One of the things that often presented a challenge to our “review a day” format at Comics Daily was the sheer inconsistency of comics shipping – the fact that, although there should really ostensibly be a fairly even spread of comics worth reviewing (whether a book we’re buying anyway, or one we wouldn’t if we weren’t reviewing but considered worth trying to say something about) over the four (or sometimes five) shipping weeks of each month. But that often wouldn’t tend to be the case, and we were frequently left scrabbling over B- or C-list main superhero universe titles that – and no disrespect to the creators involved – aren’t always the easiest thing to find an angle on if you’re not a fan.

Conversely, we’d often find ourselves with a week where there were lots of books we fancied covering, but simply didn’t have the time between us. Often, a lot of my favourite books – from Phonogram to Batman and Robin, Captain Britain to Ultimate Spider-Man – end up coming out in the same week, which makes for a fun visit to Forbidden Planet, but a difficult quandary when working out what to write about. Our “Sunday Pages” capsule review posts would help with this, obviously – and both James and I have also tended to find of late that these shorter reviews are quite enjoyable to put together. With that scheduled series of posts temporarily on hold, however (I, or we, may revisit it at some point – but for the moment one of the things we’re exploring with the new format is not having a specific schedule to stick to beyond “something every day”), there won’t be a regular set of capsules each week, but every so often a week may come along in which I feel the urge to ramble on about a handful of books. This is just such a week, so read on for brief reviews of Powers, Ex Machina, S.W.O.R.D. and more…

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This week: Capsule reviews of Astonishing X-Men #32, Batman: The Widening Gyre #3, Psylocke #1 and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #4! (continue reading…)

This week: Capsule reviews of Batman: The Widening Gyre #2, Gotham City Sirens #4, Hulk #15, Wolverine: Weapon X #5 and X-Men Forever #8! (continue reading…)

This week, James is away getting rained on in a field in Norfolk, but that hasn’t stopped Seb and Julian from capsuling it on up with Amazing Spider-Man, Batman: Streets of Gotham, Wednesday Comics and X-Factor. Plus we shout out from the rooftops about a Phonogram-related special event that we may or may not have something to do with.

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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.

DC appear to have finally cracked the problem of how to get the purchasers of single issues to still fork out for the trade, in this collection of the bizarre fifties Batman tales which fuel Grant Morrison’s run on the book. Even without the introduction by the writer, a cursory reading would make the connections obvious, and the result is an essential purchase for fans of Batman R.I.P. and the epic story that surrounds it. The only slight quibble is the admission fee, but the resolutely un-decompressed storytelling going some way towards remedying disquiet.

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.