I can’t bring myself to skim when I’m reading for pleasure. If the book is awful enough, I’ll abandon it entirely, but if it doesn’t hit that threshold, I feel compelled to read every word. This can be a problem. It certainly was when I was reading CLAMP’s Clover (Dark Horse). The book is beautifully drawn, economically plotted, often moving, and includes some of the worst poetry I’ve ever read. It includes that awful poetry dozens of times, and, masochistic completist that I am, I felt obliged to read them every time.

“a bird in a gilded cage,
a bird bereft of flight,
a bird that cannot cry,
a bird all by itself”

These are the lyrics of one of the lynchpin characters, a chanteuse whose untimely death did not, unfortunately, take her songs with her. They’re portrayed as so moving that even isolated psychics can be stricken by their beauty, but I was reminded of the reject pile from my high-school literary magazine.

“Letting me forget with your voice and your touch;
Breaking off the chains that bind my heart and feet”

Now I’m not going to say that my taste in lyrics is impeccable. Sure, I think Stephen Sondheim is a god, but I also liked Air Supply back in the day. But I could hear Air Supply’s awful, awful lyrics being sung, backed by lushly cheesy orchestrations with achingly sincere vocals. In Clover, I have nothing but the words over and over again. I wish there was an advanced version of that greeting-card technology that would allow me to actually hear a song rather than just read its maudlin lyrics. While Dark Horse has done a beautiful and generous job producing this collection, it doesn’t sing when you open it.

Well, okay, it kind of sings when you open it, because the illustrations are very, very beautiful. The four members of CLAMP trade duties, and Clover was drawn by Mokona with assistance from Tsubaki Nekoi and Satsuki Igarashi, with story by Nanase Ohkawa. What’s most striking to me is the use of negative space. Backgrounds are rather scant; panels float on fields of white and black, creating a precision of emotional effect. It also highlights the elegance, verging on sensuality, of the juxtaposition of the panels.

Lyrics aside, it’s got a story that’s economical and moving, as I said earlier. It’s about immensely powerful psychics identified by the government for possible intelligence and military use who turned out to be a little too powerful for that government’s comfort. The psychics try to find comfort and peace within the restrictions of their daily lives, and some are more successful than others. The collection is less a beginning-to-end narrative than a timeline-jumping look at a group of interconnected characters, a core event, and the things that led up to it. There are some nicely understated moments and many lushly angst-y ones.

“Now, come close to me,
I’ll sing an endless song,
God, please tell me,
Redder than red, the truest love.”

But, god, those lyrics.

Trying to review a new installment of Adam Warren’s Empowered series (Dark Horse) is exactly like trying to review a new installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (Oni). The fifth volume of Warren’s saga of a (sometimes literally) struggling super-heroine is good in exactly the same ways as the previous four, but with a slightly higher level of poise and complexity. It’s meatier and moodier, but it achieves those effects without sacrificing the core charm and wit of the series.

Basically, a review of the fifth Empowered book would constitute an attempt to get new readers to pick up the first volume of the book. I figure that people who have read the first volume either gave up on the book for its salacious content (which is perfectly fair), stuck around for more of that same content (also dandy), or stuck around like I did for the endearing characters, great jokes, and slowly building subplots. Providing a summary of events of the fifth volume would be meaningless to people who’ve never read the series at all while irritating readers who’ve stuck around and haven’t yet read book five.
All that said, it’s such a terrific book that I can’t pass up the opportunity to sing its praises, even if I’ve sung them so often that you know the lyrics by heart.

What need to know: Empowered, the book, is about Empowered, the heroine, who has the best of intentions and the most unreliable of super-suits. It’s embarrassingly form-fitting and shreds at the slightest provocation, often leaving her at the mercy of bondage-happy opponents. Her fellow super-heroes (an obnoxious and entitled herd) treat her with undisguised contempt, but she keeps trying to make a difference, scoring small victories amidst all of the humiliation. Her greatest sources of comfort and confidence come from her smoking hot, super-supportive boyfriend, a reformed super-villain minion known as Thugboy, and her best friend, the hard-partying, ass-kicking Ninjette. When things get crappy, they’ve got her back.

How the series has evolved: Earlier volumes traded in short, astutely satirical pieces mocking everything from spandex tropes to the bizarre idiosyncrasies of fandom to whatever else crossed Warren’s field of vision as he worked on the comics. As the series has progressed, Warren has incrementally developed all of the characters, revealing their back stories and allowing them and their relationships to evolve. Individual chapters have become longer, and subplots have become more intricate and moved closer to the surface. The level of menace and the feeling of consequence have risen over time, but Warren has maintained the sweetness and sense of humor of the series, which is quite an accomplishment.

Why I like it: Super-hero parody has become a category unto itself, and a lot of examples aren’t any more interesting or insightful than their targets. Empowered succeeds for me because Warren manages to juggle so many elements at once – the pointed satire, the unapologetic (but sly) cheesecake, and the fact that he bothers to tell a proper story with fully realized characters in the process. That last element is what I often find lacking in meta-commentary books; they sometimes read like an Andy Rooney monologue, with lots of trite “Don’t you hate it when…” observations. Empowered is as smart and sharp as you could hope, but it’s also got a lot of heart. It manages to comment on super-hero comics while also actually being one of the better ones you’re likely to read.

I’m not really sure how comics have managed to keep Rick Geary to themselves. It’s not that I expecting him to move away from the medium; I’m just surprised that the admiration for his work hasn’t cracked beyond the comics audience and into wider venues. Where’s the interview on NPR or a spot in a group profile in the Times? I’ve never met him, so I have no idea if those sorts of things interest him in the slightest, but it seems like comics-friendly journalists are missing one of the medium’s best creators.

I’m most familiar with Geary’s non-fiction work, specifically his Treasury of Victorian and XXth Century Murder, published by NBM. They’re terrific, meticulous accounts of gory and intriguing crimes from bygone eras, combining true-crime detail with great art and insightful observations of those eras. I’m less familiar with his fiction works, so Dark Horse’s collection of The Adventures of Blanche was a welcome arrival. Geary always demonstrates a sly sense of humor in his true-crime comics, but he applies it with a freer hand here.

When readers first meet Blanche, she’s a contented grandmother in a small town, but we learn in short order that she wasn’t always so provincial. She left the family farm to study piano in New York, then moved to Hollywood to conduct for the budding motion picture industry, then found herself in Paris, providing musical direction for an avant-garde performance piece at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Any of those experience would qualify as an adventure, but Geary raises the stakes by folding in secret societies, labor unrest, and international espionage. Curious and compassionate, Blanche is game for just about anything her unexpectedly adventurous life throws at her.

Her story is told through letters home, with Geary illustrating the events. As usual, he revels in the detail of time and place, folding in tidbits of history without derailing the adventurous aspects of the book. Like his heroine, he’s an efficient, engaging storyteller. And Blanche is the perfect kind of heroine for these kinds of stories. She’s modest but not prudish, inquisitive but not foolhardy, and just sure enough of herself to get in trouble (and plucky enough to get herself out).

Maybe Geary’s sterling track record of smart, snappy comics has led to him being taken a bit for granted. He makes it look easy.