Plenty of good reading can be found at Sequential Tart. For one thing, they’ve announced their Third Annual Tartie Awards, with deserving honorees like MY FAITH IN FRANKIE, BIRDS OF PREY, and RUNAWAYS, and equally deserving dishonorees like death-happy DC, the rape scene in NIGHTWING, and the replacement of Cameron Stewart with Paul Gulacy on CATWOMAN. There’s also a solid piece on “Death and the Role of Gender in Superhero Comics,” which doesn’t say anything particularly new, but it’s a subject that always demands consideration.

Speaking of death and the role of gender, Newsarama has some preview pages of the upcoming BLACK WIDOW title.

Tired of the Bendis backlash? Never fear. Don MacPherson at theFourthRail likes him just fine, so go read his review of POWERS 1. (Cohort Randy Lander offers no opinion on the issue.)

A quick summary of the salty vérité of Eisner Award-winner Brian Michael Bendis from POWERS 1:

A@@hole: 5 singular + 2 plural = 7 total
F&#k: 8 + 1 “beeped” + 1 with prefix “cluster” = 10 total
F&#ked: 3 + 3 “beeped” = 6 total
F&#king: 5 + 1 “beeped” = 6 total
S^*t: 7 + 1 “beeped” = 8 total

Tally does not include “The Line Up” or “Powers Personals.”

If you missed ARROWSMITH, the splendid mini-series by Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheo, now is your chance to repent by purchasing the trade paperback ARROWSMITH: SO SMART IN THEIR FINE UNIFORMS. It’s a beautifully rendered mix of fantasy and war story, but the key to it is the characterization; the characters are layered, sympathetic, and interesting. This is some of the best work Busiek has done outside of ASTRO CITY, and the pencils by Pacheo and Jesus Merino are gorgeous throughout.

Publisher’s Weekly has summed up my feelings on THE ULTIMATES quite nicely. Thanks to Kevin Melrose at Thought Balloons for blogging it.

Mark Hale again confesses to an embarrassing entry in his collection, SLEEPWALKER #1. Visit the ChaosMonkey and share the shame.

Earlier, I was kvetching about Christopher Moore’s COYOTE BLUE and had set it aside. Stranded at home with a head cold, I picked it up again and hit a turning point in the story that makes it all work for me. I don’t want to give anything away, but about a third of a way through, there’s a great scene that gives the proceedings some real pathos. Still funny, but the stakes and sympathy rise to Moore’s usual level.

It’s like in high school when I was reading GRAPES OF WRATH and thought I was going to lose my mind until I got to that short chapter with the diner waitress, and it all came together. Weird how that can happen.

Olivier Coipel is apparently spelling Alan Davis for a few issues of UNCANNY X-MEN, with preview pages at the Pulse. When I first saw his work on LEGION, Coipel’s pencils made my eyes bleed. I thought he’d improved considerably by the time he was working on AVENGERS (though some of the costume designs were awful). I’m not sure what to make of his pages for UXM but to say that he seems to have some of Ed Benes’s fondness for the gynecologic.

Ooooh… Avengers Disassembled has its own spiffy logo, the stylized logo “A” but… SHATTERED. Mmm…. symbolicious.

I didn’t pick up much in the way of stuff on New Comic Book Day, as I got out fairly late in the afternoon and wanted to leave the all-ages stuff for kids. (Big thumbs-up to Gary, the owner of one of our local comic stores, for putting out free copies of current issues to supplement the day-specific freebies.)

Of what I took, I was stunned at how much I liked BARRY WEEN, given that it’s basically just Judd Winnick indulging in his worst excesses. Somehow, those excesses work exceptionally well in this case. While it may chafe me to see super-heroes be quippy, nihilistic, arrested adolescents, seeing actual adolescents act that way is a hoot.

If Oni is counting these things, they can consider a copy of the LOVE FIGHTS trade sold based on the freebie. EVEREST looks promising, even though I generally think the act of climbing that particular mountain is a pointless act of hubris.

I’m so relieved to see the prevailing opinion on B.A.B.E. FORCE. Were it possible for a forest to sue a publisher for negligent homicide and improper disposal of a corpse, this would be exhibit A.

For a fuller look at everything FCBD had to offer, stop by Cognitive Dissonance. Johanna Draper Carlson has done absolute yeoman’s work covering the mountain of material that came out.

I’m utterly uninspired to review by last week’s comics (though I’m coming off a manga binge), but I would be violating some kind of law if I didn’t put in a good word for SLEEPER SEASON 2. Many people have already made perfectly good arguments for why you should be buying this title, so why not go take a look at some of them?

I will say just one thing about SLEEPER: it reads equally well in trade and monthly formats. I read the first six issues in TPB and the next six individually, and it confirms my belief that Ed Brubaker is one of the best at striking a balance between those two markets.

So I’m reading the Avengers Disassembled interview at the Pulse, and, naturally, my thoughts turn to the move “Heathers”.

And the Marvel offices transform into a Cleveland high school. Bendis, Quesada, and Millar are walking around in minis and too much lip gloss, and they’re taking the daily poll on weather the Black Widow is a moaner or a screamer. They play cruel pranks on Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza.

And Tom Brevoort is totally the Veronica, wearing too much eye-liner and wishing he could just write in his journal and sit with Kurt and talk about their favorite issues of TOMB OF DRACULA and why ETERNALS never should have been inserted into continuity. But he can’t, because he’s one of the cool kids now, and it’s all he can do not to scream when Brian makes him pick three Avengers to kill off and say how cool it will be when Venom joins.

Mercifully, this line of thinking stops before I cast someone in the Christian Slater part. Pity me.

Scott, the estimable blogger of Polite Dissent, has lost a signed page of comic art. Click here to learn more, and keep an eye out for it.

Bless you, Graeme of Fanboy Rampage. While it certainly can’t be good for you, digging through message boards of every ilk, your distillations of what you find are really, really entertaining.

And bless you, John Jakala, for keeping me up to date on the twisted performance art that is ADLO!

And last, but not least, bless you, Scott, for giving such a detailed answer to my question about the influence of television advertising for prescription drugs.

Newsarama has posted the first 23 pages of AVENGERS 500, and I’ve got to say, this might be THE comic of choice for fans of wide screen destruction porn. “Blowed up real good” seems almost too demure a descriptor.

On a marginally related note, to read the Newsarama discussion threads is to know fear. Seriously.

You are now entering a disconnected ramblings zone.

What a lean week for comics. The only thing I’m particularly excited about is SLEEPER SEASON TWO. (And maybe EX MACHINA, if Gary was able to re-order it). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I’ve decided to limit the number of comics I review in an average week.

After writing eight of what I think of as full-length reviews last week, my inner slouch objected. So for a while, at least, I’ll be cutting back to four or five per week, trying to focus more on titles in transition. By that I mean books that are either significantly better or worse than they’ve been lately, new titles, titles with different creative teams, titles I’ve arbitrarily decided don’t get enough attention, and titles meeting any one of a number of other vaguely defined standards I haven’t thought of yet.

Of course, spending less on American comics means I can justify stocking up on more manga. I’m in the midst of the first volume of PLANETES (liking it lots), may have another volume of IRON WOK JAN! in my file, and can always heed the siren call (“Gero… gero… gero…”) of SGT. FROG Vol. 3. Plus, lots of folks have given me some great recommendations for other titles to try.

Or, I can just go back down to the basement and waste more of my life with BALDUR’S GATE II: THE SHADOWS OF AMN. Honestly, I’ve never been much of a gamer in the traditional sense. I didn’t have much patience for the dice-and-notepads style of Dungeons and Dragons when I was in high school, though the hacking and slashing and zapping and looting always appealed to me. The BG games spare me all that math, though I’m continually impressed with the level of calculus I’ve seen other people employ to achieve maximum gaming satisfaction.

Oh, and on the subject of BG II, I recently had a feline-related problem. While playing along (hack slash zap loot!), one of my cats walked across the keyboard and made the game menus disappear. With no idea how to correct this problem, I turned to the Web, e-mailing technical support and also posting a query to alt.games.baldurs-gate. Within hours, a kind soul at the newsgroup replied with a friendly “hit the ‘h’ key,” leaving off the deserved “you idiot.” Days later, technical support answered the same question by suggesting I upgrade my video card.

Okay, so maybe providing previews of comics in their entirety isn’t the brightest marketing move Marvel ever made. I’m still glad to see that Marvel’s included two of its most promising new titles in the program.

The Advance Marvel Previews section at MileHighComics has posted SHE-HULK 5 and DISTRICT X 3 for your perusal.

SHE-HULK is a smart comic look at a law firm that specializes in the super-heroic. It’s also a nice take on the title character, who’s forced to spend more time than she’d like as a “puny human.” While Jennifer Walters navigates the choppy legal seas of capes and cowls, she also seems to be learning that you don’t need to be big and green to be a super-woman.

DISTRICT X is the X-book that isn’t. While it addresses many of the major themes of the X-line (prejudice, minority identity, etc.), it takes an approach that’s largely free of any cumbersome continuity. Set in New York City’s mutant neighborhood, it stars mutant cop Bishop, working with the local law to keep the peace. It also tells a bunch of smaller stories about the kinds of mutants who won’t be putting on spandex and fighting crime any time soon. With a rich sense of place and a humanistic approach, this book is shaping up to be something special.

Click. Peruse. Enjoy.