This is Leave Your Spandex @t the Door number 116, boldly going where no one with an ounce of dignity has dared venture before.
• Panel of the Week Voting
• January ’08 H-O-T Grade
• The Spirit #12
• Who’s That (Wonder) Girl?
• Black Panther, Welcome To The X-Men…
• Revolving Door of Death
• Buffy Season 8 #11
• Fantastic Four #554
• Wolverine & The X-Men trailer
• Colbert vs the Gay Lobby
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This week in comics…
Panel of the Week Voting
Last poll ended in a deadlock, even after 2 weeks of voting, with Wolverine and Brand New Day Spider-man.
Last week didn’t have much to offer in terms of panels, so decided to merge the two weeks for one stronger poll.
CoolWebPoll
Panel A
Starman Who? (Justice Society of America #12)
Panel B
Teen Relief (Teen Titans Year One #2)
Panel C
One More Jab (Amazing Spider-man #549)
Panel D
Wonder-whipped (All-New Atom #20)
Panel E
Humpty Dumpty Saw The Great — (Jack of Fables #19)
January ’08 H-O-T Grade
Each month, the H-O-T Grade is my absolutely subjective view at what you absolutely can’t miss reading:
1. Y THE LAST MAN #60 (Vertigo)
2. ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #118 (Marvel)
3. ASTONISHING X-MEN #24 (Marvel)
4. THE SPIRIT #12 (DCU)
5. THE TWELVE #1 (Marvel)
6. THE ORDER #7 (Marvel)
7. UMBRELLA ACADEMY APOCALYPSE SUITE #5 (Dark Horse)
8. CROSSING MIDNIGHT #15 (Vertigo)
9. TEEN TITANS THE LOST ANNUAL (DCU)
10. PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #0 (IDW)
Bendis’ Ultimate Spidey is the big surprise this month, starting off the tribute to the Amazing Friends line-up with a light-hearted high-school reunion sort of crossover with every Ultimate title! It still wasn’t stellar enough to overthrow the long-awaited conclusion to Y the Last Man, while Whedon’s dependably excellent Astonish X-Men closes up the Top Three.
The Order, Crossing Midnight and Umbrella Academy are regular contenders every month, while other faves Wonder-Woman and X-Men were pushed out of the ten by a narrow margin. We’ll be talking more about the new arrivals The Twelve and Project Super-powers soon.
The Spirit #12
The new Spirit, that is, not your daddy’s spirit. Although with each issue it’s proving to be every bit as beautiful, diverse and daring as the original.
This issue was highlighted to me by LYSAD reader Gregory Guity who submitted the third of the following panels for the POTW voting. As I usually tend to go for funny (deliberately or not) panels in the votings, I didn’t feel the panel would fit in, and there was this feeling of… something missing from the little one panel story. Having finally read the story today, I’ve figured you need all three panels to grasp the full strengh of the last one:
The same page offers what could be the essential Spirit panel. It’s an acclaim for Darwyn Cooke that he packs such intensity and iconic essence in a single panel of a six-panel grid page, and generally invests so much energy – thought into making every panel in his Spirit comics worthy of framing and studying on a gallery wall.
And since we’re in the process of killing bandwidth, a brilliant wallpaper from the issue’s opening splash page:
The issue follows The Spirit tracking down his childhood sweetheart Sand who has fallen in with the wrong crowd and become involved in the sale of a new lethal substance. Sand apparently originates from Will Eisner’s Spirit stories, and Darwyn Cooke went as far as approximating Eisner’s palette and ground-breaking page layouts for the sake of the flashback sequences detailing the story between Sand and Denny Colt.
While the plot feels confined in the single issue format, the story still packs an emotional whallop, culminating in the first three panels in this ‘review’. A must read.
9/10
Who’s That (Wonder) Girl?
Girl knows how to make an entrance.
Wonder-Girl/Donna Troy on the final page of the beautifully-rendered Teen Titans: Year One #2 by Karl Kerschl (DC Comics)
Black Panther, Welcome To The X-Men…
…hope you survive the (s)experience!
Source: Black Panther #31 (Marvel Comics)
Revolving Door of Death
Source: Captain Marvel #2 (Marvel Comics)
Wolverine & The X-Men trailer
from the upcoming new animated series. Looks and sounds at least as good as X-Men Evolution (and is it a direct sequel?), so let’s keep our hopes up!
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8 #11
I actually went out and did research this month for this review. Yup, scholarly, that’s me.
For those of you just joining us, the much-adored Buffy TV franchise is continuing in comics form by original creator Joss Whedon as a show runner and himself with other veteran Buffy TV writers and friends on script duty. Oh, and it’s damn good! Buffy, Xander and Willow are living in a Scottish castle training the Slayers Army (yes, we’re using the A-word now), while facing a new enemy: the human army who are viewing Buffy Inc. as a WMD, and are seemingly in cahoots with a magic apocalypse-type evil who has remained in the shadows – till this issue!
And his name? Twilight
Read the Full Review
Fantastic Four #554
They’ve hyped, they’ve teased and they’ve flat-out lied about it and now it’s here .
The Ultimates team of Mark Millar (Marvel’s Golden Boy) and Bryan Hitch (Marvel’s Tardy Boy) have set their sights on Marvel’s original super-hero team/family; Millar has been making his usual playful declarations and promises of restoring this title as ‘the World’s Greatest’, playing it a short breath away from Hubris (they actually named their first storyline thus) – but who could blame him after his proven sales-topping track record? Meanwhile, ‘Hitchy’ has himself promised a smooth schedule with no delays after the increasingly erratic Ultimates 2 schedule. Start your betting pool!
Colbert vs the Gay Lobby
Advance warning: this is hilarious and a satire, please don’t take him too seriously, just laugh at the kind of American he is impersonating.
That’s a wrap for today! I’m waiting your comments and feedback through email to Manolis@gmail.com or through the site’s comments feature
If you self-publish your own comics or represent an Indy comics company, add me to your press release list, and I will run your news in this space every week.
Manolis Vamvounis
a.k.a. Dr. Dooplove
