There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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The first graphic novel I ever bought was Death: The High Cost of Living. I was a teenage gothette just figuring out that there were all sorts of strange and wonderful things out there that I hadn’t discovered yet, and then one day my friend came to school with a little thing called the Death Gallery, full of these gorgeous pictures of this little goth girl that sorta even looked like me (if you squinted and washed out the color).

What the heck was that? I’d seen plenty of comics but nothing that looked like that. Her copy of The High Cost of Living was worn and well-read and I looked through it and it was a real story, not a jumped-up excuse for people in ridiculous costumes to beat things up. Comics, eh?

Well, DC/Vertigo has given my inner teenage goth girl a gigantic gift with this Absolute Death . That was fifteen years ago–literally half my life–and yet opening this huge slipcased hardcover with its thick, glossy pages is nearly as thrilling as that first look inside. The High Cost of Living and Time of Your Life are in here, as is the full Death Gallery and lots of additional art, the first-ever Death story from Sandman (though not every Death story from Sandman) and additional Death stories from Vertigo: A Winter’s Tale, The Sandman: Endless Nights, and a beautiful tale from a 9/11 themed anthology. There’s sketches and the script to the Sandman #8 (The Sound of Her Wings, the first appearance of Death) and an introduction by the fabulous Amanda Palmer, and even the short comic where Death and John Constantine explain how to use condoms.

Absolute editions aren’t cheap, but us comics people are nuts for them anyway. And really, when you’re in love with a medium that is half literature and half visual art, you can’t make it too big or beautiful. For while we all love Neil Gaiman and I read each book that comes out, the writing is only half the story here. The art, mostly from Mike Dringenberg and Chris Bachalo but also luminaries like Dave McKean, Jill Thompson (whose Death: At Death’s Door mini-manga is not included, sadly), P. Craig Russell and Colleen Doran, deserves these bigger, shinier, fresher pages that I’m afraid to touch except round the edges.

And Death deserves the attention–the morning spent with the book spread across my lap, remembering the first time I read these stories and saw these pictures, remembering what she meant to me then and means to me now, as an adult with a career and little free time for indulging. She understands, I think.

 The secret in the title of A Family Secret (Farrar Straus Giroux) isn’t the sort that is being deliberately kept from others as much as it simply goes un-talked about for years.

And who could blame Helena Van Dort, an elderly Dutch woman who lived through World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, for not talking about the war years all the time? It makes for a pretty unpleasant topic.

Comics artist Eric Heuvel’s crystal-clear storytelling, beautiful draftsmanship and open, inviting and expressive design makes for a pleasant reading experience, however, as unpleasant as the subject matter might be.

A Family Secret is Heuvel’s graphic novel about Helena’s war-time experience, written from a scenario credited to Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, Menno Metselaar of the Anne Frank House and Hans Groeneweg of the Resistance Museum of Friesland. That sounds like a lot of experts to have in the room, and it shows in the book’s educational focus.

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The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My

Written & Illustrated by Tove Jansson

Published by Drawn & Quarterly

D&Q’s done very nice work collecting Tove Jansson’s trippy and delightful comic strip Moomin into a series of high-quality hardcovers. Every successive edition has been a treat of silliness, whimsical logic, family values and bizarre rural landscapes. Moomin, however, did not begin life as a comic strip. Rather, Ms. Jansson’s odd little hippopotamus-like family had their origins in children’s books. Later, picture books followed, and in 1954, the comic strip finally debuted. Justified by the success of the charming comic strip archives, D&Q has begun creating replica editions of the Moomin picture books, starting with 1952’s The Book of Moomin, Mymble and Little My.

For readers familiar with Jansson’s Moomin comics, experiencing Moomin’s travails in the form of a picture book is likely to be somewhat familiar – the whimsical tone and uplifting outlook remain unmolested – and jarring – the reliance on rhyme and rhythm make for a very different reading experience. Whether the experience is better, worse or simply different is going to be entirely on each reader. I found the simply rhyming scheme slightly distracting, repeatedly losing any sense of what was occurring. Yet Jansson’s language, marked by references to unusual creates like the Hattifatteners, flows confidently, moving Moomin and Mymble (and My) from one surprising circumstance to the next with certainty and inimitable style.

Jansson’s loopy illustrations seem to benefit from the format, as her use of simple color schemes and the larger canvas afforded by the page size offer a more perplexing and delirious vision of MoominValley. The book’s most obvious feature is that every page has a cut-away section, allowing peeks into the preceding and succeeding pages. The windows into the future don’t provide much story value other than to play off each page’s final rhyme, inevitably a suggestion to guess what zaniness will occur next, but certainly many young readers will enjoy the game.

Although the picture book does not match the dream-logic, wandering stories of the Moomin comic strip (which comes thoroughly recommended), D&Q’s first replica edition of Tove Jansson’s picture books, The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My is still a trippy good time, and suggested reading for anybody with young children who enjoy adventurous tales in fanciful lands.  And it’s a treat to see comics publishers expanding their repertoire with diverse graphic storytelling projects.

As a comics critic, I’m not terribly fond of the anthology format. They’re extremely difficult to write reviews of, and I’m hardly ever satisfied with the reviews that result any time I do try to tackle one.

That’s due mostly to the very nature of anthologies (Well, that and the fact that I’m not as good a writer as I’d like sometimes, but I prefer to blame the format). Even those with strong, unifying themes will involve different creators on each story, and inevitably some creators will be better than other or, in the rare case where they’re all excellent, they will all be excellent in very different ways.

So every time I sit down to write a review for an anthology, I generally end up walking away from my laptop disappointed with the results—they always seem to be some variation of “This is an anthology consisting of stories tied together by this particular theme. Some of these stories were good, and some of them were not.”

As a comics reader, however, I’ve found that anthologies can be a lot of fun, introducing you to new creators and/or characters in rapid succession after a relatively low-risk investment of time and money.

Among my favorite to read are the sorts of holiday specials that mainstream publishers occasionally put out, for these very reasons. And for the Halloween ones, the grab-bag nature of anthologies seems particularly apropos, as reading them can parallel the experience of trick-or-treating. One stop you might get a little box of Dots or a York peppermint patty, the next you might get a Tootsie roll or one of those hard, brown blobs that come wrapped in plain black or orange wrappers and smell vaguely of peanuts.

Yesterday’s new comics day brought two such Halloween-prompted anthologies—DC/Vertigo’s House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 and Image Comics’ The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1—so I thought I’d try trick or treating in those two particular neighborhoods. Both books were also promoted as good jumping-on points for the various serials, and since I have yet to read a single issue of either House of Mystery or The Perhapanauts, I thought I might be well-positioned to serve as a test case for how effective they were at meeting those goals.

So grab your metaphorical costume and metaphorical treat bag and join me after the jump for some metaphorical trick or treating. (The “jump,” by the way, is also metaphorical).

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Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Zot!, has written an interesting post up on comics criticism — specifically, looking at negative reviews.

For myself, I always consider reviews useful—even the hatchet jobs. It makes my heart sink a little when I hear other artists dismiss all reviews as irrelevant to their process. A common claim is that reviews tell us “only about the reviewer” and tell us “nothing about the work,” but I disagree. Yes, reviewers have biases. Yes, they miss the point sometimes. But there’s always some kind of information embedded in any reaction to any creative effort.

As someone who writes reviews on a fairly regular basis, I think the idea of how the industry sees these things is really important. The best reviews — the way they should work, or at least the way I hope they work — is not only to give notice to like-minded consumers of whether or not it’s a praiseworthy effort, but to also be an advocate for readers, to respectfully let creators know what works and doesn’t work for us. In a perfect world, reviewers’ reactions to the work — even if they’re off the mark — give everyone some perspective.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Are there some reviewers with an axe to grind out there? Oh, yeah, I’d believe it — I’ve seen plenty of industry folks I know and respect have calls to be fired, have streams of invective sent their way because someone didn’t like — or worse yet, didn’t get — the work in question. Sometimes, nostalgia wins out — I’m sure you can think of status quo changes that are more controversial than others. Other times, things are lost in translation. Sometimes that’s the reviewers’ fault — other times, it’s a question of clarity on the creators’ part.

But, similar to what McCloud says at the end of his post, the most important thing — the only important thing — that a reviewer needs to have is that regardless of who you’re reviewing, regardless the character or status quo, the thing that’s most important is that a reviewer should want the industry to succeed and keep moving onwards. The story and its presentation — not the politics or inside baseball — is all that matters in comics criticism. What do you think? Fans, industry people, let us know what you think!

If there was a book that isn’t Sandman more deserving of oversized, supersaturated Absolute edition, Promethea is it. It’s a sometimes-skipping, sometimes-running, sometimes-strolling journey through a dream world as wild and beautiful as Neil Gaiman’s but ruled by a warrior-queen who’s everything Wonder Woman ought to be.

Promethea is a living story, and she’s just taken over a new human host. The previous incarnations, like something out of Joseph Campbell, have all left their mark on her, and they each have something to teach young Sophie Bangs, a college student whose research has led her to Promethea’s tale.

I love Alan Moore (which should almost go without saying) and yet I’d never read these stories, which are probably the most like me of any of his works. Promethea is in one sense the wealth of woman-knowledge and magic passed down from generation to generation, and that’s an idea I can certainly get behind. But the story is less about ideas than about feelings; less a story than an experience.

Imagination-scapes unfurl across double-page spreads full of symbols that evoke a visceral reaction and yet are things you’ve never seen or heard of. It makes me want to write, or dream, or write about dreams. Hell, it makes me want to draw, and I’m no good at that.

Layered into the story are thoughtful critiques of power, hierarchy, patriarchy, as well as pokes and gibes at mainstream comic storytelling. The tale gets stranger as it goes on, spinning off into splashy explanations of Moore’s thoughts on magic and myth within the myth he’s created.

It’s less a narrative than a trip, fables layered on top of stories and characters’ identities shifting into dreams. If Watchmen is Moore’s Ulysses, then Promethea is Finnegans Wake and it demands the same experience—stop trying to make it make sense and just let it wash over you and enjoy the ride.

Matt Kindt’s 2007 Super Spy, a book that devoted each of its many chapters to the life of a different World War II spy in occasionally crisscrossing stories, featured a very complex narrative, made more complex by Kindt’s relentless, almost delirious shifts in layout and style.

His latest work, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man (Dark Horse Comics), is similar to Super Spy in a lot of ways. It’s impeccably well designed, so that every aspect of the book as an object—covers, title pages, etc.—serves the story. Kindt shifts from standard comics panel-grids to incorporate information in the form of other media, like a newspaper articles and pages from books about his characters. His artwork remains bold and showy. His characters still seem assembled from brushstrokes, like calligraphy people that suggest greater detail and radiate a third dimension.

But where 3 Story differs from Super Spy, it differs for the better. The story is more straightforward, but also a little more serious and sophisticated, Kindt’s use willingness to push the limits of the form in different directions here never coming between the reader and the story as it sometimes did in Super Spy (At times Super Spy seemed like a book that was first and foremost about the way in which it was being told).

The title refers both to the structure of the book, which consists of three stories distinct but continuing stories, and the one-time height of its main character Craig Pressgang, the Giant Man of the title. Each story is told from the point of view of a woman important in Craig’s life—his mother, his wife and his daughter—with his wife’s section making up the bulk of the book, and his mother and daughters’ stories serving as a prologue and epilogue.

Craig reaches the height of nine-feet-tall by the time he starts college, and keeps growing the rest of his life. It’s a fairly normal life too, including college, a girlfriend who becomes his wife, work, family and attendant difficulties with each, although the normalcy of Craig’s real problems are slightly obscured by the fantastical nature of his condition.

None of us are giant people, but most of us face some or all of the emotional problems Craig does, his gigantism functioning simultaneously as an in-plot conflict and a metaphor. In other words, everyone grows apart from their loved ones at some point, but when Craig does so, it’s in large part because he himself is literally growing constantly.

That the emotional content works so well is a credit to Kindt’s ability to write, draw and, most importantly, write with drawings, although the fact that he focuses on a single fantastic element to write as naturally as possible around certainly doesn’t hurt. Other than Craig’s mysterious growth, every element of the story is considered and presented as realistically as possible. Rather than the sort of wish-fulfillment attendant in growing superheroes, like Marvel’s Giant Man, Craig’s growth brings with it as many problems as it does benefits—his nerve reactions are super-slow so he hurts himself easily, he suffers from leg problems, and, in a world without Pym particles, all of his clothes need to be custom-made, until he grows so large the only clothing that will fit him are bolts of cloth stitched together and, finally, he’s too big for clothing at all.

His increasing alienation is manifested physically, as he gets so big that he can communicate with his tiny family, and Kindt keeps the character remote even from the audience, as we aren’t show or told what’s going on inside his head directly, but instead see him from within the heads of the women in his life.

It’s a pretty powerful work from a cartoonist whose skill, like his protagonist’s size, seems to be continuously increasing.

Related: For more info on the book, including a seven-page preview, visit the publisher’s website here. For more on Kindt, check out the artist’s website here (And make sure you visit the portfolio and blog section, if you’re curious as to what a Kindt image of, say, The Thing fighting MODOK might look like).

Rotten #4

Written by Mark Rahner and Robert Horton

Art by Dan Dougherty

Published by Moonstone

Agents Wade and Flynn proceed to their next zombie mission out in the Wild West in Part Four of Rotten. In a comic full of clever dialogue and wonderfully structured stoytelling, both in the writing and the art, you could say it’s sort of a bonus to include zombies.

As the popularity of “Zombieland” should make clear, it’s not just zombies that bring in an audience. It’s always going to come back to the story and the characters. In Rotten, you’ve got a very different kind of story led by a couple of likable and authentic guys, Agents Wade and Flynn. They are under special orders from Pres. Hayes to investigate reports of attacks from creatures or,  “the undead,” out West.

Issue Four finds our heroes going undercover as commanding officers taking over a snow-bound and desolate Army fort. For all purposes, it shouldn’t even exist. There’s a lot of good tension-filled scenes between the new officers and the troops as neither group is eager to reveal everything they know.

Dan Dougherty is definitely the guy to be drawing this. He has a very distinctive style: sharp-edged and lean. He knows how to keep the story moving with tight compositions. He also knows his way around the subtleties of human expression. In this issue, the pressure is really applied on Agent Wade to not only act as a leader but to be one even when his orders sound outright strange. His every move must be convincing to a group of desperate men. Dougherty keeps us in the story and gives us a deeper appreciation of this complex character.

And what are these strange orders coming from Wade? Well, they’re nothing compared to what the men have been hiding from him. It’s spooky stuff in the tradition of “The Twilight Zone.” You don’t want to say this sort of thing too often but Rotten remains one of those best kept secrets in comics and I recommend you get in on it. This issue is the start of a new arc and a great place to dive in.

Ball Peen Hammer writer Adam Rapp must have one hell of a busy-looking business card at this point. He’s a playwright, filmmaker, young adult novelist and adult novelist, adding graphic novelist to his resume with this, his debut work in the medium. He’s working with artist George O’Connor, a picture book artist now on his second graphic novel (His first, Journey into Mohawk Country, was also published by First Second).

Their book, named for the tool used in a procedure best not spoiled here, betrays Rapp’s background in theater, as it’s an extremely talky one, mostly occurring in  two pretty claustrophobic settings. A cast of six or seven and minimal set design is all it would take to move this from the page to the stage, which points to a problem with the work: It’s a comic that doesn’t have to be a comic, and while that doesn’t make it a bad comic, I think it keeps it from ever being a truly great one.

I said it was talky, but it’s not at all poorly assembled. All that conversation is well-divided into different panels, so that the whole endeavor retains the form of a comic book and the experience remains one of reading a comic book—there are no walls of text, or panels overwhelmed by dialogue bubbles. It doesn’t read like a novel or screenplay or play being stuffed into a graphic novel for cynical reasons. Given how much of the story is told through the conversations—there’s no text prologue or narration to serve as shortcuts—it’s really quite remarkably assembled.

O’Connor’s lines are thin, and many when they’re needed—on brick walls, cross-hatched gloom, rotting diseased bodies, exterior long shots, a few rain storms—but his character designs are smooth, expressive, open and highly variant. The cast is a small one, but it looks great, and if you’re familiar with O’Connor’s children’s books, you may be surprised to see how he’s adapted his style to this form and this particular work.
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The second release from Drawn and Quarterly’s John Stanley Library collection features a much better known property than Melvin Monster—Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip heroine Nancy. As was the case with the Melvin book, Nancy Vol. 1 is a gorgeously designed and packaged book, something collection-ophiles can look at and handle with admiration.

Seth uses Nancy’s emoticon-simple face to great effect on the cover, title page and the pages between the five issues of Dell’s Nancy comic collected within,  making for a fine example of a book-as-art-object in and of itself, regardless of the contents.

But what contents! These late 1950’s issues were written and laid out by Stanley and drawn by Dan Gormley, and I was somewhat surprised by how similar they read to Stanley’s Little Lulu comics, of which I’m much more familiar (and also a great admirer).

Nancy and Sluggo fall neatly into the friend/enemy/paramour relationship of Lulu and Tubby (Is “boyfrenemy” a word? Can we make it one?), with fat jokes about Tubby swapped out for jokes about Sluggo’s poverty. Both little leading ladies are similarly precocious, smart, imaginative and basically good but capable of being quite annoying to adults. Each girl also deals regularly with a comically wealthy snob, a kinda creepy-looking best friend (Oona out-creeps Annie easily, of course), a bratty baby-sittee and neighborhood bully or bullies.

Both features also traded in amusing character-based humor and corny situational comedy often funny today for its precise lack of humor, and both work best when showing the intersection of the adult world and the children’s world.

As with Lulu, one of the many pleasures I took from the Nancy book was that weird nostalgia for a time I’ve only ever experienced in other old comics (Peanuts and Dennis the Menace and the like), for a childhood that doesn’t even remotely reflect what my own experience of growing up 30 years after Nancy and Sluggo’s adventures collected here was like. (Oh, and as with Lulu, there are plenty of reaction shots of adult passersby on the streets; those always crack me up).

Where Stanley’s Nancy differs most strongly from his Lulu (aside from the great differences between the way they’re being packaged these days) is the often quite strange clash in character design. The super-simplified Nancy and Sluggo seem to belong to a completely different strip than the gorgeous and almost representational wasp-waisted, delicate featured Aunt Fritzi, and all three of them seem to belong to another world than that of Oona, Spike, Rollo and most of the other kids and adults that pass through the strip.

The tension in the designs—intentional or not—only heightens the differences between the distinct sets of characters and the way they perceive their world, underlining the conflicts at the center of some of the best bits.

Not to over think it or anything. One could also just say it’s great cartooning applied to somewhat amusing mid-twentieth century kids comedy in a gorgeous package and leave it at that.

What comes to mind when you think of Jeff Parker comics? A talking gorilla with a machine gun? Harrison Oogar, The Caveman of Wall Street? The entire roster of the Avengers, transformed into a team of M.O.D.O.K.s?

Well Parker’s latest comics work, five-part Image miniseries Underground, doesn’t have any of those things in it, nor is it much of anything like the vast majority of the Parker-written comics you’ve probably read.

That’s not a bad thing.

While his ability to make me laugh is one of the things I admire most about Parker’s writing, there’s nothing wrong with range, and it’s nice to see Parker taking the opportunity to demonstrate his own. Underground has very little humor in it, aside from an early scene in which park ranger Wesley Fischer stares at herself in the bathroom mirror and tries to figure out the best way to say good morning to the sleeping co-worker in her bed, who is now more than a co-worker.

The mode is more straightforward action drama, and Parker has a perfect collaborator for work in the genre—Whiteout artist Steve Lieber, who’s no doubt having a pretty exciting month in general.

Wesley, the aforementioned park ranger, is also an expert caver, and wants to keep Stillwater Cave off-limits to amateur cavers and tourists, who could damage the delicate system. That places her at odds with much of the rest of the small, economically depressed Kentucky town, the residents of which think opening up the cave could prove an economic boon. Leading the charge is local businessman and entrepreneur Winston Barefoot, who may have something to do with guys going ahead with the dynamiting of the cave on their own.

A great deal of this first issue is spent on introducing the characters and conflict before ultimately complicating it, leaving us with an underground cliffhanger promising more action in the unusual, underground setting in future installments.

If the comic seems like a bit of a departure for Parker, whose writing has dealt with some of the more off-beat corners of Marvel’s superhero universe and a colorful magician character fighting demons for DC/WildStorm, Lieber is well within his comfort zone of drawing real people in real places doing realistic things.

Lieber’s a strong designer, storyteller and actor, and makes every page beautiful (if you stop and really look at it), unassuming (if you don’t) and, most admirably, perfectly natural. He’s one of those rare artists who manages to make great art look effortless, so that his panels and pages simply look as they should, making it easy for the reader to be drawn in.

In that respect, it mirrors the issue as a whole—it’s really quite inviting.

The last thing the world needs is another telling of Superman’s origin story, particularly in comic book form. Mark Waid, Leinil Francis Yu and company just did a perfectly good job of retelling it for the 21st century in Superman: Birthright, a twelve-part series that started just six years ago, and even more recently Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and company  reminded readers they knew the story like the back of their hand already, so why not just fast forward right through it, in the first four panels of their All-Star Superman?

Of course, DC’s been fiddling with their continuity, and one of the changes of their 2005-2007 Infinite Crisis/52 continuity reboot that many of the things that were done away with in the previous continuity reboot were gradually restored, which left a lot of questions in the minds of those of us who worry about things like when Superman first put on his suit or first met the Legion of Super-Heroes.

So here comes Superman: Secret Origin #1, the first in a six-issue series by the “Superman and The Legion of Super-Heroes” team of Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Jon Sibal to put our anxious minds at ease.

Johns rather wisely skips over the destruction of Krypton, the rocket ship, the Kent discovery and so on, opening with young Clark Kent already a teenager at Smallville High. He, his parents and his confidant Lana Lang all know he’s a lot stronger and tougher than he should be, but Clark doesn’t know why. When his heat vision shows up, Ma and Pa reveal the rocket ship hidden in the barn, and Clark begins to learn about his origin, which has been kept a secret from him all this time (See? Secret Origin. That works perfectly).

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Batman: Cacophony

Writer: Kevin Smith

Artist: Walt Flanagan

Inker: Sandra Hope

Published by DC Comics

Hardcover, 142 pages, $19.99

As he throws out one self-deprecating line after another, Kevin Smith can make what he does look easy but it would be a mistake to dismiss what he’s done with Batman: Cacophony. In his introduction, he readily admits he can do better but  what he really means is that he’s inspired to take the work further. And, after reading this new hardcover collection, you should come away looking forward to more.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Smith’s take on Batman. Some of my comics friends had been put off by Smith’s Batman not saying what Batman would say. And then there’s the whole thing with the Joker taking a walk on the wild side. Well, it’s not exactly too big of a leap to see the character as gay. The one scene where he’s all too eager to act on his desires with the man who could likely kill him is beyond the pale but certainly within Joker territory. The few times Batman seems to slouch into something less than what we’d expect are minimal. Basically, along with artist Walter Flanagan, this is Kevin Smith’s Batman and it works best to go with it.

The quirky moments, I came to see, did not take me out of the story, especially if I’ve already accepted the world that I’m in. And, for the purists who may not even want to give this a chance, the quirk works and it does not overwhelm what is a solid story.

We start at the gates to Arkham Asylum. Due to the recent economic crash, frenzied cost cutting measures by the board lead to the firing of the front gate security guards. The money saved, however, promptly goes to the board’s year-end bonuses. Of course, who would ever want to break into Arkham Asylum? This night, it’s two separate killers both looking for the Joker.

As the story unfolds, we see one of the killers is Kevin Smith’s villain, Onomatopeia, from his Green Arrow run. And the other killer is a vigilante, Deadshot. Each will play supportive roles as will another minor baddie, Maxie Zeus, who has built an empire by converting the Joker’s venom into a designer drug. The Joker, in the scheme of things, has been reduced to the role of bait in a plot to lure Batman but he’s definitely the star of the show as well as a great vehicle for Smith’s humor to boot.

This book also includes the first draft script to Issue Three so you can get a sense for yourself of the number of revisions that went into the final work. Needless to say, Kevin Smith is a huge talent and he still won’t win over everyone. Having just read the first issue of Smith’s latest Batman run, The Widening Gyre, I would highly recommend getting this collection and it will likely win you over if you’re receptive and add to your appreciation of the current run.

Batman: Gotham Underground (DC Comics) I passed on this when it was originally serialized, as I wasn’t reading Countdown, and it was a tie-in to a Countdown tie-in (Salvation Run), but I’ve found I’m much less picky about the comics I read when I borrow their trade collections from a library as opposed to paying for them out-of-pocket 22 pages at a time over the course of several months. The work of writer Frank Tieri and pencil artist Jim Calafiore, the book is an ambitious attempt at what seems like a pretty good idea for a comic.

Despite the title, the main character is actually The Penguin, and the book deals with his attempt to fend off rival criminal empires encroaching on Gotham City. Tieri seems to be trying to give at least one scene to every single villain and vigilante in Gotham City, and manages to pretty successfully work almost all of them in, sometimes successfully (the unavailable Joker, for example, via flashback) sometimes less so (Vigilante IX, or whatever version they’re up to now, enters and exits via left field).

The main problem with the book (beyond Calafiore’s art, which brings a jagged, edgy weirdness to the proceedings, but little else of value) is that the trade collection isolates the story from whatever else DC had on the shelves at the time, but the story doesn’t quite stand on its own once isolated. Plot lines from other books are picked up on and left to finish elsewhere, with no indication within the story itself that this is so. The result is that certain swathes of the narrative seem to come out of nowhere and then be forgotten.

And even if you are a reader of the DC Universe in general, and are thus aware of things like Countdown and Salvation Run, there’s still something unsatisfying about the book. It is, after all, the story of the struggle for criminal control of Gotham City. So was War Games (2005), Face The Face (2006) and Battle For the Cowl (collection due in November). It’s hard to care much about the consequences of these stories when their results are so short-lived, and/or contradicted by the other Batman books.

Beasts of Burden #1 (Dark Horse Comics) Well this is awkward. I was pretty disappointed in this book, which comes from my own incredibly high expectations for it (I don’t think I’ve ever read a bad comic by either Evan Dorkin, who wrote this issue, or Jill Thompson, who provides the painted art) and the simple fact that I was completely unprepared to read this story. The cast of characters, all house pets that can talk to one another and apparently have some experience facing supernatural threats, was surprisingly large, and this issue is constructed not so much to introduce them as it is to tell readers about what’s currently happening in their lives—it’s assumed that you already know them and what their various deals are.

It’s not an unfair assumption, given that the characters have appeared in several stories in Dark Horse’s various Book Of… horror anthologies over the years, but I expected a more entry-level story from a #1 issue in a new miniseries. If you didn’t read the Book Of… books, Dark Horse is making it easy to do so, by putting them all online here, but I wanted to evaluate the book as it stands on its own.

And it doesn’t stand on its own all that well. Sure, Thompson’s art is gorgeous—the character designs are all extremely strong, to the point where the various animals all look like representational versions of real animals, but can still emote in a way real pets can’t quite manage. A few of them have strong, likable personalities, and there’s a neat conflict involving an imaginatively conceived monster that gets around by pulling a Charles Forte strange fall maneuver. But joining the story in progress like this felt a little like picking up a random X-Men comic. I didn’t know who was who or what was what, and was compelled to go to the Internet to find out.

I realize this doesn’t exactly sound terribly positive, but I don’t mean to warn readers away. Instead, I just want to warn you that if you haven’t read the Book of… books, to start here, and then pick up Beasts of Burden #1. It’ll make all the difference in the world. I didn’t think much of this issue, but I have a hard time blaming anyone but myself, which doesn’t happen very often. (For another opinion, check out my colleague Sarah’s review here).

The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven (First Second) The second and third volumes of Kim Dong Hwa “Color of Earth” trilogy follow young Ehwa into adolescence, into her first serious relationship and ultimately into marriage. While the first volume concentrated mainly on Ehwa’s gradual discovery about her body, the bodies of others and the world of love and relationships from the outsider’s perspective of a child, in the second and third book she begins to experience the same grown-up emotions from the inside for herself.

In Water, which I guess you could call the puberty volume, she meets a wrestler/farmhand from a nearby village named Duksam and falls in love, experiencing longing and frustration. In Heaven, she becomes an adult, experiencing marriage and sex. All of the characters continue to speak to one another almost constantly in poetic nature metaphors, which makes for a formal, literate read, but, looked at from a different angle, can also be pretty funny.

In Water, for example, everything in nature seems to be suggesting sex, like, constantly. Similarly, the wedding night consummation scene in Heaven, told in visual metaphors, is rather elegant in context, but also sort of hilarious, particularly read out of context.

Taken all together, Kim Dong Hwa’s epic is surprisingly emotionally effective. By the end, I found myself feeling proud of Ehwa and sad for her mother, who was about to lose her closest friend and confidant after so many years. That comes from watching Ehwa grow-up over the course of hundreds of pages, I suppose. The cast is tiny (there can’t be more than a dozen characters total) and the setting small almost to the point of being claustrophobic (most of the action set at Ehwa and her mother’s small house), but because the subject matter is that of the two principal characters’ lives, and so much attention is devoted to it (about 900 pages total), that it’s a grand, sweeping epic of the small, intimate elements of two women’s lives.

Johnny Boo Book 3: Happy Apples (Top Shelf Productions) Now on its third book, James Kochalka’s series about a little ghost and his even more little ghost friend has reached the point where I ask myself, “Is there any point of still reviewing this, other than to point out when a new one arrives?”  After all, if you’ve read the first two books, Best Little Ghost in the World and Twinkle Power, you should know what to expect by now:  An all-ages comic featuring Kochalka’s ultra-cute art, coloring so bright it’s electric and gags aimed at both kids (in their silliness) and adults (in their absurdity). In this volume,  Johnny learns what kind of food makes your muscles big and strong (hint: it’s in the title) and what kind of food makes your muscles floopy and funny.  I can’t recommend this series highly enough to Kochalka fans and comics fan parents who happen to have little kids.

It should be a surprise to absolutely no one that I am a huge fan of Jill Thompson’s art. I had somehow missed out on the previous incarnations of Beasts of Burden, but was happy to pick up a new number one issue on little more recommendation than Thompson’s name on the cover.

Beasts of Burden looks like it could be a kids’ comic from the cover–talking dogs and cats? It could be too cute for words, especially with such bright and luscious painted art. Except the same amount of loving detail goes into some truly creepy gore and disturbing moments. A horror comic disguised as cute stuff? I’m in.

The dogs have unique and compelling enough personalities that when one is chained up in a backyard it’s oddly disturbing, like seeing a person on the end of a chain. The hints at underlying mythology–”Witch cats” and “wise dogs”–are tempting, and the humor works without breaking the tension of the story. This issue works as a one-shot, but it also sucks you in and leaves you waiting for more.

So here’s to more comics that sneak up on you, right?

I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.

Usually new comic book day falls on Wednesday, right? And usually I put together a linkblogging post late Tuesday night and set the Blog@Newsarama  robot to post it for me early the next morning, so I can devote my entire Wednesday to the acquisition and reading of new comic books.

But new comic book day has arrived a day late this week, on Thursday, instead of Wednesday, due to the Labor Day. (Thanks for improving working conditions, getting people with full-time jobs a Monday off at the end of summer and completely ruining my week, American Labor Movement!).

Normally on Thursday mornings and afternoons I spend my time working on a post for Blog@, but I can’t go get and read comics and come up with a Blog@ post at the same time, and I need to do both as soon as possible, because the new comic book reading is something of an addiction at this point, and the latter is something I should probably do before you call go home from work and thus stop checking Blog@ for comics-related content.

So here’s the solution I came up with: I’ll liveblog my reading of this week’s books. Will that be entertaining? Informing? Mildly interesting? I don’t know, but it will definitely be a blog post.

So I just got back from my local comic shop with this week’s purchases (By the way, any fellow Columbusites in the reading audience, Sean McKeever is signing at the Laughing Ogre today in support of Nomad, so go visit him and buy his book. I suggest you bring copies of Ted McKeever books with you and ask him to sign those, just to see what happens), and it’s a relatively light week for me.

I’ve been adjusting my weekly comics-buying budget down gradually over the last few years, and it currently stands at $25 (down from an all-time high of $45 in 2005). The arrival of the long-awaited sixth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&!, which costs $10.99, bumped a trio of $3.99 DC books and a $2.99 Marvel book off my shopping list (Booster Gold, Adventure Comics, Doom Patrol and Marvel Adventures Super Heroes, for those keeping score; I’ll probably pick up some of those if one of the next few weeks are lighter). So this week’s haul consists of Yotsuba&!, Blackest Night: Batman #2, Wednesday Comics #10, Incredible Hercules #134, and Secret Six #13.

I’ve got them all in a little stack on the end table next to my special comics-reading chair, I’ve got a large black coffee from Honey Dip Donuts on Kenny Road in Columbus, and I’ve got my lap top open. So, let’s do this experiment!

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As a comics critic, I hate Chris Onstad’s Achewood. As a comics reader, I love it—it’s by far my favorite web comic, and one of my favorite comic strips or comics of any kind…hell, maybe one of my favorite pieces of current fiction of any medium.

The reason part of me hates it and part of me loves it is the same. It’s such a unique strip, there’s nothing really even remotely like it, which, obviously, can make it really hard to explain to others, or talk about at all.

There are a lot of conceptual hurdles that can make entry into the world of Achewood kind of hard, hurdles I struggled with the first few times I tried reading it, until someone eventually advised to just pick a story arc from the archives and start reading—within a dozen or so strips, you should start to not only get it, but dig it. And Onstad is so accomplished at world building that the longer the strip goes on, the more you read of it, the more you get to know the surprisingly dynamic and versatile characters, the better it gets.

Those hurdles? Who are all these crazy anthropomorphic animals, and what species are they exactly? Are they anthropomorphic animals living in an animal-scaled world, or a human-scaled world? Why don’t squirrels have pupils? How is it that four such divergent characters as Mr. Cornelius Bear, Lyle, Teodor and Phillipe are roommates?

Achewood Vol. 2: Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar (Dark Horse Comics) is the book that the Caleb who once struggled with such things could have used to answer such questions.

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