Martin Skidmore - Review

Daken: Dark Wolverine 9.1

Obviously “this works – let’s have some more of it” is commonplace thinking at just about any business, naturally enough, but Marvel have been surely stretching the point in recent years. Multiple Hulks, Spider-clones of various types, a second Thor, two or three Avengers teams at a time. I suppose it derives from the success of the X-franchising of some years ago. Here we have Wolverine’s son, who is a lot like him but a bad guy.

Strange Adventures 1

On the one hand, I’m all for a revival of DC’s ancient SF anthology; on the other hand, this is Vertigo, and I often get exasperated with them. Unfortunately the balance comes down on that side, for me.

DC Comics Presents Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City

This is a comic-format collection of four twenty year old Detective issues by Milligan, a three-parter and a one-off. Both stories are very good ones, and at eight dollars it’s good value too.

Alpha Flight 0.1

Wait, 0.1? We need a jumping-on point BEFORE the first issue proper? How is a first issue not a good enough jumping on point, exactly? Oh well, let’s read this as if it is a first issue, okay?

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

This huge collection is great value at £12.99 for nearly 500 pages, and it’s nearly all top quality material, from a range of periods.

Batman: Gates of Gotham 1

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this – I found very little to get my teeth into. The story starts in the late 19th Century with a Wayne and some other guys planning some unclear but ambitious architecture, including some bridges. Cut to now, and the bridges are getting blown up by someone new, to me at least, for unstated reasons. And that’s it. We are given no reason to particularly care about the bridges, no reason they are more important to the city than bridges naturally are, no sense of what the attacks are for or who the perpetrator is.

Yossel

In this graphic novel, one of the all-time great American comic artists imagines how his life might have gone had his family not left Poland in 1926. As with other Jews, they end up in the Warsaw ghetto. Joe, at 16 (in reality he was a successful artist at DC by then), is soon left orphaned, treated better than most by the Nazis because his drawings entertain them. The story climaxes with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, one of the most desperately tragic events in modern history, where handfuls of half-starved Jews with a few stolen and improvised weapons tried to fight back against thousands of German soldiers, with tanks, flame throwers and so on, because they knew that not fighting back meant a trip to the death camps.

Flashpoint 1

I wasn’t sure whether to try this, since I have been ignoring the Prelude to Flashpoint comics, and it’s another series that crosses over into countless other titles (a checklist lists 22 of them in June alone), but I believe the intent these days is generally to make the central series readable in isolation, so I gave it a go.

Moon Knight 1

I had mixed feelings approaching this one. On the one hand, I love Bendis & Maleev’s run on Daredevil, and will therefore be keen to read anything else they do. On the other hand, Moon Knight. A very Batman-style superhero with more explicitly stated lunacy, often expressed in simpleminded split personality terms, and without an interesting history, strong villains or a supporting cast anyone cares about.

Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine: Another Fine Mess

This is another of Marvel’s Must Have bargain $5 reprints of the first three issues of what is presumably a hot series. I nearly didn’t bother with it, since I hated the last such collection, also with Wolverine, but this isn’t anywhere near that bad.