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.

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.

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.

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

Review: Amazing Spider-Man #598
It’s rare that a comic gets a truly visceral reaction from me these days. After getting on for 15 years of readership, there’s not much that can shock me. But to be totally honest, this issue actually managed it with the revelation about Harry and Lily’s child. Creepy isn’t the word. I have to be honest and say I’m not entirely keen on Lily’s new Goblin form, compared to the previous design, and an apparent colouring error doesn’t really smooth the transition, but that aside American Son has been an enjoyable arc and the closing page promises a memorable final issue. It’s always good to see the Osborns getting pagetime. [JHu]

Review: New Avengers #54
Bendis wraps up de current arc by having de new Sorcerer Supreme, Brudder Voodoo,  strip de Hood of his powers. I have to admit, I didn’t see a fairly major development like dat coming. Damon Hellstrom also takes time out to lay some prophetic groundwork for a potential magical war building in the Marvel Universe, and christ help us if dat comes to pass, because as we all know, dere’s not’ing more tedious dan Marvel Comics about Magic. Whether or not dey can reverse de trend like Annihilation did for de “cosmic” stable of characters remains to be seen, but let me be frank: I’m not paying $3.99 an issue to read a story featuring  Dormammu twice in one year. Mercifully, given a bit more action to work with than recent issues, Tan’s art fits dis issue nicely. So it’s not all bad. [JHu]

Review: The Last Days of Animal Man #2
It’s not a bad little comic this, but it shows the worst excesses of the old-fashioned storyteling employed by Conway, in that a whole four pages of cringeworthy monologue are devoted to telling the origin of Prismatik (and an even worse paragraph of dialogue later explains her name to Buddy), where you suspect that a single panel saying “she’s the Morrison version of the Mirror Master’s daughter” would have done. And it’s still hard to see exactly what the point of it is or where it’s going. Nevertheless, it does raise a smile with the rather lovely idea that, in the future, the Green Lantern chosen to replace Hal Jordan might be a whale – although it’s a shame that more imagination isn’t taken with the rest of a future Justice League that sees only the Flash redesigned. [SP]

Review: X-Factor #45
Although generally good, X-Factor can be quite uneven at times. Thankfully, this is one of the better issues. As well as ending a decade of speculation about Rictor and Shatterstar’s relationship in a surprising, but well-telegraphed on-panel display of affection, we get to see Doctor Doom used in an entertaining and wholly original way. As ever, the humour is dry and knowing, the soap-opera drama is appropriately melodramatic, and the characters are more defined and three-dimensional than most comics could ever dream of. X-Factor issues tend to live and die by the strength of each issue’s plot, and this one has plenty of advancement to go around. A little about Monet and Darwin would’ve been nice, given last issue’s cliffhanger, but there are far worse criticisms you can level against a comic than “there wasn’t enough of it”. [JHu]

Review: Messiah War: X-Force #16
Presumably, Cyclops’ next appearance will involve him wearing a t-shirt reading “My covert death squad went to the thirtieth century, and all I got was a potential redesign of Apocalypse”.  The over-extended story wraps up here, with events conspiring to leave as little lasting impact as possible. Once Cable & Hope have been packed off to resume their meandering adventures, however, the pace picks up, as Kyle & Yost literally begin to put their team in place for the book’s next arc, creating a good omen for the book’s return to normal service.  And the ‘X’ inscription here is clearly in the running for ‘Best Minor Plot Point’ in this year’s Comics Daily awards… [JHa]

Primarily, as I’m about the millionth person online to say, that’s because of the way it looks. No two ways about it, this is a beautiful, incredible-looking comic. If JH Williams III showed with his “Club of Heroes” collaboration with Morrison (not to mention the all-too-brief stint on this very book back at the start of Dini’s run) that he had the potential to tell dazzlingly atmospheric noirish Bat-stories, then it’s here that he opens up and fulfils that potential. It’s not even one particular element that does it – it’s the entire package. Naturally the character work and draftsmanship are as classy as you’d expect, making for a sumptuous feast for the eyes, and one for which colourist Dave Stewart deserves just as much credit – but his storytelling is magnificent also.

This isn’t so much in a Quitely-esque, moment-to-moment kind of way, though, as it is the way he uses the composition of panels to trigger mood in the reader’s mind. The gorgeous, dark epics that stretch across the pages whenever Kate is Batwoman – layered blacks and greys broken up by evocative slashes of her white skin and the brash, orange-red elements of her outfit – use unconventional panel layouts, but strung along a theme that deliberately causes a “flash” in the reader’s mind: you can’t help but think “bat” as your eye scans across the jagged lines. All of a sudden you can almost see what Simone Bianchi’s been trying to do in Astonishing X-Men, only… you know, done properly. Even better, though, is the contrast between these scenes and those featuring her out of costume. The colours get sunnier and brighter, the panels go back to conventional boxes – and not even with the jarring effect of a turn of the page, but instead in a left-to-right progression across a double spread. It’s bravura stuff, it really is.

Still, even as the issue is entirely worth buying for the art alone (and it’s not often I say that), it’s lucky that the story is pretty decent as well. It’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly where it’s supposed to take place – Batman and Detective should never take place in entirely different timeframes, and there’s “Batman Reborn” branding on the cover; yet the Batman who appears feels more Bruce than Dick, and references to the precise time that’s supposed to have elapsed since we first saw Kate are vague at best. That said, despite the fact that she’s only made fleeting appearances since her overhyped debut in 2006, Rucka does a good job of leading us into this as a new setup – it’s a well-played “issue one”. We learn as much as we need to about her character (and come to that, her experiences in 52 seem to have lent her a welcome sense of humility), personal life and “hero” setup – right down to her “Alfred” figure, an apparent father with whom she shares her masked life in an interesting, militaristic way. As far as I’m aware, this character is entirely new – but again, we’re given all we really need.

That said, for all the decent character setup, I can’t say that the opening “case” has much of a hook – the “Religion of Crime” idea isn’t desperately interesting (and I honestly can’t recall where they spring from originally – are we going back to 52, and the people who stabbed her, here? A bit more of a refresher would have been nice), and “Alice” is well designed but drawn almost entirely from a combination of existing cliches. Even so, this is a mightily impressive start to the run (to say nothing of the fact that, hey! Detective is (sort of) an anthology book again! And the backup story is a Proper Detective Story about ReneeQuestion! And it’s drawn by Cully Hamner! And it’s quite good as well!), and in tandem with Batman & Robin (not to mention an acceptable if unspectacular range of peripheral books), you have to say the Batbooks are looking in splendid condition. Bruce who?

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like this. I really did. And to be fair, it’s not without it’s good moments. Fraction effectively portrays the confusion and bubbling tension of the anti-mutant march and the response to it, and the scenes between Cyclops and the San Franciscan Mayor are nice and sharp. It’s just that what surrounds them is such a disappointment that it’s hard to appreciate even the good bits.

Silvestri’s art is a major problem with the issue. It appears to be a real rush-job, with an art team that comprises 13 individuals besides Silvestri himself doing either pencil “assists” or inking. The book looks poorly-finished as a result, and even bits that are recognisably Silvestri display all the worst excesses of the man’s style, particularly in Emma’s ludicrous outfit and the downright hilarious posing that passes for “storytelling” in Silvestri’s world. Worse is that so much of the script relies on crowd scenes, where Silvestri’s inability to render more than two facial expressions really starts to show. Far better artists would struggle with the demands of the script. Silvestri positively buckles beneath them.

Sadly, the script itself isn’t without fault either. The twist ending borders on incomprehensibility, as Xavier’s involvement is revealed and Emma inexplicably changes costumes. Although billed as a co-starring book, the Dark Avengers are inserted largely as an afterthought. It is, for all intents and purposes, a regular X-Men issue guest-starring Osborn’s Avengers team. It’s unclear what, exactly, these guys are in the story for.

Whether or not the storyline will continue in this vein remains to be seen – it’s entirely possible that with the setup established, things will shift gears and become more satisfying, but it’s a highly debatable – and it already looks unlikely that things will reach the same level of excitement as the Messiah Complex crossover that actually kicked off this site in the first place.

The twelve stories reproduced here, mainly from writer Bill Finger, vary drastically in tone. DC has struck a careful balance here, including a few choice examples of this era’s surrealism alongside the expected stories. Although the sheer bizarreness of seeing Bruce Wayne assisting a south American country resist the rage of a rainbow-powered monster offers some entertainment, the greater draw is in those stories more open to modern reinterpretation.  The story ‘A Partner for Batman’ is initially striking due to the amount of unintentional gay innuendo it contains, although by the time that a passer-by has remarked on how Batman and his new older Robin replacement “can do things together”, it’s hard to ignore the feeling that the scripter knew exactly what he was doing.

The adventures that Morrison has directly recast are the main draw, with the original Zur En Arch tale the most obvious inclusion. The one downside to this process is that it’s now impossible to fully appreciate ‘Robin Dies At Dawn’, probably the strongest story in the collection, on its own merits. The infamous isolation chamber experiment is now seen as having a scope far beyond that depicted on the page, being relied upon to account for must of the strangeness in this entire volume. The appearance of the ‘Military Doctor’ is the final nail in the coffin of a contextually-faithful reading. Having a minor character retconed into the embodiment of Satan is unfortunately the sort of thing that tends to leave an impression. The original appearances of the Club of Heroes largely escape this fate, with the Club’s unironic tone completely removed from their Morrison incarnation.

‘The Superman of Planet X’ has been widely distributed online, and given how essential that tale is to understanding Batman R.I.P., it was probably only the promotional emphasis on the extremely gritty Nolan film that prevented the release of The Black Casebook this time last year. You wouldn’t see the successful combination of this price and poor paper stock without the hook of Morrison’s run, but this remains an essential purchase.

In fairness, Negative’s status as a crime boss in New York does naturally bring him into conflict with The Hood, and it’s for this reason that he’s being given his own series under the Dark Reign banner. Whether or not he’s interesting enough to support such a series so soon after his creation isn’t yet a proven quantity, though.

To the series’ credit, unlike most of the Dark Reign minis, this one does seem to have wider relevance in the ongoing tapestry of the Marvel Universe. It’s just unfortunate that it’s more related to the events in Amazing Spider-Man instead of the events of Dark Reign. Amongst other things, this issue tells readers Li’s previously unseen origin, which will presumably matter later on in Amazing Spider-Man. Beyond that, the action focuses on the Hood and Negative’s gangland war, though there is just enough time for Spider-Man appearance towards the end.

Pencils for the issue come from Gianluca Gugliotta. They’re decent enough throughout, though for obvious reasons there’s a definite sense that Gugliotta is favouring the pages that feature Spider-Man than elsewhere. There are some nice moments elsewhere, such as the White Dragon’s re-entry to his hideout, or the White Rabbit (no relation) action scene, but it’s not going to blow you away.

Although Van Lente does a lot to expand Negative’s character and backstory throughout the issue, there’s no denying that the appeal of the book lies mainly in seeing a lot of supervillain’s on the loose as much as in Negative himself. It’s not a harsh judgement to say that Mr. Negative is still not that interesting as a stand-alone character – a few more issues like this, though, and he might be.