Around the Store in 31 Days: Day Sixteen

Continuing on the "creator racks", we'll move on to Warren Ellis.

This one is kinda hard, actually, because it would be really easy to default to TRANSMETROPOLITAN. Which is great and awesome, no doubt, but it seems too easy.

One of Warren's greatest strengths as a comics storyteller is his love of telling a complete story in a single unit. You can see this on display in FELL or GLOBAL FREQUENCY (both which also could easily make the cut), which are collections of single-issue stories bound up as part of a larger narrative, but I think that for this pick, I'm going to edge myself over to PLANETARY v1: ALL OVER THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES (which is, actually, a pointlessly long subtitle, isn't it?), which is as much about stories and storytellers as anything else.

It opens with a war between the Pulp Heroes and the Super Heroes, moves to Gojira and Monster island, ghost detectives in Hong Kong, and has the best rethinking of the Fantastic Four and Hulk that modern comics have done. All wondrously self-contained, yet each moving the overall story a bit forward.

You can sum the book up with this line from issue #1: "It's a strange world; let's keep it that way"

Yes.

There's also lovely lovely art by John Cassaday.

If there's one single complaint I could make it's that there's STILL one more issue to go (and we're getting on 2 years now... my computer says the originally solicited shipdate of the last issue was freakin' 2006) -- Although the story proper is done, and the last one is just an "epilogue" -- which means the final collection of the series can't come out until that happens. Hope they get that done soon!

Anyway, great great stuff, and well worth being in your collection.

-B

Behind

Gotta go to work in a few here -- Lester is on "vacation" (something about a nude midget chocolate factory?), so I have to go cover his shift. Curse you Lester, you infernal bastard!! I spend yesterday's shift doing "industry reading" Wizard, CBG, etc. There go my brain cells. So I only have 4 comics here to discuss. By tomorrow I plan to go over this week's trades, then take Sunday off and hopefully, Monday wrap up the last of this week's reviews just in time to get another pile of new comics.

This is my life. Week in, week out, over and over again.

BATGIRL #54: That was kinda cool -- the story actually turned on her illiteracy, and something mean was said. Good.

CAPER #10: A little too over the top, but there were some good one-liners here -- I can't see this being sustainable for 44 more pages though? OK

METAL HURLANT #12: Anthologies are usually pretty uneven, but I thought this first MH published under the DC co publishing deal was pretty solid from cover to cover -- as a a first, I don't think there was a story here I didn't enjoy. This was as good as Heavy Metal once was, decades ago. Good.

PLANETARY #20: Damn damn damn fine stuff. We finally meet the Thing, and take him out all at once. Barrelling towards a conclusion -- one uglier than we expect, I suppose. Excellent.

That's it for now -- be back soon.

-B