sdelmonte | This Week's Comics

Spoilers? Yup.

52, Week 41 - We're in the home stretch, people, and it looks like we are very close to seeing just where Renee, Ralph and Adam and Kory are going. Renee, in Nanda Parbat, has a chance conversation with a certain Amazon and is now ready to accept what she's become. Adam and Kory finally reach the GL Corps. And Ralph has all the pieces he needs for whatever it is that the Helmet of Fate wants, but he sure doesn't have all the pieces of himself. Entertaining, and well-paced, but at this point I think it's all about moving the pieces into place for the big finish. Which means that nothing here really stands out.

Batman 663 - A candidate for "That Was the Weirdest Thing Ever" trophy. How so? Well, first off, it's a short story by Morrison with computer-gernated illustrations by John Van Fleet, so we aren't in standard territory. But we've seen short stories in comics before. It's what in the story that is very weird. If I tell you that the Joker is ready to return from the injuries he suffered at the start of the Morrison run and is killing former henchmen, I wouldn't be giving you a hint of how bizarre this is. We get a very, very creepy view of the Joker, Harley, the hnechmen, and Gotham, with Batman startlingly out of place as the one sane thing in the tale. Morrison does a great job getting inside the shattered mind of the Joker, who in the writer's opinion is always reinventing himself (so that the classic wacky crime boss and the modern mass murderer can be the same character). He does less well as a writer in general, however, veering towards the purple too often, trying to be Stpehen King without coming close. But what makes this is the weirdness factor. If you don't like weird, stay away. If you know how odd Morrison can be, you might like this.

Either way, this is an experiment and if you prefer standard words-with-pictures comic book stories, you will not have a good time, even if you like Morrison.