I finally had a chance to catch up on most of the stack of new releases I’d accumulated over the past few months.
The last two issues of Batman: Dark Age – I’d been reading these as they came out and not rereading despite the big gaps but I think I still managed to keep up – it’s a really interesting book that has a lot of clever things to say about family, loss, war, crime, ageing and psychology. Allred’s art is as solid as ever but the writing is the star – I found this really affecting and look forward to rereading the whole thing at some point.
Wolverine Revenge 1-3 – weird book. I’ve been a Capullo fan since X-Force (his issue 19 might be the first X-book I ever read) and since I didn’t really care for Spawn or the long Batman run I was really looking forward to his return to colourful superhero art. The art is pretty good but maybe not as stellar as expected considering how long he’s been working on it and how much he was hyping it up. The story is… weird. Out of continuity, sure – but it seems very light and almost phoned in for a usually complicated and meticulous guy like Hickman.
Deadpool Wolverine WWIII 1-2. Somehow I missed issue 3 so I’ll have to track it down. Much more interesting than Revenge above, Adam Kubert is reliably good and IMO under-appreciated as an artist. The designs, acting, and layouts always have a lot of thought put into them but he’s so regular and prolific I think he gets taken for granted. It probably doesn’t help that he moves around from title to title a lot.
Batman Long Halloween: Last Halloween. Issue 2 with art from Klaus Janson. Initially I was disappointed to find that Eduardo Risso was only drawing the first issue rather than the whole series but the line up of artists is impressive enough to keep me going. Jeph Loeb’s Batman stories are popcorn fun but of the best kind. Simple, with decent character beats, and almost always elevated by the artists he chooses to work with, I will probably aim to do a big Long Halloween/Dark Victory/Last Halloween reread when it’s all done with.
Spider-man Reign 2 – I’m one of the rare supporters of the original book which I thought was bold and daring, with the caveat that it leaned heavily on Miller’s DKR. I didn’t expect to see a sequel but this has been a real treat so far with Kaare Andrews really putting in the effort. The book opens in an art style similar to the first series (stacked wide panels, Elektra Lives Again-era Miller linework), but at the end of the first issue old Peter is sent back in time to McFarlane-era continuity and so the book is drawn in a McFarlane-esque style – the rendering, posing, and page layouts. It’s appealed to me massively and such a departure from what has become somewhat of a house-style at Marvel. I’ll always be a 90s kid when it comes to comic art!
