Wednesday's New Things: Other Worlds


1. Much to my great dismay, at some point I lost track of the last Brubaker/Phillips series, Fatale, I think at a moment when the comic's eldritch horror skeleton was crossing over Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye. Like everything else from this pair, alone or together, that was an excellent comic; one slow week, I'm going to start picking up the deluxe edition trades. This book seems to play it straight, as opposed to the Elder Gods pulp of the last one, which fits the part the developed with Criminal and Incognito, and they seem to have gotten the taste for Hollywood, though, since this seems to pick up the movie star thread. It'll pair intriguingly with Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin's Satellite Sam, which deals with a similar subject matter and, I think, is taking a break before its last arc. Preview here



2. I think Grant Morrison and DC have been talking about this Multiversity project for half a decade. I love these sort of alternate world stories, just because I like to see what writers come up with that looks like what we know, but isn't quite. I read the old Marvel Exiles book through both middle school and high school; that was a fun book. With the radio silence on this one, I had sort of given up on it. From the preview (couldn't we have had Frank Quietly on the whole thing? Please?) Multiversity seems to be old school Morrison, closer to The Invisibles and Doom Patrol than Batman, Inc., or even New X-Men, with the caveat here being that we're long out of the eighties and those books, at their best, don't always make sense. Worth a flip through, certainly, but at $4.99, maybe not a purchase. 


3.  From the annals of WHO IS THIS COMIC FOR?!?, comes a reboot of a very well regarded newspaper comic from the first part of the twentieth century, done by Windsor McKay, probably one of the medium's early-ish pioneers. The people who put together Return To Slumberland are also quite talented, but I do have to wonder how appealing this is, as a comic. There is no nostalgia factor here, since the comic ended 88 years ago. People have not been following the comic, no one is attached to the characters in the way that they become attached to licensed ones, that is, Windsor McKay and Little Nemo are attached to each other in a way that Captain America is not attached to Jack Kirby or Joe Simon. No matter who's involved, it's not clear to me that there's a market for a project like this. On the other hand, an enormous Little Nemo tribute book was just kickstarted; maybe he's headed back to Slumberland at the right time. Preview here.


4. This is a good comic book, the third issue comes out this week, you should read it, etc.