This week’s comics have made me grumpy.

Powers 6 is solid enough, but I’d love it if they could get a handle on the typos.

Supreme Power 13 arrives, and it still isn’t going anywhere fast. There’s also something about the way the hookers get played for laughs and cheesecake even as they’re being systematically murdered that creeps me out.

The current arc in Daredevil is supposed to be some big, thematic culmination, but it seems like more of the same to me. And the “chaos magic” gag in #67 is irritating and gratuitous.

I’m not quite sure where Natasha’s rant against gender-based double-standards of appearance came from in Black Widow 3. Her argument has merit in a general way, but she seems like an odd messenger. She’s routinely used her appearance to disarm and seduce opponents and informants (and in fact does so in this very comic), and she does nothing to articulate the contradiction. She takes advantage of the double-standard and uses it as a professional tool, and it might have been more interesting if she’d pointed that out. Honestly, I’m as unnerved by the “beauty industry” as anyone; I liked the recent Mystique arc that took a swipe at it. The discussion of it here just seemed like odd, underdeveloped boilerplate.

Remember John Byrne’s brief stint on one of the Spider-Man books where he revealed that Sandman, who had undergone a meticulous reformation process that played out over years in a variety of comics, was just faking the turn-around? Remember how much of on-line fandom hated that twist? I’ll be curious to see if there’s a similar reaction to the big reveal in Flash 216. I haven’t read a lot of the Wally West run, so I’ve missed many of the “Rogues gone good” stories this issue references, but I do remember Heat Wave’s turn from the pre-Crisis Barry Allen stories. It seemed like the only break Barry got at the time, and it was rather a nice change of pace.

Now, I’m going to go read the latest volume of Hot Gimmick to restore my mood. Man, Akane and Subaru are adorable.

I’m back from Thanksgiving travels, picked up the week’s comics, and they weren’t exactly a cornucopia of goodness. There was one exception.

Adam Strange is brilliant. It’s the most solidly entertaining thing DC has put out since Formerly Known as the Justice League. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read Superman: Secret Identity yet.)

Give yourself a holiday present. Go out and buy this week’s issue and track down the first two.

A lot happens in the first four issues of DC’s Manhunter. Prosecutor Kate Spencer fails to convict the murderous Copperhead, then launches her vigilante career by tracking and killing him using super-villain gadgetry stolen from an evidence locker. She leaves that same gadgetry lying around to be found by her young son, who winds up in the hospital. Clearly at fault for her son’s condition, she still finds time to spar bitterly with her ex-husband. After an unsuccessful battle with the Shadow Thief, Kate blackmails a protected witness into providing tech support for her costumed activities.

And she’s the protagonist.

This title really shouldn’t work for me, given my usual tastes in super-hero comics. It’s got an unsympathetic central figure with a deeply suspect moral framework. The material is dark and violent. But writer Marc Andreyko has posed a number of intriguing questions about his central character, and he’s created a fictional corner of the DC Universe that’s well worth exploring.

It helps that Andreyko is starting from scratch with the character. He’s developing his own sandbox while making it work in the larger DC context. Even Kate is aware that she’s breaking conventional cape rules, demonstrated in a memorable dream sequence. She knows she’s crossing the line, so why does she?

Readers don’t know the answer to that yet. The title so far has been more concerned with establishing Kate’s circumstances than exploring what drives her. But the ambiguity is tantalizing rather than frustrating. Her actions are so brutal and her choices are so contradictory – she’s an officer of the courts and a successful one at that – that the reader can’t help but wonder how all this started. Part of the fun of the title is waiting for those answers.

Kate is a novice in a very violent game, and her inexperience shows. It’s a smart choice and more believable than if she was a ruthlessly efficient killing machine right out of the gate. And while it doesn’t exactly soften her, her fledgling status does humanize her a bit. It also drives her to consider her tactics, which can be fascinating to watch. The addition of the blackmailed ex-con to the cast is particularly promising. Dylan Battles is a tech-savvy scumbag who avoided jail by ratting out his super-villain bosses. Now he has a new employer who’s a different flavor of ruthless, making for an interesting dynamic.

Art by Jesús Saiz complements Andreyko’s efforts nicely. His pencils have a shadowy realism that suits the story of an apparently normal woman stepping into some very dark places. He also handles the super-heroic material well, with memorable fight sequences and nice renderings of figures like Copperhead and Shadow Thief. Comedy is in his repertoire as well; the pages showing Dylan’s ignominious career as a henchman are hilarious.

For all these strengths, the book still doesn’t seem to be finding an audience, which is too bad. The stories seem to be brushing up against the mainstream DC Universe, which is a smart move. (The Justice League is set to guest-star in the fifth issue, and there are references to events in Identity Crisis. Those references are a lot easier to swallow in a title like this than in more conventional super-hero fare.) I do wish DC had thought to slate a crossover with Birds of Prey, which is exploring similar subject matter in its current story arc. It might have given Manhunter the boost it needs.

Still, if you’re looking for an intriguing exploration of vigilantism in context of and contrast to a larger super-hero community, you should really give Manhunter a try. It’s an engrossing read with loads of potential.

Steven Grant posted a list of questions in the latest edition of Permanent Damage at Comic Book Resources:

1) What’s your favorite comic of 2004?
She-Hulk. I love its light-hearted approach, character-based comedy, and solid super-heroics. It’s a nice tonic, given some of the depressing material that’s been flooding the market.

2) What’s your favorite comics-related moment?
Awesome Andy’s moment of clarity in the sixth issue of the aforementioned. Actually, just about any Awesome Andy moment would make the short list.

3) What’s the worst thing to happen in comics in 2004?
Grim, depressing content translating into high sales in super-hero comics. It doesn’t help that I find the stories themselves pretty poor.

4) What’s your most fervid hope for comics in 2005?
That Marvel and DC (particularly Marvel) focus on quality over quantity in their publishing decisions. Flooding the market with more of the same doesn’t seem like the smart way to expand a dwindling market. It just makes it harder for interesting, unusual titles to make a dent or find an audience when they’re buried under thirty-seven comics featuring another Spider-Man/Wolverine team-up.

5) What aspect of comics in 2005 are you most looking forward to?
More Scott Pilgrim! What do you mean, “The second volume doesn’t come out until February”?

6) What’s your worst fear for comics in 2005?
Inertia. It seems like the Big Two aren’t trying anything new, either creatively or in terms of business practices; they’re just doing the same old things louder.

(Here are Matt’s answers at Highway 62.)

Congratulations to Paul O’Brien for surviving Chuck Austen’s runs on an assortment of X-books. O’Brien bids bon voyage (or débarras) on the occasion of Austen’s last issue of X-Men, and pauses to wonder if Austen isn’t “the worst X-Men writer ever?” The answer may surprise you, provided you’ve never read any of O’Brien’s delightfully scathing reviews of Austen’s work.

“The disintegrator communion wafers? The Draco? A five-issue adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with armour plating? Everything he’s written involving Polaris? There’s just so much in this run which defies belief. Usually with bad comics, you can at least understand why they seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s incomprehensible that the Chuck Austen run seemed like a good idea to anyone.”

O’Brien has praise for Madrox, and he shares my disappointment that it isn’t doing better in terms of sales:

“For god’s sake, go and buy the thing. Show some support when they produce something genuinely worthwhile.”

This ties in nicely to O’Brien’s column over at Ninth Art, where he considers the plight of critically acclaimed books with miniscule audiences. He focuses in part on the “second season” concept that started with Sleeper and has been picked up by under-performing Marvel charmers like Runaways and She-Hulk. It doesn’t really bother me when a publisher starts with a new first issue, particularly if it draws attention to worthy titles. I do wonder why the publishers didn’t give the titles a decent push in the first place.

Also in this column, O’Brien talks about the Big Two Glut and the disadvantages publishers create for their interesting fringe titles when they saturate the market with high-profile characters in a slew of titles:

“In February 2005, for example, we can look forward to seven Spider-Man books, twelve Batman titles and nineteen X-books. (Depending on how you define each category – but you get the general idea.) By flooding the market with these books, many of which aren’t exactly great sellers either, the publishers ensure that readers have plenty of boringly obvious choices to take up their attention and time before they’re ever likely to consider the lower ranking titles.”

This probably explains why I’m so partial to marginal titles like She-Hulk, Runaways, Manhunter, and Fallen Angel. I’ve never had much interest in the first-stringers, at least not in solo titles. If I get interested in them at all, it’s generally based on the participation of a specific creator, as in the case of Greg Rucka’s excellent run on Detective.

It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of corporate comics, though. There’s at least some commitment to putting interesting, unconventional titles on the shelves or we’d never have seen these titles at all. But when it comes down to promoting them to the audiences who might actually enjoy them, neither Marvel or DC seems able to stretch out of their usual practices. Is there too much of a playbook? Is it fair for so much of the onus of promotion to be placed on the creators, like Peter David does with Fallen Angel?

I loved Archie Comics as a kid. Desperate to be older, Riverdale was perfect wish-fulfillment fodder. Archie went on dates and had his own car and had cool friends. Sure, it was all pretty wholesome, but at age six, it seemed like paradise. Now, at 37, I’ve found that same kind of escape.

I want to be Scott Pilgrim, or at least to borrow his Precious Little Life. Because Scott has it sweet, thanks to creator Bryan Lee O’Malley for Oni.

Scott is a twenty-something slacker. He’s happily unemployed, plays bass in a crappy band, has a cool gay roommate, and dates a cute high-school girl. He doesn’t have any real responsibilities, so life is nothing but possibilities. And he doesn’t even have to pursue any of them if he doesn’t feel like it.

As awesome as all that is, life throws him a twist. There’s this girl Scott (literally) can’t get out of his mind. Ramona Flowers is a roller-blading delivery girl who takes shortcuts in the subspace highways that run through Scott’s brain. It’s only natural that Scott would get a little obsessed, when you throw in the fact that Ramona’s smart, pretty, and undeniably cool.

That shortcuts through Scott’s brain make perfect sense is one of the great things about O’Malley’s story. The characters are all in such an amiable, slacker haze that nothing comes as too much of a surprise. Everything just flows effortlessly along, whether its late-night roommate gab or the arrival of one of Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. The everyday and the surreal mix perfectly.

The characters are wonderful, from ambition-free Scott to caustic roommate Wallace to adoring, adorable Knives, Scott’s sort-of girlfriend. The scenes with Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb, crackle with chemistry as they bust on each other in the ways that good friends do. And Scott and Ramona are a sweetly romantic pair, despite their circumstances. Those circumstances – Scott must defeat Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends if he wants to date her – give the book (this is the first volume of six) a kind of quest structure, though “quest” sounds like an awful lot of commitment for this bunch.

I have to admit that slacker fiction usually makes me cringe. It seems to come in two flavors: existential whining or moronic hijinks. O’Malley neatly avoids these pitfalls. Scott and his friends are pretty happy with their circumstances, and they’ve got good reason. They’re at a place in their life when they can do precisely as much or as little as they want, and it’s refreshing that they don’t seem to view that as a crisis or a scam. It’s just how things are.

O’Malley’s illustrations perfectly suit the effortless charm of his story, and they have the same kind of everyday wonder. The characters are distinct expressive, and O’Malley does some of the best smirks in the business. Little comic flourishes fill the visuals, too, from the what-belongs-to-who layout of Scott and Wallace’s apartment to (sigh) the “Archies” logo on a drum set (sigh). It all works together seamlessly.

Enjoying comics can be a lot of work. From the shifting fates of franchise characters to stupid publisher tricks to the dozens of other frustrations large and small, the risk-reward equation can be perilous. With Scott Pilgrim, the rewards are enormous. It’s entirely engaging and deeply satisfying, and it really made me feel like that six-year-old flipping through his first comics. I can’t wait for more.

Up much too early again, so why not do some linkblogging before the coffee kicks in?

Case Closed has joined the ranks of Comics Worth Reading. I picked up the second volume of this fun mystery manga this week and liked it even better than the first. Viz has a really good track record with me.

Johnny Bacardi has pretty much the same reaction I did to Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. I would only add that I can no longer deny I spend too much time watching Cartoon Network, as I immediately recognize the voice actors from other ‘toons.

At the Low Road, Ed talks some more about hype. Read it now, and you’ll lose up to 25 pounds in just three months! (Or not.) Dr. Scott looks at hype through the lens of herbal supplements over at Polite Dissent.

This was fun, but somebody shoot me if I ever embark on a another theme week. For the wrap-up, random favorites:

Ian McEwan writes fascinating novels that focus on a turning point, an otherwise innocent moment, and the disturbing and tragic consequences that spin out from there. Enduring Love turns a chance encounter into a dangerous obsession. (It’s just been turned into a movie that’s gotten excellent reviews.) In Amsterdam, a woman’s death leads to tense games of revenge and scandal. Atonement is the longest of McEwan’s novels I’ve read; the other two are practically novellas in length, but this story has more scope and sweep. In it, a young girl oversees something, misinterprets it, and sends the lives of her family spinning into some very dark places. Briony, the girl in question, is an amazing character, both sympathetic and disturbing.

Living in a state that gets the brunt of Appalachian stereotypes, I’m happy to see the region and its culture treated with delicacy and heart in Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Novels. McCrumb tells overlapping stories of contemporary Appalachia (in and around a small town in the mountains of eastern Tennessee) juxtaposed with thematically resonant stories from history and folklore. The Ballad of Frankie Silver is probably my favorite. As present-day Sheriff Spencer Arrowood waits for the execution of a criminal he’d caught early in his career, he looks into the story of Frankie Silver, the first woman to be executed in North Carolina. The past informs the present in lovely, unexpected ways. Other highlights of this series include She Walks These Hills and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, which is just unbearably sad and hopeful at the same time. (McCrumb has also written a series of conventional mysteries, which aren’t bad. My favorite of her non-Ballad books is probably Bimbos of the Death Sun, an affectionately scathing tale of murder at a sci-fi/fantasy con.)

Two of the funniest books I’ve ever read come from Joe Keenan, creator of Frasier. In Blue Heaven, two gays run afoul of the most conniving woman alive, who uses them to try and scam money from the mob with a sham wedding. It’s filled with terrific characters, sparkling dialogue, and wonderfully constructed screwball comedy. With the popularity of The Apprentice, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a re-release of Putting on the Ritz. It spins from the not-at-all-implausible premise that an Ivana Trump-ish social climber wants a singing career. Only her lack of talent, philandering husband, bitter business rivals, and hapless lyricist and composer can keep her from triumph, surely. These books fall squarely into the “laughing out loud” category, and I can read them again and again.

So, that’s it for Book Week. Not to worry. I’ve got prose out of my system for a while.

What is Geoff Johns thinking? I don’t mean this in a “This is a travesty!” way (like I would with certain other creators who shall remain nameless). I’m genuinely curious as to what he’s got in mind with the “Titans Tomorrow” story that continued this week in Teen Titans 18.

For those of you not following the series, the current Titans get sidetracked during time travel and meet future versions of themselves who are very dark. (Even Raven added “Dark” to her name, which struck me as hilarious, because she wasn’t exactly a sunbeam before.) They kill villains and torture captives and posture.

As Batman (who was once Robin) says, “Things got so dark. The world got so dark.” (Poetry… sniff.) None of the dark Titans articulate any specific turning point where things went dark, though Batman throws in a teasing reference to “the crisis.” This could be a nod to that current mini-series where everything is revealed to be much darker than readers thought, or it could be a catch-all tease to an as-yet-unwritten dark crossover blockbuster. (Maybe things will be clarified in next issue’s conclusion.)

The implication of the arc seems to be “Dark Is Bad,” which is an odd message for a DC title at this point in time. And, since Johns has pretty much been the Identity Crisis crossover bandwagon, and since his own titles take a healthy pleasure in dark material (teens getting kneecapped, teens getting brainwashed by their creepy fathers, then mutilating themselves, women miscarrying twins, heroes staging bloody coups, heroes getting disemboweled, heroes getting parts of their faces bitten off, heroes forced to marry their “brothers”, heroes committing suicide, issue-long autopsies, coke-snorting rogues), he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of credibility as the messenger.

I’ve wondered before if Johns isn’t trying to have it both ways… riding on the nouveau-grim gravy train while saying in interviews how readers need optimistic comics like Rebirth. Now he serves up this meta-rich meditation on heroes gone dark. I should note that I’m not a big fan of “The future is horrible!” stories. Much as I liked “Days of Future Past” at the time, its influence left me with a distinct aversion to the sub-genre.

I think you lose something when you take heroic figures and make them too cognizant of a specific, crappy future that they must prevent. (It didn’t do the X-Men any favors.) It sounds gooey, but I’d rather see them act out of more open-ended, altruistic motives than in a dogged attempt to avoid a specific, sucky outcome. And that might not be the intent or consequence of “Titans Tomorrow” at all, but the possibility makes me uneasy. There’s enough grim material in the title as it is without an underlying sense of dread and futility.

I did get a good laugh out of the cover, for entirely personal reasons. Looking at Robin-Batman sitting on Batman-Batman’s headstone with “Beloved Husband” carved in it, I immediately thought, “Oh, how sweet. In the DC Universe of the future, gay marriage is legal, and Tim and Bruce made honest men out of each other.” I don’t think many people shared that reaction with me, but it made me smile. Because I’m an adolescent, when you get right down to it.

I’m not much of a fan of prose science fiction or fantasy. (My partner corners that geek market in our household.) More to my taste are books that approach those genres from an unusual direction.

Comedy is always a reliable point of entry for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I love the fantasy parodies of Terry Pratchett. Screwball comedy and great characters combine with smart parody of the fantasy genre and humanity in general. I’m particularly fond of any book in the series that features Death, which will sound really odd to anyone who hasn’t read any of the Discworld series. There are lots of them, but highlights in the series include Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Wyrd Sisters.

Christopher Moore borrows from a somewhat wider range of subject matter — vampires, Native American mythology, the Bible, ghosts, demons, etc. — but he has a similarly skewed perspective on the conventions of the fantasy novel. The best that I’ve read is probably Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. (It’s sacrelicious!) Actually, looking through his bibliography, the only ones I haven’t read are Fluke, which my sister loved, and The Stupidest Angel, which just came out.

Gregory Maguire takes a somewhat more serious approach to his re-examinations of classic stories, and the results are usually lovely. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister places the Cinderella story in a realistic and more layered context, making sharp observations about class and power along the way. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West sets out to redeem its title character, and damned if it doesn’t succeed. Maguire paints Oz as a hotbed of repression and political intrigue and green-skinned Elphaba as a principled outcast and agitator. Elphaba’s evolving relationship with beautiful, opportunistic Glinda is a treat. (I actually don’t recommend Maguire’s other works, Lost and Mirror Mirror, but Confessions and Wicked are both tremendously good.)

Time travel is one of my least favorite subjects for fiction, but I really love To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It slides past my distaste for its subject matter by cheerfully stomping all over it, punching up its baffling tendencies while lacing it with caustic social commentary. (Time travel is managed by the touchiest kind of government bureaucracy. Victorian England takes some loving swipes, too.) I keep meaning to try some of Willis’s other books.

There is one straightforward horror franchise that I do enjoy in a guilty pleasure kind of way. The books of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are generally trash, but they’re usually sly, readable trash. My favorite is Thunderhead, partly because of its setting (the American Southwest — in a cursed cliff dwelling, no less!) but mostly for its craven, quirky cast of characters. Still Life With Crows is another highlight of their output, filled with creepy, small-town secrets. Unless you have a very high tolerance for pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, you really should avoid The Cabinet of Curiosities. Frequent Preston-Child protagonist FBI Agent Pendergast has a lot going for him, but he climbs right up his own ass in this outing and barely emerges alive.

At Polite Dissent, Dr. Scott talks about some of his favorite historical novels. And tomorrow, Book Week wheezes to a halt with an entirely random “authors I really, really like” wrap-up. What was I thinking when I started this? I’ll just blame Ed.