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The Forecast for November 3rd 2004
Welcome to The Forecast. Every Monday, Ninth Art's core team of comment writers, the Ninth Eight, will be your guides to the best, worst, weirdest and most noteworthy books on the shelves of your local comic shop. BOOKS OF THE WEEK: JLA CLASSIFIED/EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES Several years ago, long before we modern Super-Fans had to worry about who was stuffing whose mother in a bread-maker or who was raping whose wife with the Strap-On Of Hoggoth, there was a beauteous bygone era of wonderful dreams. Dreams of a franchise not being shit anymore, summoned from the deep, dark and dirty part of every non-believer's heart. That dream was very neatly summoned through the magical incantation of three words: "Grant", "Morrison" and "X-MEN". We all waited patiently, and when the splendour arrived in our stores, we were justly blessed by the Nerd Gods with the ultimate in modern Post-Normal Creativity. Morrison was unfortunately joined by Joe Casey, who floundered under such a bright bulb and went back to what he does best, weird super-projects on the periphery of mainstream. That era has long since passed, and our thoughts are now consumed by shitty Z-list DCU super-villains and how they could further defile our once proud home. But now those times are back! Fleetingly. Joe Casey and Grant Morrison are launching new series featuring the two lynchpin teams of superheroes. At DC, Grant Morrison is joined by the inflatable heroes of Ed McGuinness's new ongoing JLA: CLASSIFIED - a revolving door series for creative teams to flex whatever Justice League-related muscles they see fit. Over at the House Of Ideas, Joe Casey launches AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, a 12-issue retelling of the team's first year, with the splendid Scott Kollins. Both series seem to be flaunting the writers' love for classical spandex, without grimness or grit. While it's a return to his greatest mainstream triumph for Morrison, it's a whole new ballgame for Casey. Morrison's near unbeatable run on JLA that should, by rights, be regarded as the birth of a new generation in the comics saga, setting a standard that has yet to be eclipsed. Casey, meanwhile, is revisiting a formula that produced one of his most under-rated works, X-MEN: CHILDREN OF THE ATOM. If you're sick of the grim reality of modern-day existence forcing it's way into the world of shiny, happy people, then these series are for you. [John Fellows] THE HYPE OF THE STATES This week's biggest comics launch must certainly be WildStorm's new teen series THE INTIMATES. One hasn't been able to move on the internerd without tripping over an interview with Jim Lee, Joe Casey or Alex Sinclair about the book, complete with extensive preview art. And yet the book leaves me cold. I love teen books. I read loads of manga. I should love this book. But... a girl whose superpowers are chewing off her fingernails, then spitting them at things, whereupon they explode? Ick. A guy who has a hand puppet that can punch through walls? Ooohkay. And the busy, style-magazine-esque covers, with their graphically weak and somewhat overwhelmed logo, don't really scream "buy me!" I can't figure out who this book is trying to appeal to. The covers look like WILDCATS, which was loved by lots of 30+ comic nerds (myself among them). It stars teens, but teens with the kind of sniggering, actually-aren't-superheroes-stupid powers that undermines interest in the characters. The style is based on 1970s books, which most kids today won't have come across, because they were born in the 1980s and are too busy reading manga. Is this really WildStorm's great hope for recapturing the teen audience they had with Adam Warren's run on GEN 13? THE INTIMATES is chock full of stylistic tricks, such as a Jim Lee-drawn "comic within a comic". The most interesting of these is Casey's lines of infodump at the bottom of each page, which really does start to capture the four-AIM-conversations-at-once, micro-attention-span pace of life in the wired age. But I have the feeling this book will be another Brave Casey Experiment that makes other comic writers nod sagely and think, "I'm stealing that trick", but that fails to capture popular interest. [Alex de Campi] QUESTION TIME Despite an intriguing run by writer Denny O'Neil in the late 1980s, The Question remains, like so many of DC's characters, undefined, overlooked, and ripe for a return to some sort of relevance in the company's canon. I think most readers today could probably tell you little more than what I know - he was originally a Charlton character, wears a trench coat and some kind of no-face mask, and was written as Rorschach in WATCHMEN. That's about it. If I thought about it hard enough, I could probably remember his secret identity. But it doesn't matter that I can't remember his secret identity, and it doesn't matter that he hasn't been in regular rotation on DC's publishing schedule for a while; it's that exact phenomenon that makes this new series, written by Rick Veitch and illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards, so intriguing. Basically, you can go into this without any expectations - whether it's an entirely new direction or remains faithful to older versions, it won't matter because only seven guy on an internet message board remember that shit anyway. These creators with this character hold a lot of promise, disappointment seems unlikely, and when you get down to it, all the best heroes are the forgotten ones. [John Parker] IT'S A MOD, MOD WORLD I first heard about Dave Gibbons' THE ORIGINALS in May 2003, when Shelly Bond mentioned it at the Bristol Con as "coming out soon". For the next 18 months, the hardcover, black and white tale of friendship, love, and gang war in an alternative Britain was always "coming soon", and now - at last - it's shipping. Lel and Bok, two lads just out of school in a gritty, industrial city, want nothing more than to join The Originals, the coolest gang of Mods around. The boys have almost got the clothes, they're saving up for the Vespas, they tag walls with The Originals' logo, and they already practice hating the same rival gangs that the Originals do. Gibbons is still best known for his art on WATCHMEN, but he's also a talented writer, as well as one of the wittiest and most amusing raconteurs on the British comics scene (as anyone who has seen him compere the Hypotheticals panel at Bristol can attest). He perfectly captures the teen desire to fit in, to rebel in good company, and shows how this can sometimes have unforeseen, horrible consequences. The Mod stylings are close to Gibbons' heart, but they shouldn't limit what is really a universal story. Mods, rockers, two-tones, hippies, punks, homies, goths... at one point in our young lives, all any of us wanted was to be part of the right tribe. THE ORIGINALS is about that, and so it's about all of us. The really lovingly drawn Vespas, and the strange desire the book inspires to go listen to the Jam's 'Town Called Malice', are just an added bonus. [Alex de Campi] LINES OF DEFENCE Think of the spate of creators who supposedly abandoned Big Two comics in the early 1990s and I'm sure your memories would be awash in a deluge of Big Names promising to do Big Things without ever returning to the Big Two empire. Some kept their word, some didn't, the way it usually happens. Mike Mignola did things a bit differently. Quietly and without fanfare, he simply tiptoed his way over to Dark Horse and started his work on Hellboy, a character that has spawned several great books, including the spin-offs involving the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, toys, Zippo lighters, and a shitty movie. BPRD: THE DEAD looks as promising as most of the Hellboy comics: delectably moody, sharp, funny, and beautiful. Mignola has usually done a good job of finding the right creators to collaborate with on his BPRD books, and for this series of six, he's enlisted former DOOM PATROL scribe John Arcudi as co-writer and the terrifically talented Guy Davis (SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE) as artist. So several years after all those artists made lofty proclamations that they later ignored, Mignola and Hellboy continue to chug along in their own dark corner of comics, quietly reminding us that creators who talk too much do so because they know the work can't speak for itself. [John Parker] THE SHIPPING LIST FOR NOVEMBER 3rd 2004: Shipping details come courtesy of Diamond. Visit the Diamond website for the latest information, as the list is subject to change. DARK HORSE SEP040048 BPRD THE DEAD #1 (Of 5) $2.99
DC COMICS AUG040347D CATWOMAN WHEN IN ROME #2 (Of 6) $3.50
IMAGE JAN041288 CASEFILES SAM & TWITCH #11 (MR) $2.50
MARVEL SEP041740 ALPHA FLIGHT #9 $2.99
OTHER PUBLISHERS APR042966 ALICE 19TH VOL 5 GN JEALOUSY $9.95
The Ninth Eight are Matthew Craig, John Fellows, Kieron Gillen, Alistair Kennedy, Zack Smith, Andrew Wheeler, Ben Wooller and Bulent Yusuf. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |