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all star superman Mile High Comics had me worried this month. Their notification email that they had mailed me my monthly shipment of books was sent back on the eighth, but the books themselves didn't get here until today. Sigh. Usually there is a one week lag between the email and the actual arrival so the two week delay had me concerned. Now that there are here I can say that it was worth the wait. For a moment, I thought that I would try something new with my monthly booty. Instead of reading everything in the space of a week, I would try to limit myself to reading just one book a day. If I could stick with that regimen, I wouldn't having any cravings. Each day would be something new without any gaps between shipments. Sadly that plan evaporated once I spread out what had been inside the box. There were too many treasures there for me to resist. It was well over a decade ago when I first became acquainted with Grant Morrison. In the pages of Doom Patrol, I first saw what he could do with the comic medium and was amazed by what I read. His characters were far from the traditional super hero folk. They were some seriously damaged people and that was where the appeal laid. These weren't people with angst. These were people with multiple personality disorders and god complexes. Who else could have imagined a character called Crazy Jane as a love interest for Cliff Steele, also known as Robot Man? Now I will be the first to admit that Morrison's style can grow tiresome at times, but seeing the man who created The Invisibles writing a story about Krypton's most favorite son is not something that I wanted to miss. Many people had mixed feelings about his first issue, but for me All Star Superman was probably one of the best Superman stories that I have read in a long time. Thankfully with issue number two the momentum keeps growing. Seeing Superman carrying Lois Lane to the Fortress of Solitude for the very first time had all of the charm of the Silver Age without being campy. It made me smile. My second choice from the stack was the latest issue of Catwoman, which was also devoid of any camp. Will Pfeifer and Pete Woods have sent the title into my top five books. Selina and her supporting cast are so human to me that the One Year Later story has me a little concerned. Suddenly she will be a mother and someone else will be calling themselves Catwoman. This may or may not be a good thing for her. The third and final reading selection was issue four of Infinite Crisis. Once again this is a series that people react to very strongly be it positive or negative. As for me, I fall on the pro side. Seeing what happened to Wally West made me want to cry. Even though I know that he is a fictional character who I will never meet, I have come to think quite fondly of him through Geoff Johns' run on The Flash. Geoff made Wally someone that I wish that I could call friend so seeing him suffer affected me deeply. |