I am a comic book collector and happy to be sure. I might say “proud” if I hadn’t, over a year ago, switched to reading digital as opposed to print comics. I feel a bit robbed of the tactile sensations of the hobby – of the turn of the page, the sneaking look to the panel a page over, the bagging and shorting and stacking and filing. Though I read my comics in a different medium than I used to, I still treat each Wednesday (comic book delivery day to specialty shops around the country) as different from the other days of the week. I subscribe and now, rather than go to the comic store to be handed the books pulled for my “Hold Slot,” I click a button on my iPad and watch them download.
Then I read them.
Rare is the week that I don’t read them all between Wednesdays and some weeks I have, well… let’s just say more comic books in my digital downloads than a grown man should. Comic book legend Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit) is one of the most influential men even to put pencil to drawing board in the pursuit of making comics. So influential was he that the industry awards (think the Oscars or the Emmys or the Grammys) are named The Eisner Awards. He called comic books “sequential art,” perhaps because he became embarrassed by his profession when he had to admit what he did for a living. This is my weekly reaction to the comics I read.
I read 13 comics last week: Amazing Spider-Man #10, Avengers #38, Avengers World #15, Batman and Robin #36, Batman Eternal #33, Batman/Superman #16, Avengers and X-Men: Axis #6, Daredevil#10, Justice League #36, The Multiversity: Pax Americana #1, New Avengers #26, Superman/Wonder Woman #13 and Uncanny X-Men #28.
The best comic I read last week was Justice League #36.
As has been the case in recent weeks, I read many wonderful comics. Daredevil is a book that is so consistently good, I’ve simply come to expect brilliance. It never fails to be tremendous and its portrayal of depression this month was really startling. The Multiversity: Pax Americana may actually have been the best book overall, but it is so smart and so dense that I am not sure I understood it. Seems hard to pick it as the best when I don’t know that I fully followed it.
But Justice League I followed and loved. Jason Fabok draws a very impressive Justice League. His characters are distinct from another. His heroes look like heroes and his civilians look like real people. After rising up through the ranks at DC Comics, Fabok is knocking his big shot out of the park.
I have, many times, spoken of my love of Geoff Johns’ writing, so I won’t go into that too much here. What I will say is that this book is the best team book on the market as far as I am concerned. Marvel’s Avengers and X-Men titles, while well executed, are fairly inaccessible. Other DC teams don’t feature a line up of characters readers care about top-to-bottom like Justice League boasts. And none of the other books have the “team” feel that Johns has cemented over the past few issues of this book.
I am aware that I selected Justice League last month as well. That’s how good I think this book has been of late. The first two chapters of “The Amazo Virus” have been creative and fun and have me anxiously awaiting the next installment. What more could I want from a comic?
And There Came a Day... 