Just how do they do it? Really? Only a week after the internet wowed itself into a spasm over Rucka/Williams’ Detective Comics, and completely overshadowing this week’s Big Event from Marvel, here come Morrison and Quitely (and hey! Is this the first time since New X-Men that we’ve had two issues from the pair come out in successive months? Cause for celebration!) to give everyone a timely reminder that we shouldn’t be getting any fancy ideas, because yes, they still entirely rule mainstream superhero comics.

Batman & Robin is just ludicrously confident, unfathomably entertaining comics. It may not have the depth and subtlety of the rest of the writer’s Batman run, but it’s immediately a far more enjoyable read – because it knows that a comic can be intelligent underneath, but still plug directly into the “pure childlike glee” synapses of the brain and thus appear about a million times as effortless as something more overwrought. And even while it’s telling a straight-batting, gloriously fun Batman adventure, it still shows no small amount of experimentation in the way the story’s being told. It almost seems like the series’ gimmick is for there to be a new little storytelling trick each issue – so in #1 we had the inspired use of sound effects as part of the artwork (repeated here in an absolutely wonderful panel of Robin slamming into a wall, the cracks in the plaster spelling out “SMASH”), but the new one introduced here involves pacing in the action sequences.

Quitely’s always been a strange one for this – something that characterises his work is the way that he seems to capture individual frozen moments, rather than directly expressing movement (it’s why – for example – in this issue, when showing Batman setting off a fire extinguisher in a goon’s face, he draws individual droplets rather than a continuous “whoosh” of foam), and yet due to his ability to choose exactly which moments to portray, there’s always still a vivid sense of motion. Similarly, his recent work has seen increasing use of full-page-width panels (barely any panels in this issue sit side-by-side), but due to his placement of items within the frames, everything still feels “active” as your eyes naturally scan left-to-right. Still, though, it’s a technique that – on its own – doesn’t necessarily seem conducive to fast, energetic action scenes (something that B&R is already making a forte) and so this is worked around by judiciously splitting dialogue across word balloons – and even panels – when successive frames are showing a quicker-paced series of moments. It works tremendously well for the issue’s main fight scene, and even better, is contrasted smartly by the slower, dialogue-packed panels as Dick and Alfred ruminate in later pages.

Those pages, incidentally, represent the best thing about an issue that may not have quite the same immediate, “wow” impact of its predecessor, but which is still, of course, an unadulterated joy throughout. Having never really had the chance to fully play with Alfred during his main-title run, Morrison is clearly recognising here the need for a voice of authority and experience to counteract the (wildly different in manifestation, but still shared) youthful exuberance of Dick and Damian. The butler (sod that… the father figure)’s “pep talk” here is lovely, most notably when describing Batman as a “role” and holding up the cowl Hamlet-style, and marks for perhaps the first time a genuine attempt to set out why Dick’s version of the identity is different from Bruce’s – this is not, after all, a speech that he would have given to his former charge.

Even the return to textbook brattishness of Damian can’t harm the sheer unadulterated pleasure of reading this book. The fact that the series is by Morrison and Quitely meant that a certain level of simple, objective quality was always going to be a given. But that it’s already shown the capacity to continually surprise, and perhaps even to exceed expectations, could be the greatest delight of all.

[We don't normally say it, but since this is a big event: Beware. Spoilers are ahead.]

Okay. There’s this series, right. It’s intricately plotted, tightly dialogued and it isn’t afraid of playing the long game when it comes to handling its myriad secrets and mysteries, leaving its fans hanging for months, even years before revealing the whole picture. It’s truly unique in its field, with a multi-faceted cast and a brilliantly consistent level of quality. Just when you get a handle on where it’s going, it yanks the rug from under you. Somehow, against the odds, it’s managed to stretch beyond the genre-ghetto that spawned it and truly enter the public consciousness without ever compromising the singular vision of its creators. And we all know what that series is.

Yes, I like Lost as much as the next person. And the next person is apparently Ed Brubaker, because for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend, he’s managed to replicate one of Lost’s most memorable plot points wholesale. And we’re not just talking homage, here, we’re talking “oh, that’s a good idea, I can use it.” And we know this because the issue delights in using the same wording – that’s THE SAME, not SIMILAR – that Lost itself uses to distill its often complicated concepts into simple, comprehensible slices of dialogue. “Steve Rogers has come unstuck in time,” says Armin Zola. “[They] kept referring to me as The Constant,” says Sharon Carter. “We have to move the island,” says The Falcon. Well, maybe not that last one, things are already starting to blur a little.

Now, let’s be fair – Lost didn’t invent the “unstuck in time” concept. Slaughterhouse Five did it way earlier, for one. But it didn’t have a “Constant” like Lost did and Cap does, nor was Slaughterhouse Five the basis of a massively prominent TV series watched by millions over the last 5 years. Let me be clear: I am in no way questioning Brubaker’s credibility as a writer – everyone gets their ideas from somewhere, after all. I am, however, questioning his timing and judgement. Was now the right time to do an  “unstuck in time” plot? And was there really no better way to refer to these concepts than the same way Lost does? The story itself isn’t bad, but it undoubtedly suffers when considered against the wider cultural context of its release.

And what of the story? Well, it’s… okay. Hitch’s pencils are as good as ever, though the scenes of WW2-era Cap make Reborn look far too similar to the Millar/Hitch Ultimates for comfort. In a book where the originality of the writing already feels compromised, it doesn’t help to have large swathes of the artwork looking like re-purposed Ultimates offcuts. The prominent use of both Mighty and Dark Avengers cast members takes the book outside Captain America’s usual insular world, justifying the story’s spinning-out into a miniseries, but the additional grounding in the Marvel Universe means that it lacks the timeless quality of Brubaker’s run to date. It’s all a bit, well, underwhelming.

One thing you can’t fault it for, however, is delivering what it was supposed to. If you want to know what happened to Steve Rogers, well good news: there’s no dodging it here. And the question of how they’ll get him from where he is to where he should be does sound like a story I want to read. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the rest of the series can give me something to worry about that takes precedence over how similar its plot points are to Lost. It’s not impossible, but really, that shouldn’t have been this big of a distraction in the first place.

Every month we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

In recent discussion with Comics Daily Cohort James Hunt, an assertion that I’ve often made about comics reared its head – that Spider-Man: Maximum Clonage Omega was the worst single issue comic I’d ever read. James scoffed at this – worse than Jeph Loeb’s recent efforts? I confessed that it had been years since I’d read it, but that I was fairly sure that yes, in the intervening time, I’d never encountered anything worse. He remained sceptical. Well, with a Dusting Off rolling around on the schedule again, I figured it would be the ideal opportunity to refamiliarise myself with it.

I was wrong.

There is never an ideal opportunity to refamiliarise oneself with Spider-Man: Maximum Clonage Omega.

Originally intended as the capstone to the infamous Clone Saga – at least, the bit of the Clone Saga that was going to wind up with the newly “I’m-a-clone”-ified Peter Parker going off into the sunset and Ben Reilly taking over as Spider-Man, although you’re a fool if you think that was ever really intended to be the end of the story – the six-part “Maximum Clonage” (topped and tailed by these ludicrously-named “Alpha” and “Omega” issues) is, quite simply, one of the most wretched and pointless exercises in the history of comics. Featuring the final stages of the irrevocable destruction of the character of Dr Miles Warren – turning the Jackal into a green, pointy-eared goblinny figure (yeah, like there aren’t enough of those hanging around Spidey) whose agenda has inexplicably shifted from “hate Spider-Man because he let the woman I loved die” to “I want to kill everybody on the planet and replace them with clones”, not to mention one of the most appallingly-conceived and named characters (”Spidercide”) ever unleashed by Marvel, it’s a confused mess on every conceivable level – and the scene in which Peter is confronted by thousands upon thousands of costumed clones of himself a genuine nadir in Spider-history.

But that scene had already taken place by the time Omega rolled around. And Omega is even worse. “Scripted” by Tom Lyle, an artist promoted to writing duties far beyond his horrendous level of inexperience simply because, it seems, no-one else would touch it (so he was the ’90s equivalent of Tony Daniel, in other words), the ludicrous plot is delivered by way of unbearably trite dialogue (”No! I think that you must still die.”), inane exposition (”No wonder I thought that I was the clone so easily.” “Oh, that? When I took the cell samples from you that I used to create your clones, I implanted that thought in your head while I was there.”) and page after page of tedious, circular events. The bomb’s going to go off! Look, it’s the Jackal! They’ve webbed up the Jackal! Quick, stop the bomb! Wait, the Jackal’s free, stop him! Get back to the bomb! Oh no, the Jackal’s free again! Gwen’s got his gun! She’s going to fall! No, he’s going to fall! It’s honestly enough to make you pound your own head against the wall. And it doesn’t even manage to achieve its stated aim – in the closing pages, the question of who’ll be Spider-Man afterwards is still, staggeringly, left wide open.

What really pushes this into “downright appalling” territory, though, is the art – honestly some of the worst work I’ve ever seen in a mainstream comic. I mean, you know, at least Ultimates 3 had Joe Mad going for it. An incredible four pencillers (including Mark Bagley, although I can’t see anything that actually looks like his work) and five inkers are credited on a 48-page comic (one telling, lest we forget, a single story – this ain’t an anthology), and so even if they were turning in good work, it’d still look as horrendously inconsistent as it does. They’re not turning in good work, though – not at all. Unclear storytelling, absolutely dreadful (and mostly distorted) character work from all concerned… I know that at this point the editors were in a tremendous rush just to get the thing out, but it honestly feels like an insult that anyone thought the work contained within these pages was worth charging people nearly five dollars for. Maybe they reckoned the chromium cover (oh yes) would make it worthwhile.

Is it the worst comic I’ve ever read, though? I’m not sure. Since I first read this I’ve read not only recent history’s Ultimates 3/Ultimatum, Titans and All Star Batman, but also things like Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Dreaming, and Tom Veitch’s Animal Man. Although to be fair, all the aforementioned had better art than this. Story-wise, though… well, it’s rotten, and trite, and pointless, but it’s a very comics-y kind of trite, and people have been churning out guff like it all over the place for years. It’s at least lousy in a more amusing way than the obnoxiously-bad-and-kind-of-proud-of-it work Miller and Loeb have been doing recently, and even Lyle probably can’t be blamed too much for pages that were apparently subject to a bajillion rewrites. In the end, an accolade such as “worst comic ever” is not one to give out lightly, and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to definitively state what I think that is. But I’m pretty sure you’d have to work hard to find something worse-looking – or with a worse title – than this.

Brian Bolland is probably best known to readers of this site for his work on Judge Dredd or Batman: The Killing Joke. There are far worse properties a creator could be associated with, certainly, but Bolland himself has always been a remarkably versatile artist, capable of effortlessly carrying virtually any genre, given the chance to illustrate it. Which is good, because the stories in this comic – a collection of strips written and drawn by Bolland in the mid-80s – are in a genre all their own.

Captioned throughout in rhyming couplets, the Actress and the Bishop tells the stories of two unlikely cohabitees (note that “actress” is a more polite way of saying “prostitute”) and covers, through a whimsical filter, both character’s unconventional relationships with both their professions and one another. The stories straddle genres, part comedy-of-manners, part horror, part existentialist pornography, part spiritualist soap opera. It’s light and dark at the same time. At a glance it can seems impossibly superficial, yet a well-place turn of phrase or slip of the pencil turns it deeply introspective.

There’s a remarkably restrained Englishness to the stories – the contrast between the restrained facade and the raging emotions beneath epitomises a certain stereotype of Englishness, and takes on a gentle, nostalgic quality. The portrayal of the two characters carries a coy, sexually-charged air, and the stories dive deep into both of their motivations and attitudes without ever getting seedy or judgemental about their behaviour. Although the character designs could have seemed flamboyant or misplaced in the hands of another artist, Bolland’s precise linework anchors them perfectly within in the world shown in the strip.

For $3.99, you get all the published appearances to date of the characters, which comprise 2 3-page strips from the A1 anthology, together with a 17-page story previously only seen in the artwork collection “Bolland Strips!” a few years ago. Desperado have done comicdom a fantastic service by putting these stories into print as a traditional pamphlet, and having read it several times already, I know it’s one of those comics I”ll return to again and again. It’s rare you get to feel like you’ve “discovered” an artist you’re already so familiar with, but it’s making me see Bolland in an entirely new light – and if nothing else, that feeling is worth the cover price alone.

Uncanny may have pulled out the big guns for this week’s crossover one-shot, but Warren Ellis’s more trade-paperback orientated sci-fi X-Men resolutely refuse to back down, in what’s easily the strongest issue of the present team’s run. After a series of extremely focussed issues, the writer finally combines action, character development and an unexpectedly conclusive resolution to the plotline in one satisfying package.

Cyclops and his first-choice team may have tracked down the source of the extra-dimensional mutant incursions plaguing the earth, but the culprit isn’t giving up any ground. Finding themselves being forced to play their chosen roles in the scheme, the team end up deploying a distinctly authoritarian trump card to save the day. Beast’s reflections on the outcome are familiar from the end of the ‘Shiftships’ arc of Ellis’s genre-defining superhero title, but there’s a memorable bit of commentary on the evolution of this franchise to allow such a dénouement- it’s a far more subtle than normal example of Scott Summers’ new philosophy affecting his entire team. The book’s guest star is well-handled, with a fitting resolution for a character that had become an unwelcome loose end in the broader tapestry of the X-verse. Interestingly, it took the X-Men’s most hard sci-fi approach in a long time to show the flaws of its resident engineer.

With the exception of a cover that appears to be demonstrating Cyclops’s new ‘laser sneeze’ secondary mutation, this is Simone Bianchi’s strongest work on the book. His departure from the title after this arc is understandable, given that Astonishing has effectively been operating on a bimonthly schedule, but he’s given us a more than memorable parting shot. I’ve been one of the artists defenders, but sadly some of the criticism has been proved right, as the simpler layouts imposed by time restrictions have resulted in more appealing art overall. There’s no loss of the lavishness that has characterised the creator’s work, but adopting a more squared-off panels shape during the second half of the issue really improves the storytelling, with events far more clear. Phil Jimenez is being drafted in for Ellis’s second arc, just as he once replaced Frank Quietly on the franchise, but Bianchi will certainly leave a lasting impression.

With the story smartly polished off, and no clumsy foreshadowing for the next arc, Astonishing is clearly targeted at the collected editions market. The sheer quality, however, is more than enough to make the serialized incarnation an essential purchase.

This week’s capsule reviews cover Amazing Spider-Man #598, New Avengers #54, The Last Days of Animal Man #2, X-Factor #45 and X-Force #16

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