Two Gotham stories for you

2010 is really about the comics for me it seems. Over the past few days I read the first two volumes of Gotham Central and movie director Kevin Smith's foray into the world of graphic novels, Cacophany. I didn't love the Smith comic, but I like it more than the Amazon reviews. You really notice the Smith touches in places. His movies are about man children who realize the love of their lives is right in front of his eyes, sometimes too late, sometimes just in time. His scripts are over flowing with words about the nature of love and relationships. In this book, Smith shows Batman as obsessed with Joker and he comes off a bit whiny in places. I suspect some are put off by that. Some more are probably surprised by Smith's take on Joker. He is the usual homicidal maniac, but he is also gay, which allows Smith to indulge in his penchant for sex jokes.

The star of the book is a new and nasty villain called Onomatopoeia, who breaks Joker out of Arkham for his own reasons. Smith has another Batman book going and I hope he includes this guy.

Gotham Central, on the other hand, is flat out fantastic, although poor sales eventually killed it. The book is set within a special crimes unit of the Gotham Police Force, special in that they deal with the crimes of supervillains. Creators Brubaker and Rucka could have taken a tongue in cheek approach or a gonzo violence piece, but instead they went the Wire route. The story lines are dark, the police flawed and the infrequently seen Batman is a source of both tension and relief for the police. They resent how they are not part of his world and how his actions can cause them harm.

The stories are sometimes obviously comic book, like when Mr Freeze ambushes a pair of cops and they try to pick up the pieces, literally. Other stories like the one where a cop deals with here parents and fellow officer's reactions to her outing as a lesbian are just straight up drama. Either way, they are great.

Efficiency and Progress is ours once more

So I was at the library and saw a comic called Ball Peen Hammer. The cover features a black clad gask wearing, pipe wielding chick. That boded well. Sadly, it was not a reflection of the quality of the comic. The book is an incoherent mix of the Talking Head's Life During Wartime, Mad Max, and the paranoid early 70s ravings of Phillip K Dick.

The story is fairly simple. Two dudes are in a shithole and are forced to perform bizarre and evil acts. One dude longs for this chick he met one night. As it happens she is looking for him. They both see how terrible the world is and little is resolved. The other dude is a writer who wants to document what is going on, but is too shocked to do it.

The thing is, what is going on makes no sense. Some terrible disease is ravaging the arty part of town so something called the Syndicate has quarantined them. There is awful acid rain. This is all terrible of course. The men though are called to go find black children, hit them on the end and bag them. Then this giant of a man comes and takes them away. This last bit is strange, as we never see non-whites.

Who is it that is being oppressed by the Syndicate, or shall we say, The Man, is never made clear. It may be minorities, as these dudes are supposed to kill them. It may be the poor as everyone here looks poor. It may be the art class, as in a bizarre piece that made me think of that awful orgy scene in Matrix: Part Suck. Apparently, all the artists and hipsters were totally chillin' and lovin' in some underground party space when the Man came and kicked them all out and then filled the place with concrete.

I think the circumstances are supposed to be unclear and generalized and that we are supposed to see that good cannot thrive while evil reigns. The problem is the moral choices that are somewhat presented are meaningless when they are set in a nonsensical background. Who cares what they do in a silly story. Sophie's Choice is powerful because something like it probably did happen and the moral weight is terrible. This book is just silly.

One small thing that stuck in my craw. The forces of oppression use AK-47s. What the hell? The AK-47 is the symbol of rebellion the world over. It's on the flags of Hezbollah and Mozambique. If Franz Fanon was a weapon, he'd be an AK-47. Of course, the reality of the gun is different, but from a symbolic perspective it is clear, the left uses the AK, the man uses some high tech guns.

Slipping into Fanboy status

I think I am becoming a Ed Brubaker fanboy. I know because I just bought issue 4 of the new Criminal Tale, The Sinners, even though I have purchased, but still not read issues 1 through 3. Why am I doing this? I want to be able to sit down with all of them and read them all at once? I made a mistake with Incognito, where I went back for more and they were sold out!

I read the first issue of Incognito when it came out and it didn't quite click. I then went back for number two and it sat on my shelf for months. Then I read and loved it! That's when they were all sold out. Fortunately the trade just came out.

The story in this one is great. A supervillain is put into a witness protection program, but he finds he can't stop kicking people's asses. He tries to be covert by stopping criminals and finds he likes it. This gets the ire of his former employers, a none too nice group of folks and he also manages to piss off the a secret superhero-staffed version of the FBI. Bad times all around.

The book is great because it infuses the superhero story, with its constant, but generally nonconsequential violence, with the depth of a crime story with its very consequential violence. People die in this story and they tend to die badly. Now in a realistic crime book, there would be one or two terrible acts, but this is a superhero book so the chaos is constant.

The only reason I was happy it ended was the hint that there is more to come. Now I have to get a hold of his Gotham Central which tells story's of Batman's city from the perspective of the town's cops.

Superman didn't get into heaven, saving the world for Marx and for Lenin

I've been introducing my kids to the What If? Comics from Marvel. They are wacky takes on what would have happened to classic Marvel story lines if some bit of history had been altered. One classic has Spiderman stopping the criminal that would have gone on to kill Uncle Ben. So instead of changing his ways and becoming a crime stopper, he just stays an entertainer. A lot of them are tongue in cheek like that.

DC, generally the lighter in tone line, has a darker set of alternate universe books called Elseworlds. One of those tales is called Red Son. It's big twist is that instead of landing in Kansas, the young Kal-El lands in the Ukraine and Superman grows up to be a Hero of the Soviet Union. This is not good news to the US, but they can rely on their own super-power, the brain of Lex Luthor. The Russians have their own home grown threat, thanks to the callous murder of dissident parents before the eyes of their child.

This could have been played for laughs or made into a simple role reversal, Mark Millar makes it a study of tyranny and the perils of pursuing complete security. In the US, Superman took on the American ideals, in Russia, he takes on the communist ideals. Everyone must be safe, equal and obedient. This leads to a Welcome to the Monkey House state in Russia, that comes to dominate the entire planet.

The book has an excellent finish as well. It's a nod to many other science fiction stories as well as being true to the Superman lore.

Crime, crime, everywhere there's crime

Another day, another set of graphic novels. Now's it crime time. I recently picked up two books, Torso and Criminal: Bad Night by modern comic masters, Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker, respectively. These very different books illustrate what is possible in telling crime (true or otherwise) stories with the graphic format.

Torso is relatively old for a graphic novel, written in the late 90s. It takes it time in telling the story of an unsolved serial killer loose in Depression era Cleveland. These murders, terrible and grisly acts which left only a torso for the police to find, place on the watch of the man that took down Capone, Elliot Ness. The book uses experimental visuals and a long exposition to show how a man who could figure out how to deal with corrupt cops had a much harder time dealing with the novel idea of someone who killed frequently for non-material reasons. Having read up a smidge on the case, it seems Bendis sticks to the facts, including a shocking choice Ness makes in an attempt to break the killer. Much of the conclusion is imagined, but the end stays true to the facts.

Criminal: Bad Night is one of Brubaker's ongoing series of stand-alone stories of people who either through bad luck, desperation or bad choices, find themselves on the wrong side of the law. His use of browns, yellows and black hues and the haggard look of his characters gives the stories a grimy feel that is perfectly fitting the feel of the story. The ends of Brubaker's Criminal stories are what you might call twists, but really they are just the tragedies seem almost inevitable once you read them.

This book wil not leave you in stitches

David Small had a worse childhood than you did. Really. You probably got in more fights or maybe you lost a family member, but did your parents give you cancer and ignore the signs for years? I thought not. If you are not already terrified you should check out the graphic memoir Stitches, in which Small retells his childhood.

As you might guess, the whole thing is grim. The tone is oppressive and you feel terrible for the little boy, who appears mostly to be a hindrance to his parents. Even the art is grim, which isn't so much black and white as it is ranges of gray.

The art though is what makes the book work. Small does a great job capturing the wandering attention of a child and the child's need to play. This happy moments are contrasted by the terrible visages of his relatives. At the most benign, his father's expressions are hidden behind his glasses and his pipe. His mother's face is contorted by her resentments and her rage at her situation. His grandmother, whom he fortunately rarely sees, is marked by fits of sadism and madness.

How he gets the cancer will be fairly obvious early on (his father is a radiologist) but how his parents deal with it is shocking. It is another doctor that calls attention to the growth on his neck and his parents constantly attempt to deflect attention from it.

It's terribly sad and well done, which means the critics love it. It's not for everyone, but I found i haunting.

The trouble with the term graphic novels

I am on a real roll with graphic novels. Right now, I have one about child abuse, one that tells a noirish crime story and one involving the downfall of a superhero. In the past few weeks I have read plenty more. The wide range in styles and subject matter are starting to make the term graphic novel confusing and even meaningless.

When Maus, an allegory of Nazism and prejudice using animals, and other serious books came out, it was obvious that calling a serious book that uses cartoonish drawings, speech bubbles and frames a comic book didn't seem right. So we started calling them graphic novels. As time went on, superhero comics became more serious and were also bound in trade paperback form giving them the look and, often, the heft of the more realistic and literary works.

Now there are as many types of graphic novel as there are novels. This makes recommendations tricky. Saying you might like Shaun Tan's The Arrival, since you enjoyed Ed Brubakers Criminal series is like saying you might like Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Klay because you liked Tim Power's Declare (by the way, this amazing book is somehow out of print. MADNESS). All four are wonderful, and if your tastes are wide enough, you are sure to like them all. The thing is, not everyone's taste is that wide, so saying something is a great graphic novel doesn't help that much.

I suspect that as graphic novels gain more acceptance they will be broken out into categories just as novels are. For now, I will try to explicit about the types of graphic novel I am discussing.

I seem to be reading a lot of graphic novels lately

I read the great Dark Avengers and the so-so Ultimatum (best if you want to see lots of carnage and deaths of major characters.) I also just picked up Torso, a true crime graphic novel by Brian Bendis.

As the intial book in a new imprint called Vertigo crime and authored by crime writer Ian Rankin, you might expect Dark Entries to be a crime novel. You would in face be wrong. It is a John Constantine story, which means it is a supernatural tale. Constantine is hired by a TV crew to help out on a reality TV show with problems. The cast live in a faux haunted house, but begin to experience strange events the TV crew aren't manipulating. The crew calls in Constantine to investigate. Things then get strange.

While I enjoyed the story, it may be because I am neither a Rankin nor a John Constantine fan. If you are a strong fan of either, the story may vex you. The Amazon reviews (which you should not read as they are spoiler-laden) seem to indicate that long serious Constantine fans may not like the direction the book takes. Similarly, Rankin fans, who might expect his gritty, but realistic stories may be surprised that he has made what might pass for an X-Files episode.

A childhood nerd dream come true

When I was but a wee lad, I read a lot of Justice League of America. Looking back, sure the stories are goofy, but my own kids love them now, so I suppose I wasn't too far off the mark. Having read a lot of them I eventually got to the point where I wanted the bad guys to win. Not temporarily, in a way to be overturned in the same comic or in the next, but for a long time.

My forlorn hope has finally come true in the Dark Avengers story line. It is now complete but it lasted for over a year. You can read the first few issues in the first trade hardcover. If you are curious about the backstory you can follow the convoluted Civil War/Skrull Invasion story line, but what you need to know is that the major heroes of Marvel are discredited. Norm Osbourne, the former Green Goblin and chief baddie of the first Spiderman movie, creates a new Avengers team out of the mentally unstable and wicked potential heroes. Hence the idea of the Dark Avengers.

Now, this could have devolved into lots of hand rubbing and "mwu ha ha ha" laughing, but it actually works quite well. It plays like an Avengers story where the bad guys are running things. The bad guys either want to be good guys, believe they are good guys or just appreciate the opportunity to wreak havoc on the government dime. It helps that Brian Bendis writes the stories. Along with Ed Brubaker, he is one of the greatest comic writers out there today.

This is just the sort of thing to bring a lapsed nerd back to the church of comics.

Shutter Island is now a graphic novel

I was going to warn potential readers of the graphic novel that they may want to pick up the non-illustrated version first, but Geoff Bucher puts it perfectly in the LA Times.

Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Paramount Pictures are bringing “Shutter Island” to the screen (finally) on Feb. 19 and a discerning consumer of culture might reasonably ask if it’s worth investing his or her time in a novel, a graphic novel and a film version of the same tale. The answer, so far, appears to be a resounding “yes.” One word of warning, however: The ending of “Shutter Island” is so jolting that any second-time encounter with the material (no matter the medium) will have a hard time matching the payoff of the first visit to the island. Choose your nightmares carefully.

The novel is the probably the fastest read Lehane has produced. It is almost as if he wanted to do the ultimate stay up all night thriller before staring in on the gigantic brooding, seething The Given Day.

Pixu

Well, I'm glad I didn't spend any money on Pixu: Mark of Evil. For whatever reason I am drawn to both horror novels and horror comics so Pixu, a hardcover graphic novel no less, seemed like a good choice. It seemed a bit too short to buy, so I went to the library. Good for me.

My main complaint is how insubstantial the story is. If you your focus is on the pictures (or art if you must) you will get more mileage than I did. I however want story and there isn't much. Here it is. Five people live in a spooky apartment building. Only one is a good person, some are OK and some are evil. Bad things happen to them quickly, but we don't care a whole lot because they aren't developed.

The authors, mostly artists, would rather communicate with images than words, but in a book this short, nothing really cohered. There are some unpleasant themes as well, mostly child abuse, but the authors went a little too far in the direction of suggestion. There also a sense of unreality about the entire thing, that was probably meant to be creepy but ended up making it less engaging.

Continuing to binge on graphic novels

Thanks to the riches of the Multnomah Public Library and Cosmic Monkey comics, I am continuing my comic book binge. I read issues 2 and 3 of Unwritten and will shortly be getting the rest. It's a fun story of characters from books coming to life and has lots of jokes about horror stories.

Hack/Slash is a tongue in cheek horror comic about a pair of sword wielding misfits who hunt slashers. In this world, serial killers and mass murderers are often a form of undead that Cassie Hack and her hulking partner Vlad dispatch in often gruesome form. If you enjoy horror movies, and particularly if you like loving send-ups like Scream, this one is for you.

Ex Machina is super dee duper awesome. It is written by the same dude who penned Y: the Last Man and has an equally novel story. It is a superhero book of sorts. Thanks to a strange accident with a mysterious, potentially alien?, technology Mitchell Hundred gains the ability to communicate with and control machines. He becomes an underground hero and, thanks to heroism on 9/11, gains enough stature to win the office of Mayor of New York. So it is a comic about politics, with superhero and sci-fi elements. He weaves in stories about gay marriage into ongoing political intrigue. This one is awesome.

I wish Point Blank were as good. The book is an early Ed Brubaker comic set in the same universe as the superior Sleeper and Incognito comics. This one though lacks the stream lined plot and tight writing of those later works. I think Brubaker also created unnecessary confusion with his dream vs. reality plot.

A visit to the comic shop

I've spent a long time working on converting my kids into nerds and the effort is finally bearing fruit. We started with Star Wars, the nerd gateway drug, and have moved along nicely. Now the kids love Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ray Harryhausen, and giant monsters (can Godzilla be far behind?)

The next great leap is to comic books. My oldest likes the Marvel Adventures Avengers books. The Marvel Adventures books are geared for the younger set. This is handy as comics are increasingly being made for more mature types. It is fun to take them down to Cosmic Monkey and look through the kids section. It also means I get to pick some up for myself. Here are some recent reads.

Locke and Key Head Games. This six issue series just wrapped up. Unlike the first six issue series (an absolute must read), this one is more transitional, setting up action for the next book. The weirdness quotient goes up quite a bit in this story as does the complexity of the narrative. Author Joe Hill writes horror novels as well, and it shows in the story.

Unwritten - I picked up the first one, and will certainly be reading more of this title. The book is about the son of a writer of Harry Potter like stories. The father has disappeared and the son plays on his fame at comic conventions. At one convention, an audience member calls his identity into question and then the story gets really strange. Pretty soon characters from the books start appearing in the real world. Here is a LA Times piece on the book.

Y the Last Man. How on earth have I not read this already? At the shop yesterday there was a display of "After Watchmen, what next" comics. For a buck you get to try classic darker comics. So I finally picked up Y the Last Man, a story about all the men on Earth dying, except for Yoric. Wow what a book.

I got a sickness, sweet as a love note

Among genre fiction, vampire fiction sometimes get a better reputation than others. This is due to the common understanding that there is a subtext of sex, power, disease or other social issues lying beneath the stories. Vampires can even be grafted into other genres, as seen in Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series, which is really noir social criticism. If you like noir and vampires, you need those books. I limit myself to one of his books every few months so that the pleasure of reading them doesn't end too quickly.

Sometimes though, vampire stories are just tales with really nasty monsters. 30 Days of Night was a graphic novel (since followed by sequels and stories set in its universe) that told of a tribe of vampires descending onto an Alaskan town in sunless depths of winter. I thought it was good enough to read some more, but not the best thing I have ever read.

Perhaps my moderate expectations helped here, but I thought the film version was a decent bit of bloody, violent entertainment. The violence in the comic was so stylized that the victims seemed a bit faceless. Here the cruelty and wickedness of the vampires is emphasized and the film is more frightening for it. The longer build-up and the plight of the initial survivors gives the film quite a bit more tension than the comic. There are a few changes of note from the graphic novel, but readers of the comic shouldn't expect great shocks.

Getting geeky with it

Man that BSG is good. I rapidly burned through Season 4 the first half on DVD only to find that hulu.com no longer has the second half on-line. So I suppose I have to wait. This show has had some serious ups and downs, but this season is really quite something. The end of the season was completely awesome in a classic sci-fi way. Avoiding spoilers for the second half is going to be quite difficult.

Per a friend's recommendation, I picked up the Walking Dead again. This is a grim as hell graphic novel about life after the rise of zombies in the US. I had the rest the first book and it felt fairly pedestrian. It showed a group of people banding together, then meeting other people and falling into conflicts as they tried to survive constant zombie attacks. Fairly common zombie fare. The later books bring on the dreadful notion of trying to survive long-term in such a situation. The mental and physical strain becomes worse for all involved and the carnage and cruelty levels get upped with each issue.

The book's art is black and white which has its pros and cons. On the up side, the violence would become a bit much in full color. On the downside, most of the characters devolve into scraggly looking younger guys and scraggily looking older guys. It can hard to tell them apart.

Glad I didn't pay for it.

So I've been on a good streak with graphic novels lately. I've been talking to friends and reading the Amazon top ten lists to pick the ones best to read. I saw some positive notices about the noirish nature of Brian Azzarello's The Joker and thinking it might be like Criminal, I picked it up. Sadly it was not.

The concept, the Joker is released from Arkham Asylum and aims to win back his criminal empire, but it never went much further than the concept. A wanna be named Jonny Frost serves as his right hand man in hopes of becoming a criminal genius himself. He learns that hooking up with a psychopath probably isn't a great idea. There isn't much development beyond that. You also don't learn much about the Joker aside from the fact that he is an angry crime boss who wants vengeance and that he likes random violence.

The art is quite good, so if you are looking for a grimy depiction of Gotham, this is a good choice. I loved the picture of Joker emerging from freedom and of him fishing downstream from refineries. Just don't look for much interest on the story side.

No honor among thieves

I have little trouble keeping up with most genres. Literary fiction is small enough that you don't need to spend a lot of time learning about new releases. A visit to the new section of any bookstore is likely to clue you in regardless. With a little effort online, I feel I can identify what I want to read in science fiction, fantasy and crime. Comic books, or graphic novels if you prefer, are a whole other ball of wax. Whenever I think about picking one up, I head down to the comic shop or the comic section of the library and then I stare at the mass of colors and images. Despite reading a fair piece of them, my eye is untrained in spotting quality. For comics, I really do need a sherpa.

Thankfully, I have one in my friend Matt who put me on to Ed Brubaker's and Sean Phillip's Criminal. The story will be familiar to crime fans. A loner thief is recruited to help in a robbery, and not just any robbery, but an inside job pulled by crooked cops. What could possibly go wrong? The story, while good, is not the draw. Instead it is the bleak atmosphere. This is the anti-Ocean's Eleven. Instead of a bunch of happy go lucky wealthy scammers, we have a bunch of desperate people making bad choices because of their prior bad choices. It's not a pretty picture, but it feels realistic. The art is also excellent. The story is set in the modern era, but the muted colors give it a 70s feel that harkens back to the gritty movies of the time.

All on my own I picked up the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier and I wish I hadn't. This one should have been great, set in a 1950s England coming out of the Big Brother years of 1948. Instead it is a jumble of texts, including an essay about Lovecrafts Great Old Ones and a comic story about Virginia Woolf's Orlando, that comprise the Black Dossier> There are all the references that made the earlier books so much fun, but overall it isn't terribly interesting. There is another book coming out soon, maybe that one will be as good as volumes 1 and 2.

But you take what you should have left and leave what you should have grabbed

Jonathan Ames is a novelist and essayist who is not unwilling to write graphically about the sexual and the scatological. He is also, apparently, not afraid to rake himself across the coals. His graphic novel the Alcoholic is a remarkably clear eyed look at a life constructed out of bad choices. The main character is one Jonathan A. who discovers the joys of boozing as a teen and carousing becomes a central facet of his life.

The tone of the book is a mix of humor and reflective horror. Jonathan damages the most important people in his life, not in a dramatic Lifetime fashion, but through solipsistic neglect and crazed infatuation. The drugs and alcohol take a toll on his health as well. He also has a eye for the bizarre. In the opening panels, Jonathan wakes up in the front seat of a car next to remarkably short elderly woman with a frightening seat of teeth. She remarks it has been quite some time since she has gotten any action and gets ready for some. These off the wall encounters happen throughout.

Dean Haspiel drew the art and it works quite well. He is adept at portraying emotion as well as the farcical, as when Jonathan A gets a bad case of the runs in France and makes a unsuccessful dash for the facilities.

A mess o' graphic novels

I spent my reading time over the last few days on graphic novels. I quite like reading them, but I have a devil of time telling which ones to read. I have been relying on Amazon best of lists for awhile. I also have found luck with Powells end cap displays and the featured comics at the Multnomah County Library. Here are the recent reads.

Apocalypse Nerd by Peter Bagge. I know Bagge's work mostly from Reason magazine where his comics tend take potshots at both the right and left in an amusing way. This book is much darker than that work. The story focuses on two Seattle guys returning from a camping trip to find that Seattle has been nuked by North Korea. They quickly go into survival mode and find that morality is dependent on civilization. The light, goofy art is at odds with the subject matter although it helps lighten the tone quite a bit.

Too Cool to be Forgotten by Alex Robinson. In this book, a 40 year old goes into hypnosis to stop smoking and wakes as a teen in the 1985. Once there he recalls that in 1985 he smoked his first cigarette, so that if he says no he will be cured. Of course, there may be other reasons he started smoking. I found the best parts to be the adult recalling with regret the choices made in high school.

Strangeways: Murder Moon by quite a few people. This one is a werewolf story set in the post-Civil War Wild West. The art is black and white, which makes for some confusion in places, but is otherwise excellent. The story is underdeveloped with frequent unresolved allusions, but it should please horror fans.

Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill. The name is terrible, but this is a great graphic novel. It collects the first six issues of the Locke and Key comic, hence the subtitle. The art in this book is excellent with great transitions, horrific images and characterizations. Hill is an accomplished novelist and short story writer, so it isn't surprising that the story here is excellent. The final pages are clearly a set up for the next set of stories, but this is a complete, and satisfying, story in and of itself. The book has a trailer which you can see here.

A pleasant diversion about the end of the world

In discussing the Ultimate Galactus trilogy, I was going call it a graphic novel, but really, it is just a very attractive comic book. Shaun Tan's gorgeous (and wordless) The Arrival, a depiction of the wave of strangeness and confusion in the immigrant experience, is a graphic novel. Ultimate Galactus is a bunch of super heroes fighting a really powerful bad guy. The story is set in the Ultimates universe, a reboot of the universe that moves the origins of heroes up from the 60s to this decade. The battle with Galactus was an early Fantastic Four story, but in this new Galactus trilogy, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Nick Fury and the Ultimates/Avengers battle each other and then Galactus.

The huge number of heroes is one of the problems with the story, there are just so many in there, along with some other cameos, that no character gets much chance to shine. The bigger problem is that the final battle is a bit abrupt. The opening chapters should have been trimmed to allow for more action at the end.

On the plus side, it is an action-packed story that nicely updates a few characters. The old Galactus seems a bit off these days. First of all his name sounds Roman and he is a giant human-looking biped despite being an ancient alien. The new version makes much more sense, and they even make his name more reasonable. They also manage to carry forward elements of the old one quite nicely. The Silver Surfer is quite different, and may displease fans, but I liked it.

The Ultimate universe makes for good reading, and this book is no exception. It is not up to the level of the Ultimates 1 & 2, but those are among the finest super hero stories I have ever read, so that isn't surprising. If you want another take on the superheroes get together and fight an implacable alien foe story, read DC's the New Frontier.

Given the short reading time and the fairly high cost, these sorts of books are ideal for library check-out. At $30 and about one hour of entertainment, the price/time ratio isn't very attractive. For the best ones, of course it makes sense, but you can run out of reading material lickety split if you buy a lot of these.