The night before leaving on my trip I had some pre-travel jitters and having plowed through all of my new books the night before to avoid lugging singles with me on the trip, I hunkered down with my WEDNESDAY COMICS hardcover until the wee hours of the morning.
I fell in love with this thing the moment News & Record graphic novel reviewer J. Brian Ewing brought his preview copy into the store. While DC has a tendency to make some questionable decisions when it comes to formatting collected editions, they did this one just right and with good reason. Though it seemed to be somewhat panned in its original release due to price point vs. quality of printing ($3.99 on newsprint) and some lackluster stories, the make-or-break of the experiment always seemed to lie in how it would be reprinted, if at all.
They did it right.
Before you even open the book, the cover is perfect, highlighting every character in glossy on a matte background. The introductory pages give you a great sense of the spirit of the project. Bonus materials. The unpublished bumper Plastic Man and Creeper stories. Just the overall quality of the printing on the glossy interior pages as opposed to the original broadsheets, namely for Lee Bermejo's SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN. And everything reads better with the stories placed in order sequentially rather than the initial one-page per week format.
Never before have I seen a single book have a con floor buzzing the way this slab did at HeroesCon 2010. At every table I went to, creators ask to see my copy and flipped through the oversized pages with wonder and joy. Some shared a longing to own pieces of original art and some just wanted to know where they could get a copy for their very own.
But in a more private sense, here are some of the things that I enjoyed all over again or for the first time in the opening half of the tome.
BATMAN by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso - I wasn't wowed by Batman the first time through. I felt that the layouts in particular were pretty bland. Doing what seemed like a regular comics page on a giant scale didn't do much for me and it caused me to lose interest in the narrative. Reading it together at once made me understand the connections between characters that I didn't care to make before.
KAMANDI by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook - I think that mores than any other, this was the most talked about story during the original run and I poured over it just like everyone else. If I heard Mark Morales correctly at HeroesCon, someone bought all of Ryan Sook's original art off of him and was re-selling it for $40,000 a page! Looking into it now, pages 7 and 10 are for sale at Heroes Comic Books.com. They're 19.5" x 25" each (HUGE!) and the prices are "please inquire". I think I'll be left wondering. I also didn't realize originally that Shin Tun was Washington, DC.
SUPERMAN by John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo - easily the most panned around the shop when they were coming out, and really interesting that this w the strip DC decided to put forward in USA Today to appeal to the masses. I suppose people would connect better with Superman than they would with Kamandi or Metamorpho no matter what the discrepancy in narrative quality. I said in the message board thread the very first day Wednesday Comics was announced that I didn't think Bermejo's art would work on newsprint, and I still think i was right. But it pops on the glossy stuff. The story still reads pretty low, but I does have a strong energy and weight to the fight scenes once you can really see what's going on.
DEADMAN by Dave Bullock - no offense to Dave, but the main feeling I was felt with after his strip was wondering heat Darwyn Cooke would have done with a crack at this format. I know he's knee deep in doing Parker, but this seemed right up his alley, no continuity, expansive format, edited by Mark Chiarello (who also oversaw THE SPIRIT, NEW FRONTIER, and SOLO).
GREEN LANTERN by Kurt Busiek and Joe Quiñones - there ended up being a nice symmetry that slipped by me between the current story with the alien invasion and the flashback story with Hal and Dill. "One riot, one Ranger." = "One invasion, one Lantern."
METAMORPHO by Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred - Good to see Gaiman come back to Element Girl, which was one of my favorite stories from SANDMAN. The Metamorpho fan club was both twisted and fun. "Kids, if you synthesis a new element you can win a free trip to the set of the Metamorpho TV show." I guess James Cameron and Tony Stark will have front row seats! The snakes and ladders inset as a plot device was brilliant. And the above spread is probably one of the best splashes in comics history.
TEEN TITANS by Eddie Berganza and Sean "Cheeks" Galloway - I've been a big Cheeks fan since Carly showed me his stuff on Deviant Art like 5 years ago and I bought the Kate Corrigan and Liz Sherman Hellboy Animated busts just to get a hold of his designs. I'm also going to buy SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN to check out his style. The self-referencing of Wednesday was a nice touch and reminded me of the "Once More With Feeling" musical episode of Buffy ("Dawn's in trouble. Must be Tuesday."). Sean's Wonder Girl re-design with the hoodie and sweat pants was awesome. The most curious thing was the switches in narrators (7 times in 12 pages and one page without any exposition at all). With Berganza's experience as an editor I would have expected different. This also seems to be the only story "set" in DC continuity, at least that's what I surmised based on the comment about Doctor Light's death during FINAL CRISIS: REVELATIONS. Cheeks did the above Blue Beetle sketch in the back of my hardcover. I hope it becomes the first of many.
STRANGE ADVENTURES by Paul Pope - this was my favorite strip during the original release. I forgot about Doctor Fate's cameo. I'm not usually one to praise the beauty of women in comics, but Pope's Alanna was pretty gorgeous, and that's coming after I was downright disturbed by some of the women he drew in the PULPHOPE art book from Ad House.
A review of the second half should be up later in the week!
Location:Howell, NJ
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