Thoughts on January 9's Comics

Superman 672
Insect Queen, Part 2
Gossamer Wings
--Peter Vale's art pales in comparison to Pacheco's, but it's an improvement on Leonardi's. He does a pretty good job with the insectoids and hive architecture, but his people have this very generic quality. I remember Kurt Busiek once saying on Usenet that Tony Stark without facial hair looks very generic, more like the third person from the left in a crowd scene than the main character. Well, most of Vale's character have that problem; they look like that third person from the left. This really stood out to me in the scene where Lana meets the three LexCorp technicians. They've been given different styles and colors of hair, and one's got a beard, but still... there's this genericness. Yeah, they're very minor characters who only have a few line, but surely that's all the more reason they should look distinctive. At least if Lana Lang looks like she belongs in a crowd scene, she's still the Lana Lang, you know?

The writing also suffers in comparison to Camelot Falls, one of the best superhero yarns I'd read in a long time. In that arc, there was this sense that there was this whole world out there, filled with unusual and extraordinary things and happenings. At first, we got Intergang, in cahoots with a mysterious not-Darkseid benefactor, as well as the introduction of the Science Police and the subplot of their secret agenda, and then we moved on to Subjekt-17, which segued into Arion and his warning, which brought with it an entire kickin' two-part alternate reality tale, and then the Arion plot moved forward parallel to Subjekt's, and along the way we get the Prankster better than ever and Squad K and, oh god, the New Gods, and more, and all of it weaving in and out of Superman's life and occasionally intersecting... It formed an amazing whole. It was a world every bit as rainbow and energetic as Superman's should be. I realize that, as a ten-parter, it could fit much, much more into it than the current three-part story. Still, the Insect Queen arc, in comparison, is just so... basic. It's A-plot of alien villain wanting to subjugate Earth and B-plot of something going on with a supporting character, and nothing else. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing... there's nothing especially right with it, either. Does that make sense?

I did enjoy this issue's story. The Insect Queen and her minions are interesting, and both cliffhangers have me eager to see what happens next. I guess it's not so much the story that's my problem, as the way it's being carried along such a worn path. I hope the delays the book's been suffering haven't made Busiek gunshy about the kind of intricate plot-juggling he did in Camelot Falls.

Buffy Season Eight 10
Anywhere but Here
-- Maybe I'm finally getting used to seeing the Buffy characters in a different medium, maybe the writing's gotten genuinely better, but for whatever reason this was the first issue that felt as on form as the series at its best. In the previous issues, it felt more like someone was writing a good Buffy imitation than like someone was writing good Buffy, like the writing was imitating Whedon's style and consequently not as effective because this person who wasn't Whedon wasn't writing from his own gut but Joss Whedon's. And I felt this way about all the issues, including Whedon's own.

Well, all of that -- I felt none of it here. Good dialogue, good jokes, neat ideas, and some very interesting revelations about our heroes. Season Eight finally feels like its going somewhere truly worth going, not merely continuing Buffy for the sake of its continuance. Before this issue, the story of these characters was continuing. Now it's progressing as well.

The artist for this issue, Cliff Richardson, was apparently a longtime penciller for Dark Horse's previous Buffy series. In retrospect, that's not too surprising because he just nailed the character likenesses here.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Block Dossier
-- I've finally managed to work through the beat prose section (which actually gets significantly easier to decipher after the first two chapters), so now I can write this.

Make no mistake, this book is "continuity porn." Much more ambitious and expansive than most works under that label but still continuity porn. Only where the point of of a Marvel comic called that would be to reference and draw connections to other Marvel comics, here the purpose is to reference and connect all of fiction, from all media and all genres. And it does a deft job of that, admittedly. Still, I read stories to get *stories*. Volume One of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that had a story, one that made numerous references and connections along the way. This, in contrast, is a list of references and connections that happens to tell a story along the way, and whatt story there is seems more designed to make the maximum number of references possible than to be good and enjoyable in its own right.

It's an odd book in that I would never recommend purchasing it to anyone (save someone who really loves both the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and sourcebooks, in which case this is made for you) but would recommend reading at least once. Moore and O'Neill take dips into various styles of prose and storytelling throughout the book, and that's interesting to see even if those sections never cohere into much of a plot.