if not compelling. Can you imagine how mind blowing some of this stuff would be (say, both God is Dead and Uber, also out this week) if Avatar branched out from the house style a little bit?

3) So Hit's premise-- LAPD goes outside the law to fight crime-- is not exactly groundbreaking; it is, for example, the exact same premise as the recent movie Gangster Squad. Still, sometimes seeing what a talented storyteller can do with an old saw is a worthwhile endeavor. I can't speak to writer Bryce Carlson, I think this is his debut, but Vanesa Del Rey's artwork has been bouncing around the internet for a while. The one lettered page I've seen suggests that Carlson is going to let Del Rey do most of the talking, which is fine by me; her art has this slinky quality, aided by her facility with light/dark contrast and her understanding of the power of negative space. Both of these seem to work because she exercise discretion about when to use her black pen, making her figures stand out and her shadows more powerful. A longer, unlettered, preview here.

4) I know this came out last week, but how cool does Itty Bitty Hellboy look? It reminded me that I need to check out Balthazar and Franco's Aw Yeah comics. 

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