There’s nothing in the world to make you appreciate being home like spending even five minutes in an airport, much less several hours on an airplane.

We had a great time, and I’m sure I’ll go into needless detail on it later. At the moment, I have to unpack, apologize to the dogs and cats for abandoning them, send a week’s worth of junk mail through the shredder, and shake off the seething misanthropy born of spending extended periods of time in a metal tube with unpleasant strangers who violate your personal space.

One quick note: Alternate Reality Comics in Las Vegas is awesome. Thanks for the recommendation, Dr. Scott!

There won’t be much in the way of blogging for the next several days. I’m not sure a) if there will be an available internet connection where I’ll be or b) if I’ll have the energy. Regular service should resume in a week or so.

Oh, and there won’t be a new Flipped Monday, May 23.

I know these weekly lists can get a little tedious, so to spice things up, I’ve decided to give it a perky 80s-pop soundtrack, fold together some footage of me picking up comics with exaggerated expressions of delight, confusion, and disgust, building to a quick-cuts segment of various critical shopping moments, and ending with me collapsing on a sofa, exhausted but exhilarated, ready to partake of a product-placed beverage and go through my purchases.

Okay, maybe not. But I thought about it. Here’s what I’ll be buying…

• Birds of Prey 82
• Ex Machina 11
• JLA Classified 7
• Livewires 4
• Manhunter 10
• Spider-Man/Human Torch 4
• Young Avengers 4

And I’ll give Hero Camp 1 a look, just because the premise sounds kind of fun and the shop is likely to have pre-ordered extra copies of something from Image.

Morbid curiosity will probably demand that I flip through the second volume of Tenjho Tenge. But I’m guessing that virtually every panel will probably hit the web soon, adjacent to the untranslated original. Why shell out the cash?

Oh, and for those of you who were wondering what was next for dead, gay Northstar, here’s a preview of Wolverine 28. Insert “better off dead” joke here.

He may be shamelessly partisan in favor of short-tempered, doltish aliens who like to dress up like pretty birdies, but Scipio’s blog, The Absorbascon, is really terrific. It’s filled with DC-centric goodness, and it’s the latest addition to my sidebar.

George Grattan’s posts in the rec.arts.comics newsgroups are always well worth a read, and he’s upped the ante by posting some reviews of recent DC releases. More, please.

Speaking of reviews, Johanna Draper Carlson has been reviewing up a storm at Comics Worth Reading. Among the recent entries is a look at Del Rey’s Genshiken. I liked this manga a lot more than Johanna did, but I agree with her entirely about the high level of Del Rey’s production values.

Lea Hernandez draws like a girl! And she’s proud of it! And she should be! She’s posted an excerpt from her essay for the upcoming shôjo issue of The Comics Journal.

Girls like manga. Little kids might like manga. No one knows how DC really feels about manga. All these notions get short shrift in the latest Flipped over at Comic World News. (Barring a sudden burst of inspiration and diligence, there probably won’t be a new Flipped next week, but I’ll confirm that one way or the other here and at the Flipped Forum.)

When some people get ready for a trip, they make sure the mail gets held at the post office, do laundry, and confirm their reservations. When we get ready for vacation, it almost always involves spending many hours out in the yard desperately trying to get everything in the ground. Perennials, seedlings, bulbs… tons of plant matter that my partner has bought in fits of horticultural optimism that will surely die if we don’t plant it right this minute.

I am very sore now, but the bulk of the planting is done.

I have no idea where all those wild onions came from, but there were thousands of the nasty little things. They were everywhere. I smelled like a prep chef at a risotto restaurant by the time I was done ripping them out of the ground.

It wasn’t all toil and misery. We did get a visit from the five-month-old Tibetan Terrier down the street, who was out for a jog with her shirtless owner. Most of our neighbors are retirees, but the Tibetan Terrier humans are recent arrivals, and her dad can pull off the shirtless thing. I mention the shirtlessness only for context.

With all due respect to my much-loved mutts, this puppy is the cutest canine ever. On their first pass, she looked perky, tidy, and adorable. On the way back, much later, she looked filthy, slightly deranged, and even more adorable. I can’t see myself owning a purebred dog, but I would happily kidnap this one. Unfortunately, her owners seem to love her very much and take excellent care of her, so I really can’t justify it as a rescue.

So now there’s just the standard list of pre-travel chores. I still don’t feel sure about my choices of reading material. I’m going to have to supplement it with some manga and a few library books, I think. But I did get a copy of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. I like Vowell’s essays a lot, and the title seems like it will discourage strangers on the plane from talking to me.

I had only planned to pick up one of DC’s summer mini-series (Villains United), but I had a moment of weakness on Wednesday and grabbed the first issue of Rann-Thanagar War. Andy Diggle and Pascal Ferry are to blame for sparking my interest in Rann and its residents, and I guess I wasn’t quite ready to leave them behind with the last issue of the Adam Strange mini.

(Spoilers ahead.)

R-TW opens with the war already underway. Adopted Rannian Adam Strange has traveled to Earth to recruit Hawkman and Hawkgirl to help him establish peace between the populations of the two planets. The Rannians and surviving Thanagarians are currently occupying Rann. Thanagar was destroyed by the unexpected appearance of Rann in its solar system. Rann popped into dangerous proximity to Thanagar because of the machinations of a rogue Thanagarian, a military officer who was secretly loyal to a nihilistic cult. In other words, it wasn’t Rann’s fault, and Rann’s citizens did their best to rescue as many Thanagarians as they could before their planet was destroyed.

Given the circumstances, mutual suspicion, hostility, and ingratitude are only natural. Adam’s hope was that the Hawks (whose current relationship to Thanagar is rather tenuous after a number of continuity shifts, but heck, they’ve got the wings) would be able to help smooth things over before the situation deteriorated too far. But in the hours Adam spends soliciting their aid, hostilities break out, and Rann becomes a battle ground between the two groups.

After an odd opening sequence of the Hawks battling a phoenix (perhaps a conscious wink at a classic cosmos-in-peril saga from Marvel), the exposition comes thick and heavy. Adam describes the background (summarizing his recent mini-series) and the subsequent cultural and emotional fallout (a refugee crisis, machinations of a variety of aggressive galactic empires, increased cult activity). I would have preferred to see these developments rather than hear about them. Writer Dave Gibbons does a solid job summarizing them, and penciller Ivan Reis works hard to give the flashback panels some drama, but it still seems under-dramatized given the scale and complexity of events.

Adam and the Hawks arrive too late and immediately try and get a handle on the conflict. Along the way is a short interlude with Thanagarian peacekeeper Thal, who operated for a time on Earth as Hawkwoman, though that’s never explained in the text. There’s also an interlude with Green Lanterns Kilowog and Kyle Rayner talking about the wonders of space in some seriously over-written dialogue:

Kilowog: Orders clear, Kyle?
Kyle: As brightest day, Kilowog – as brightest day.

Ow. These pages invoked another cosmic epic for me, specifically the quasi-religious pomposity of the Star Wars movies. Read through the sequence substituting “Jedi” for “Lantern” or “padawan” for “poozer,” and the flow isn’t affected at all.

The Guardians, handlers of the Green Lanterns, send Kyle off to handle an unrelated emergency. They alert Kyle to the Rann-Thanagar situation but instruct him to keep out of it. It’s consistent with the Guardians’ arbitrary standards of galactic intervention, and the order is obviously thrown in to be summarily ignored by their agent.

But awkward chatter and predictability aren’t the main problems with R-TW. What distracts me most is that the warring forces are pretty much irrelevant to the story. All of the focus is on outsiders. That’s natural enough, as Adam, the Hawks, and the Lanterns are the marquee characters here. But since the populations at war are pretty much background scenery, there’s no immediacy to the conflict. If you care at all, it’s because you’re familiar with their place in DC universe, not because of anything on the page here.

The conflict itself doesn’t have much weight either, no matter how carefully it’s been exposited. It’s been cooked up in a microwave, a misunderstanding resulting from the spiteful improvisations of one character, and she died in another title. There’s none of the ancient conflict of, say, Marvel’s Krees and Skrulls. It’s a hostile response to a tragedy that occurred entirely without malice on either side. There’s no political or cultural component to it; it’s just bad luck and bad temper conspiring to put two populations at odds.

It is gorgeous to look at. Ivan Reis really has a handle on this kind of material, at least the high-energy moments. Adam bursts into the frame a lot, and it never loses its kick. The wide-screen moments – the evacuation of Thanagar, war on Rann – are very effective. The emotions on display are extreme, and Reis usually handles them well, though he does err on the overwrought side at points. Colors by John Kalisz are effectively used to establish the shifting settings, though they can get a bit heavy.

But it’s called Rann-Thanagar War, and the war itself doesn’t make very much sense. That’s a problem, and the book is a lot less interesting than it could have been as a result.

As one might expect, Rann has pulled ahead in the poll at the Absorbascon after a brief, baffling tie that was surely caused by Thanagarian saboteurs too clumsy to develop a sustainable means of vote-fixing. (It’s sad, really.) I attribute Rann’s inevitable victory to a number of factors.

The people of Rann have emotional maturity. Its citizens are capable of sustaining healthy, loving, long-distance relationships. This is romantic and inspiring. Thanagar’s most prominent couple has been stalking one another from reincarnation to reincarnation for centuries. This is neither romantic nor inspiring. It’s co-dependent and creepy.

The people of Thanagar are trying too hard. Their raptor-fetish drag screams of over-compensation, like a comb-over or a shirt open to the navel. The people of Rann are more comfortable in subdued, retro styles. It takes a confident individual to wear a fin on his or her head and to make it work.

While Rann has occasionally been misplaced, its existence has never been called entirely into question. Thanks to various blips in the DC time stream, one might reasonably wonder if Thanagar won’t merely vanish but actually retroactively disappear altogether. This is not a planet that’s come to win. Even if it is, it might just wink out of the time stream like a redundant Earth-2 super-hero.

The bulk of recent Thanagarian appearances have been written by Geoff Johns. The majority of recent Rannian appearances have been written by Andy Diggle. Advantage: Rann.

Rann is populated largely by good-natured, imaginative nerds. Thanagar is filled with bulked-up bullies. If shônen manga has taught me nothing else, it’s that good-natured, imaginative nerds will thump bulked-up bullies every time.

Vote Rann!

(Spoilers ahead.)

Action Comics 827 (DC) leaves me wondering where writer Gail Simone’s work ends and penciller John Byrne’s begins. The script has some signs of Simone’s customary light touch, but it’s kind of an odd fit with Byrne’s very familiar visual style, and many moments end up seeming like a comic that’s been written by Byrne. (While Marvel hasn’t trademarked the phrase “master of magnetism,” the reference is obvious, and it doesn’t particularly flatter the DC character vying for the title.) The story focuses on Repulse, a magnetic villainess who’s determined to eliminate anyone with the same shtick. She’s enormously powerful and takes full advantage of magnetism as an offensive weapon instead of being content to just “bend girders.” She’s fashioned herself has a flirty bad girl with 1940s hair, evening gloves, and vintage nylons. Superman gets drawn into her schemes when one of her victims makes it to Metropolis to seek the Man of Steel’s aid. The level of threat she poses is appropriate for Superman, but he seems incidental to the story. Any number of DC heroes could have been subbed in to Superman’s slot without much difficulty. And some of the work done to establish Superman’s personality and his supporting cast is more than a little strained. It’s a mixed debut for the new creative team. (In fairness, Superman is a tough sell for me, as I find him really boring.)

Adam Strange 8 (DC) concludes the exciting, well-crafted mini-series and settles the fate of the space-hopping planet Rann. Writer Andy Diggle and artist Pascal Ferry have done wonders reviving a little-used DC C-character, accentuating all the things that work about Adam Strange. His formidable intelligence and decency carry him through a range of escalating perils in fine movie-serial style. I do wish Diggle had resisted the urge to introduce yet another subset of DC’s space-based characters, particularly since they function mostly as cannon fodder in the climactic battle. But overall, the issue draws the mini’s threads together nicely and gives most of its surprisingly large cast nice moments. It ends on a cliffhanger, which seems appropriate, given that every issue has ended on one. But it’s not the kind of cliffhanger that demands a resolution, even though one is available in DC’s Rann-Thanagar War 1. It works just as well as a nod to the chapters that have gone before.

I would have liked Desolation Jones 1 (Wildstorm) much better if they’d called it They Saved Hitler’s Porn. Let’s run through the Warren Ellis comic checklist. Cynical protagonist who’s seen better days? Check. Forced introduction of a bit of contemporary scholarship (supermodernism in this case)? Check. Withered, mostly revolting sybarite in the supporting cast? Check. Sexy punk chick? Check. Seedy, conspiracy-steeped milieu? Check. You either like this sort of thing or you don’t, and you’ve had plenty of opportunities to decide. It’s conceived and executed well, but it’s very, very familiar, even with accomplished visuals from J.H. Williams III.

District X 13 (Marvel) tells the extremely worn story of a young mutant whose powers emerge in destructive and dangerous ways. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Marvel’s mutant stories will recognize its mechanics instantly. Interesting execution can overcome a trite premise, but writer David Hine and penciller Lan Medina play the story entirely straight. As a result, it seems like a comic you’ve read many times before. I think this will be my last issue of District X. It has a terrific premise and a very promising setting, but it hasn’t made very imaginative use of either since the first arc. There’s also some frankly bizarre characterization (the young mutant’s father views himself as a liberal until the conversation turns to mutants, when he goes full-frontal fascist) and some very shaky art (as characters mention that it’s 10:30 in the morning, the sky is dusky and the street lamps are on; people look at a picture and identify a girl as a mutant, though I have no idea how). It’s another disappointing installment of a series that had a lot of potential to be something special.

Jake Tarbox, editor of DC’s CMX line of manga, has resigned from his position with the publisher. Newsarama has good coverage of the story here. I certainly think DC’s handling of their manga output has been problematic and said so, and I’m starting to wonder if CMX will ever get any good publicity. I’m also wondering if DC is really committed to the imprint or if it’s destined to go the way of Humanoids.

It’s hard not to get a sinking feeling after looking at some of the early comments from posters at Newsarama:

“I didn’t even know that DC had a manga imprint.”

“If you weren’t familiar with manga, you didn’t miss anything. If you are familiar with manga, this might have ticked you off.”

“I’d totally forgotten that DC had a manga imprint.”

“DC and Marvel have no idea what manga fans want and why it´s so popular. They just want in on the cash.”

“This is the first time DC has released ANY type of response to the criticism thrown its way over TenTen, and it’s through the resignation of an editor? And not the editor who made the decision, but the one forced to carry it out? If this is damage control, I don’t hold much hope for further repair.”

And that’s just the posters at Newsarama. What in the world will the folks over at the Anime on DVD forums say? (Apologies to Fanboy Rampage for borrowing its shtick.)

If I ever wavered even for a moment about skipping House of M, Marvel has kindly provided six preview pages to reinforce my decision.

(Spoilers ahead.)

In the preview, the Scarlet Witch, still crazy, attempts to recreate the birth of her imaginary twins. Fortunately, the menfolk (Charles Xavier and Magneto, Wanda’s father) are on hand to subdue the poor wretch… for now.

So basically the big, sprawling event springs from one of my least favorite elements of Avengers: Disassembled. Poor, deluded, inadvertently destructive Wanda can’t get her shit together, never got appropriate male supervision in the use of her powers, and couldn’t have real babies, so she’s unconsciously lashing out at the world. Fun!

There’s really no way a story could rebound from that starting point, at least for me. I admit that it’s mostly personal, though I do think Disassembled was a terrible story on almost every level. I also like to think that the transformation of Wanda from competent heroine of long standing to vacant time bomb of mutant mayhem was just an empirically bad idea, made worse by the fact that she was largely absent from the story where it happened. It was wasteful and destructive and it didn’t say anything interesting about any of the characters.

In case I haven’t made it obvious, the Scarlet Witch was one of the first Marvel characters to really click for me. It’s not difficult to see why, looking back.

She was a mutant who lived without concealment or apology. She was who she was, and she left it to others to accept that or not. She also loved who she loved, regardless of how friends, family, or society might respond. She met her various challenges squarely, making friends, finding romance, earning respect, and coming into her own along the way. It was extremely rewarding to watch, inviting identification from a number of perspectives, and it was very unusual by super-heroic standards.

In their decision to turn her into a destructive plot device, Marvel has devalued most of that. Beyond being unable to control her abilities to a lethal extent, Wanda’s attempts at building a life and a family are now portrayed as pathetic, signs of her instability instead of evidence of her determination. “She wanted love, companionship, and support. Oh, how could we not have seen how terribly sick she was?”

And that’s just beyond depressing to me. A great character with tons of potential gets reduced to little more than a malfunctioning weapon, another in the litany of crazy females who can’t handle the pressure, and she’s a particularly deadly one to boot. (She doesn’t even get the nasty thrill of acting with intent. She’s just crazy, and she doesn’t mean any of it.)

Please feel free to accuse me of hating change, because when change makes characters less interesting and reduces their potential to generate engrossing stories, I do hate it.