Time to wrap up talking about my weekly comic purchases for the past few weeks; fortunately, it was a small shop today, so I won’t keep you too long.
No Hero #6
The proverbial hits the air movement system, as we find out what Carrick is really doing with his position as sole source of FX7 and the exact state of mind of Joshua Carver, the newest FX7 inductee. This means that Juan Jose Ryp gets to do what he does best, unleashing his hyper-detailed art on the Ellis ultraviolence, and he does a bang-up job. I’m not sure about the direction in which Ellis has taken the story, but I’ll see it through to the end.
The Unwritten #3
I really don’t like the covers – is that just me? Anyway, the contents make up for it. Carey throws in some charming analysis of Frankenstein as well as having Tom finding a link to his past in the family home (that was where Shelley came up with the story, and Milton came up with Paradise Lost – part of what he calls his ‘literary GPS bullshit’). Three issues in and this book is shaping up nicely; there’s mystery, an intriguing concept and a good execution. I hope it gets the opportunity to continue its story.
Wednesday Comics #1
I wasn’t sure about getting this – we don’t have ‘Sunday funnies’ here in the UK to twang at our nostalgia strings, and I’ve never been a big enough DC fan to try this automatically – but it looked so unusual and interesting not to try. I deliberately made the decision to read this on the tube on my commute home – if you saw someone on the Northern line heading south this evening grappling with the first issue, it could have been me – just to see if I got a reaction out of other commuters. I’m strange like that. It’s weird unfolding the book – it’s a big thing, printed on traditional newspaper stock (I was expecting slightly glossier stock for some reason) – but I have to admit it looks great. The only trouble with it is the anthology nature of it – some pages work really well, playing with the idea of doing a story one page at a time (Gibbons and Sook on Kamandi or Kerschel and Fletcher on The Flash), whereas some just feel like single pages of an ordinary comic book (Azzarello and Risso on Batman). There is also the hodge-podge nature of the various different art styles – the cuteness of Allred or Galloway or Conner versus the scratchier art of Hueck or Pope. It’s a very different thing, something DC should be lauded for – of the two mainstream publishers, it is DC who experiments the most with what comics can try to do – and I hope it does well for them.
