52 WEEK ONE:
Written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid
Breakdowns by Keith Giffen
Pencils by Joe Bennett
Inks by Ruy Jose
Colours by Alex Sinclair
Letters by Nick J. Napolitano
Published by DC
“Golden Lads & Lasses Must…”
Day 1 – Ralph Dibny is in Opal City, which was seemingly demolished by the Monster Society, whoever they may be, during the Villains United scam. Somebody is talking to him on the phone about it but he seems to be far more interested in the gun that he may yet choose to kill himself with. It seems he’s still a little depressed about the fact that his wife was torched by some other superhero’s nutso wife with a flamethrower, which is a perfectly understandable response, really. The gun still has a tag on it, so presumably he just bought it on eBay or something. The worst thing I ever bought on eBay was a pirate copy of the Resident Evil DVD for a fiver, which I still haven’t actually watched. Warranties are your friends!
Meanwhile, Reese Montoya orders up another drink.
Meanwhile, Steel helps the clean-up operation in Paris. Shaq is all about the gay-paree.
Day 2 – Ralph is still on the phone. Christ almighty, pal, get on MSN already! Whoever is on the other end of the line tells him that Superboy died. Wonder what happened to Krypto…
Meanwhile, Reese Montoya orders up another drink.
Meanwhile, Steel brings in a casualty to a medical team and pretends he’s on ER. That show could really stand to bring back Benton.
Day 3 – Ralph is apparently talking to Fire on the phone, whilst cradling his gun. Too many jokes, too little taste.
Meanwhile, Reese Montoya has had enough to drink. She turns down cheap sex whilst in a bar called the 52 Pickup perched beside an overflowing ashtray emblazoned with “Cannon Cigarettes”. How meta-drunk of them.
Day 4 – Steel and a random fireman take a time out to drink coffee and mull over just how big that really big fight was… not that you’d know it, since they skipped it in Infinite Crisis and in the Villains United special…
Day 5 – Booster Gold! He turns up to catch some Australian villain called Mammoth that I’ve never heard of before from robbing a jewellery store in Metropolis. Mammoth at least gets to call him a “flamin’ gala”, thus proving that Grant Morrison has succumbed to the dubious charms of Alf Stewart on Home And Away. In a perfectly concocted set-up scene, we learn that Booster is from the 25th century and now resides in ‘our’ time with his ‘pet’ robot Skeets, who contains complete history records for this period and points Booster in the direction of prime heroic commercial opportunities. Booster is looking forward to a big speech that Superman gives at the Superboy memorial service tomorrow, but I’m still busy laughing at the sad face some little boy made when Booster told him that Wonder Woman was alive and kicking. Gutted…
Meanwhile, buy Soder Cola.
Meanwhile, Fire is trying to reach Ralph Dibny on the phone again but Ralph doesn’t want to talk. This is because he is a) male, and b) doesn’t want to f*ck her. It’s just common sense, people. Fortunately, there is more interesting news for Ralph as he puts the gun in his mouth and ponders pulling the trigger. It seems there was a message left on Sue’s tombstone for him…
Meanwhile, Steel is back in the States and stops his niece, um, Steel, from going off to catch up with the Teen Titans because there is too much relief work to be done. Since she isn’t interested in that, he takes her armour away from her. This does of course mean that she can’t actually do any relief work, but if we point out the stupidity of the black man then we’d be called racists and have to sell fried chicken for a living. SPINAROONI!
Meanwhile, Black Adam delivers a speech to the capital of Khandaq to let us know once again just how awesome he is. There’s even time to foil a suicide bomber. What a guy…
Day 6 – Some wee bald dude answering to the name of Dr Sivana is kidnapped by persons unknown, whilst watching the…
Superboy memorial service, which is attended by everybody that isn’t Superman (powerless), Wonder Woman (discovering herself in the bath), or Batman (powerless to not discover himself in the bathroom whilst on a cruise with Tim and, of course, Dick). The Shadowpact have a happy reunion, probably because they’ve realised the editors have no reason to meddle in their book. Bart Allen reminds us that Wally West and his family are fine and resting… somewhere… and that Jay Garrick is the only Flash around, honest guv. Skeets tries to get Booster into centre stage, since he thinks that this speech of Superman’s will result in Booster joining the Justice League. Again.
Meanwhile, in the background, Nightwing chats with Power Girl’s jugs.
Then Booster freaks out when he realises that none of the “big three” are coming, which means Skeets has the wrong records for the timeline that they are both in. I should also point out the statues of Superman and Superboy. Not only did they construct the golden homage to Superboy in record time considering he died about a week ago, but while the Superman statue gets to perch a golden Golden Eagle on his arm, the Superboy statue gets a seagull flying overhead to take a dump on it. How fitting.
Day 7 – The Question defaces the Bat-Signal and replaces the Bat-Symbol with a question mark, pointing directly at Reese Montoya’s window. She’s in there drinking, as if you hadn’t gotten the point by now. Day 7 was obviously a slow one.
Score: B
52 WEEK TWO:
Written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid
Breakdowns by Keith Giffen
Pencils by Joe Bennett
Inks by Ruy Jose
Colours by Alex Sinclair
Letters by Nick J. Napolitano
Published by DC
“Looking Back At Tomorrow”
Day 8 – Okay, with a title like that, this thing has definitely got to be Morrison’s baby. Anyway, we check up with Ralph Dibny again as he investigates his wife’s tombstone and the mysterious message that was left on it for him. Some guy that claims to be the groundskeeper of the cemetery, but that wears a Booster Gold jacket and looks an awful lot like Ethan Hawke, turns up and shoots the breeze about Ralph’s hero days and Sue’s finer qualities. You know, the ones that don’t involve leaving teeny-tiny footprints on somebody’s brain… cos they can turn up on an autopsy…
Yeesh.
Meanwhile, Booster takes the malfunctioning Skeets to be checked up by Dr Magnus. I don’t know who that is. I know of Ultra Magnus, but even if he got a doctorate I can’t imagine the other Autobots would give a shit about him. Hell, it ain’t like they asked the Junkions to repair him after Galvatron blew him up… Anyway, Magnus is leaving for Bludhaven for a visit with some other old dude in jail. Not even chemical warfare can keep this guy out of Bludhaven, apparently.
Day 9 – I think this is a new day. The editors seemed to miss a caption along the way, but Magnus is indeed now visiting Professor Morrow in prison. Not conjugally, thankfully. There are some things that just should not be played out in real time. They have a nice little chat about artificial intelligence, machines betraying their creators, and about the higher than usual number of mad scientists that are being kidnapped.
Day 10 – The Question loiters in an apartment in the dark, staring at a lesbian couple in bed. That’s a pretty effective cease-and-desist order against any Batman comparisons. One of the women, Reese Montoya, wakes up and shoots him a couple of times, but the power of the wood is enough to save him. He leaves a calling card, inviting her to a later meeting…
Day 11 – Booster Gold saves a jet from crashing, no thanks to the malfunctioning Skeets who, none the better for any of Magnus’ examinations apparently, pointed him in the wrong direction. So, either Booster has come from the future to a different reality than this one, or Skeets has been infected with some kind of belligerent O.M.A.C. technology. I find that last sentence a particularly depressing one to read, or even think about, though that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.
Meanwhile, Reese Montoya decides not to have another drink. She goes to the meeting point, an abandoned building, and The Question pays her to work for him for a bit.
Day 13 – Yeah, apparently everybody went bowling on the previous day or something. Maybe they’ll do another series about all the days they skipped in 52. Anyway, Wonder Girl is doing some emphatically zealous online Superboy cult memorial service, but Ralph turns up to confront her about the tombstone message after the self-important sermon ends. The message was an inverted S-symbol, which apparently means “resurrection” on Krypton. I don’t know how Ralph knows that, or why he would suddenly decide that Wonder Girl, out of the hundreds of superheroes involved with either Sue or Connor, was the one that left him the message, or why he would think it was anything more than random graffiti, or why Wonder Girl is doing such weird sermons rather than typical teenage whinging, or why Ralph seems to know so much about Kryptonian customs, or why I’m not using a wine glass to drink this wine I’m drinking from a non-wine glass glass… But ohhhh, she’s the one… she’s the one… ha… ba-da-ba-da…
Oh, and there’s a History of the DCU back-up feature. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not you want to place any stock into a “definitive history” feature that is narrated by Donna Troy.
Score: B
X-MEN: DEADLY GENESIS #6:
Written by Ed Brubaker
Layouts by Trevor Hairsine
Finishers by Scott Hanna
Continuity by Quesada Prime
Published by Marvel
Riiight, okay. I don’t know why this one is so much harder to believe than Bucky becoming the poster-boy for the Anti-American Axis Alliance or whatever, or even more than Jason Todd dying and then never having died, but in the grand pantheon of reshuffled continuity and editorial meddling, the new version of the genesis of the all-new uncanny team of X-Men that went to Krakoa seems too far-fetched for its own good.
Xavier found his team of X-Men captured by Krakoa and decided to send in the new, younger, untrained squad of mutant wannabe heroes to try and rescue them (despite Moira MacTaggart’s warnings). They manage to rescue Cyclops but all the team gets killed along the way. Well, except for Vulcan, who just so happens to be Cyclops and Havok’s brother. Oh, and Darwin, who died but hitched a ride to resurrection by joining his evolutionary essence to Vulcan. But nobody knew about any of this because Xavier thought neither Summers brother should know about their other brother, or about the involvement of any of the other team of X-Men, or even that Krakoa wasn’t sentient in the first place.
Hell, I tuned out whilst writing that. You lot have no hope. The long and short of it is that we have a third Summers brother that is extremely powerful (well, they say he is, but he’s yet another one of those bland mutants with random and undefinable powers involving strange energy propulsion and suchlike, so really, who knows?). He jets off into space to take his revenge on the Shi’ar type sorta folk that mistreated his parents, having ditched his teenage desires to be an X-Man after seeing what has become of the current team. Nobody blames him for that; we just wish that all of this wasn’t so needlessly complicated and hard to understand. If they wanted to introduce a third Summers brother and tie it into the space-faring side of the X-Men then why tie it into Giant Sized X-Men #1? The Krakoa element was completely needless. Just have this Vulcan fella turn up having escaped from the aliens, having clung onto an all-encompassing belief that the X-Men on Earth were his salvation, having been mistreated in space all his life, and then have all his expectations of the X-Men shattered and his fragile sanity smashed up altogether, leaving him no option but to take matters into his own hands and the X-Men no option but to follow him.
Et voila, sanity and a good story to appease our editorial gods.
Also, Xavier is now a human and has lost his mutant abilities. He is also being set-up as a grand manipulator, having kept all of the above secret from everybody for a good decade or so of Marvel Time. Can anybody connect the dots? Anybody? Bueller? At least Cyclops is written as having the balls to kick Xavier out of the institute and claim it as his own. I’m sure that the legal technicalities over ownership of the XAVIER INSTITUTE make such matters more complicated than this lover’s spat would care for but, hey, whatever. Bendis wants Brubaker to write Uncanny X-Men and we’ll be damned if any story is going to stand in the way of that. Unfortunately, Brubaker seems to have taken this one step too far and stood in the way of his own story.
Score: D
FELL #5
Written by Warren Ellis
Illustrated by Ben Templesmith
Helped Ably by Al Cohol
Published by Image
There have been two very good new TV shows in the UK over the past couple of years. One you will already know as Doctor Who. The other is an almost-sci-fi cop drama called Life on Mars. It tells the tale of an upwardly-mobile, by the book professional detective that is hit by a car and awakens to find himself in 1973. It’s left deliberately vague whether or not he has actually time traveled or is just in a coma following the accident (or whether he’s just crazy… or whether he was always in the ’70s and just imagined the future… there are many theories) but the long and short of it is that he is a man out of time, stuck in a place that does not quite fit him, clinging to his belief in the law as his last refuge even as all his associates flagrantly break the rules and act more like frontier sheriffs than urban policemen. It’s a very well-made cop show with an unsettling undertow to it that never quite allows anything to fully settle, which makes for interesting viewing. If you haven’t already seen it then I’d recommend checking out the first episode to see what you think.
Fell skips the time-travel part but offers a similarly disconcerting take on the cop genre. The lead character has been sent ‘over the bridge’ to the peculiar place known as Snowtown. He is clearly being punished for something, since the town makes even the most awful depiction of Gotham City look like a shiny happy petting zoo. The worst of the worst are not here, they left because they were too intimidated by the locals – and most of them were probably the local police. Detective Fell on his precinct:
“Moon St Police Station is to me what Hell is to Satan. The place I go to work, but man does it smell like crap.”
All of this means that the book lives or dies on the quality of the artwork. Thankfully there is nobody better suited to the task than Templesmith. His style is the sort of thing you would imagine the illustrated version of Genesis to look like if it had been written by Roald Dahl on a bad acid trip at midnight on Halloween. It isn’t just in his drawing either, but in his breakdowns and camera angles. This issue is basically just an interrogation scene involving two guys sitting at a table talking to one another, yet Templesmith presents Ellis’ well-crafted dialogue in a thoroughly involving manner. In the customary background material Ellis makes comparisons to the way Oliver Stone moved the camera in the movie Talk Radio. It’s hard to argue with him (well, it always is, since he’d probably be too drunk to listen to reason anyway, but his point stands this time). Just compare this issue to the New Avengers: Illuminati one-shot by Bendis and Alex Maleev, which also features a bunch of people sitting at a table and talking, and try not to be too taken aback at the staggering gulf in quality (in favour of Fell, in case you’re thick and can’t keep track of such matters).
All of this, plus a stressed out secretary yelling the line “I can do things to men that poodles only dream of!”
What’s not to love?
The only possible negative here is the delayed scheduling. This particular issue was originally solicited for January and yet here we are towards the end of May. Still, each issue does stand alone and tell a self-contained story. There’s no danger of losing momentum here, unlike with Ellis’ stunted reboot of Iron Man. It just means I have to stay on those pesky tenterhooks in between issues for longer than is healthy. Such is life… and life is just plain better when you read Fell.
Score: A
SHADOWPACT #1:
Done by Bill Willingham
Released by DC
Twelve reasons to buy Shadowpact…
– There’s an alcoholic and sentient monkey called Detective Chimp that’s trying to come up with twelve reasons not to have another drink, but he can’t seem to come up with more than nine.
– There’s a Hellboy reference involving horns.
– The big-name guest-star characters – Superman and Hal Jordan – are used properly to introduce the less well-known stars of the book rather than overshadow them. There’s a large magical threat. Superman can’t fight it. The Green Lantern ring isn’t capable of combating it. They need to turn things over to the Shadowpact, who now seem like far more worthy heroes than they otherwise would have been. No fuss, no muss. And no Batman. No time for his preening prima-donna diva tantrums. Just ask Firestorm…
– Bill Willingham is in complete control as both writer and artist of the book. Even better, the cast is so low-key that there will be a bare minimum of editorial meddling in the stories to follow. It’s all left up to Willingham, who clearly adores these characters and the opportunity to do as he sees fit.
– The artwork is crisp, clear and uncluttered, reminiscent of Darwyn Cooke but in a slightly more modern manner. Although the tone is pretty damn far removed from Fell, it is equally suitable to the art style being used.
– The villains of the piece actually seem quite level-headed and reasonable, fully aware of how their victims are going to react. After dealing with the likes of Superboy Prime, this comes as a refreshing change and should make for some very entertaining confrontations down the road.
– You don’t need to have read any of Day of Vengeance to understand what is going on here. It’s all set-up, but enjoyably done set-up unlike certain other almost new series (Squadron Supreme, I’m looking in your direction…). Just jump in and enjoy the enjoyable joy, okay?
– There’s nothing quite like a good team book and, as with Ultimate X-Men and Legion of Super-Heroes, that’s exactly what this is going to be. None of this lot is going to eclipse the rest of the cast, but they are going to have some good-natured bickering and naturally written interaction.
– The issue ends with a Planet of the Apes reference, just after the hot girl villain turned into a damn, dirty ape.
And that’ll do. Yeah, there are only nine reasons but, hey, I’m just taking my cues from the drunkard monkey. Really, what better way could there possibly be to go through life?
Score: B
