This Week's Comics
It was a modest week comics wise, with nothing really extraordinary out, but here's what was in my weekly pile...
Coup D'Etat: Sleeper #1
This Wildstorm "Eye of the Storm" line crossover kicks off with Ed Brubaker & Jim Lee helming the first issue, and it's pretty good stuff. Brubaker does a good job introducing new readers to Carver, Miss Misery, Tao, and the usual cast of the book, even if it feels like they're here for an extended cameo in an Authority tale. The Authority dominate the book once they arrive, but that's ok, as Brubaker's take on the team works. Lee's art is rougher and darker than his more mainstream work on Batman recently, but it works well, especially on the first part of the book focusing on the Sleeper cast. A-
Hard Time #1
The first of the DC Focus books launches, with Steve Gerber writing and Brian Hurtt providing art. It's an engaging read, but it feels like it's stretching a bit at the beginning. Gerber does a decent job building a little sympathy for Ethan, even though he's involved in the terrible incident that begins the book. The satire of everyone's reaction to the Columbine like event isn't particularly refined, but it doesn't dwell on that for too long. It's hard to get a sense of the series at the moment since it only gets to it's presumably permanent setting at issue's end, but it was a compelling enough read to give a look next month. B+
Superman: Birthright #7
Luthor & Clark's relationship is explored. The series is pretty explicitly trying to build a past for Superman that's at least somewhat compatible with what viewers of "Smallville" are familiar with, as well as taking some inspiration from the old Superboy stories featuring young Lex. But it works. Waid provides a nice common link between Luthor and Superman, essentially having them both be somewhat alientated but reacting to their situation in opposite ways. Yu's artwork continues to be dynamic, but it comes across as a little more distorted than it was at the beginning of this series. Not tremendously satisfying as an individual issue, but another interesting chapter in a very good series. B+
Uncanny X-Men #439
It seems like every Chuck Austen X-Men story has a tipping point where it goes from possibly engaging to pretty damned ridiculous. This is that issue of "She Lies with Angels". The idea of a mutant Romeo & Juliet story is a reasonable idea for a book as occasionally focused on metaphors of adolescent angst as X-Men...but do you really nead HICKS in GIANT ROBOT COMBAT ARMOR! This would probably be funny if Garth Ennis was writing it, but if we're supposed to be taking this seriously...ouch. At least the art's nice...but...this was painful. D
X-Men Unlimited #1
The NEW Marvel Try-Out book (at least for writers.) This book has the unusual premise of teaming up new writers with established artists for short (read 11 page) stories focusing on individual X-Men. And both stories in this debut issue are thoroughly fine, if unspectacular. Tony Lee and Ben & Rai Lai provide a nice story giving some background on Sage, and J.T. Krul and Tom Mandrake tell a story of one of the Xavier Institutes young students on Halloween. The art is uniformly good, and the stories tend to hit all the right notes, but even with fairly compressed story telling, there's not much you can do in 11 pages. C+
X-Treme X-Men #41
Part 2 of "Prisoner of Fire". I'm slightly lost as to who this Elias Bogan creature is, but that's par for the course with jumping onto a Claremont written title 40 issues in. Still, Claremont does a nice job with these characters, since he's had relatively free reign to develop them as he wanted. It's reminiscent of those late first Claremont era x-men books (post Mutant Massacre) but that's still better most of what we got in the nineties. B-
