comickal: recently read, strangely satisfying issues edition

[iainpj]

Angel Annual #1: "Last Angel in Hell" (Brian Lynch/Stephen Moody/Leonard O'Grady; IDW)
In which we see the movie made from Angel season 6. (For the sake of sanity, the new arc that Willingham is writing can be thought of as Angel season 7.) The conceit is that it was written by someone who lived in Los Angeles when it was dragged to hell, who saw much of what happened, but who wasn't close enough to the center of events to really understand what was going on. Add to that the muck that Hollywood frequently makes of things. Add to that the fact that ... well, neither the script nor the actor playing the lead seem to be very good. In fact, they seem to be quite quite quite awful. Put that all together, and you get a comic book "adaptation" of a movie that is impressively, awesomely bad. Angel appears to be played by a man who has taken lessons from the Nicolas Cage school of acting (think "Moonstruck", "Raising Arizona" and "Knowing", all mixed together in the same performance). Spike is played by a woman with, so we are told in a previous issue, a rather bad English accent. Gunn is being played by a round white guy and can turn into a dragon when pressed (he prefers not to). Fred is played by a black woman as an impressively kickass character, wearing the high-tech prototype ILLYRIA suit. (No, the acronym doesn't make the slightest sense. It shoots lightning from her hands when needed.) Angel starts out as an LAPD detective, whose partner, Wesley, gets killed and ghostified (don't ask) during an operation that goes wrong because of vampires, in which Angel does not believe until forced. (Again, don't ask.) But he starts to recover from that shock, and he's going to marry Spike, but the wedding goes horribly horribly wrong, in a way that will seem astoundingly familiar to anyone who ever saw the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie. (Or read the BTVS "Origins" comic.) And that, for some reason, provides the final push to send Los Angeles to hell. Lorne, as it turns out, rules most of LA as a lieutenant of Satan himself, and ... well. You just have to read the thing to see how awesomely, terribly, deliberately bad it is, in the best tradition of unintentionally awful and tacky horror movies. It's overwritten in all the right ways. The art is actually much better than you'd think the script deserves.
Very good; highly recommended.

Detective #860: "Go: Four years ago" (Rucka/Williams III/Stewart; DC)

In which we see how Kate started her work as Batwoman, and how she sees it not as the sort of crusade that most of the Bats seem to, but as an extension of the same ethic that took her to the military. Her father discovers, rather easily, what she's doing, and is not at all amused, but when Kate makes him understand why she's doing it, he helps her with his connections, money and vision to make it happen. The three scenes with her father are, in fact, the heart of the story -- the first where she convinces him that she can do what she's trying to do, and he decides to help, the second where it all comes together and she gets her uniform ("Pop ... are those heels?"), and then the last scene, where we find out exactly what her father did when she was kidnapped, where they break each others' hearts. (In fact, as far as the colonel goes, his reasons for what he did provide the one somewhat false note in the entire story so far; his reasons for doing what he does simply don't match the character as we've seen him to date. He took away hope, however futile, for a false certainty. It will, of course, turn out that his daughter has, quite accidentally, given him exactly the same false certainty -- and we get confirmation of that on the last page.) Williams' art is, as usual, stunning; the first two thirds of the story look as though they're drawn by a completely different person, and the last third in that striking style he's used for the modern part of the story.

Rucka and Cully Hammer's "Pipeline" Question backup story hits a very interesting point, as Renee and Helena appear to have made a rather dramatic mistake in their attacks on the cartel that's been trafficking in people and drugs. (It does bring up the question of exactly how secret identities work, if it's that easy for something as low-rent as a regular criminal cartel to figure out who the Question is and where she lives -- getting Helena at the same time was simply the lagniappe.)

Excellent; Highly recommended

(NB: As has been seen elsewhere, this is the last of the Rucka/Williams "Batwoman" stories in Detective. Rucka and Jock will be writing and illustrating Batwoman in Detective 861-863, and that story will appear to be unconnected to what's come before. In the new Batwoman title to start in 2010, after a new issue 1, they'll pick up with the final five issues of the "Elegy" arc, which was planned to break around "Go" originally. The Question co-feature will continue, and was in fact scheduled to become the primary story for a few issues after "Elegy"; whether that will happen earlier is unclear. It's also unclear whether Batwoman will be an ongoing title, or whether that will be only a 6-issue miniseries.)

Wonder Woman #39, "Warkiller, finale: Dawn before Darkness" (Simone/Lopresti/Ryan/Anderson; DC)

In which the threads started in "Bad Blood", "Rise of the Olympian", "Genocide" (somewhat) and "Warkiller", as well as the odd issues between those major arcs, are finally pulled together and concluded. Given that all of this has taken well over a year -- in fact, nearly two -- it would have to be one hell of a kickass issue to feel at all satisfying. And you know what? It kind of ... is. We finally understand, for example, what the hell happened to the Greek gods after the end of Amazons Attack and Countdown, when they seemed to have been rescued, but then disappeared for the entirety of Final Crisis; we find out where they were and why they weren't around to keep Olympus from being desecrated by the New Gods. We see gods abused, gods who were killed and resurrected, gods who weren't really dead. We find out what's behind all the strange pregnancies of the Amazons. We find out the truth of Diana's engendering. We get to see Diana, Hippolyta and even Achilles kick quite a lot of ass. Lessons are learned by the most unexpected people. Donna gets her sanity back. A lot happens, and it pretty much all works. Everything isn't completely wrapped up, of course, but that's to be expected. It really is a very satisfying ending for such a very long story arc.

Something of a side note: I would really love to know how Simone managed to get DC to allow her to run for such a long time without paying even the teensiest amount of attention to the ongoing crises of various sorts in what is supposed to be one of their major titles. None of this arc would have happened without Countdown, of course, but there have been two major events in the DCU since then, and this title hasn't taken any notice of either of them.

A side note to the side note: I wonder if we're going to find out what happens to the resurrected Olympians. As things are left, there doesn't seem to be a plan to send them back to Hades. And given what Simone has said about him, I'd love to see a miniseries with Achilles, just to see what he would do in today's world.

Very Good; Strongly recommended.