The Cipher 06/09/10
June 9th, 2010 by david brothers | Tags: cipher, frank quitely, grant morrison, milestone
batman 700: words by grant morrison, art by frank quitely, tony daniel, andy kubert, and david finch/richard friend.
Down at the labor camp, they make a drone of men, mama’s boy once, but now I’ve learned to speak draconian!
ELDash
el-producto
I was thinking about picking up Batman 700. Morrison hasn’t been hitting for me like he should lately, but Quitely’s always worth a look. I was even willing to look past buying a book with art by Tony Daniel and David Finch, two of my least favorite artists. Except I read the PDF preview on DC’s site after David Uzumeri shot me a link and had all my goodwill sapped right out of me. For five bucks (!) you get eight Tony Daniel pages, nine Andy Kubert pages, six David Finch pages, and somewhere between one and eight Frank Quitely pages, with the difference being made up by the certainly-capable-but-not-Frank-Quitely Scott Kolins. For those of us who went to public school, that’s thirty-one pages for five bucks. Add seven pages of pinups (Shane Davis, Juan Doe, Guillem March, Dustin Nguyen, Tim Sale, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Philip Tan) and a couple pages of Batcave layouts by Freddie Williams II and you’ve got a book I don’t think I want any more. Five bucks? Get real.
Great art + great story = comics worth buying. That’s the rule.
I know I’m picking up Captain America (Ed Brubaker/Butch Guice) and Heralds (Kathryn Immonen/Tonci Zonjic/James Harren). Amazon just emailed me to say that Icon Vol. 2: The Mothership Connection
Shame about there not being any other Milestone books on the schedule, though. I’ve got the two Icon volumes, the Brave & the Bold: Milestone book, and the Hardware and Static trades. With the exception of the JLA trades that reintroduced Milestone (which I didn’t buy because every time I look at them I want to fire shots DC’s way) (don’t forget industry rule 4080) I think that I own all of the currently in-print Milestone books. We’re missing Xombi, Blood Syndicate, Shadow Cabinet, Heroes, and a few odd miniseries or one-shots. Wise Son and Milestone Forever. C’est la guerre, I guess.
What’re you folks buying, or not buying, as the case may be? Any trades you wish happened? I’d kill a man dead for Flex Mentallo, and I may be adding “more Milestone trades” to that list.
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What a boner kill. I put this title on reserve thinking I was getting 40 pages of story and the Frank Quitely segment actually drawn by Frank Quitely. I hope the story’s good, at least. 🙁
I would not only kill a man dead for a Flex trade, but I would kill several men dead for a collection of Hourman trades from the Peyer/Morales run (god, that was a good book).
It’s up to you, of course, David but at roughly 1.5x the length of a normal $2.99 comic, I’d say this is probably monetarily worth at least $4.50. I’m deeply unfond of Tony D also, but that preview looks a massive improvement on prior work of his.
I’ll probably grudgingly nab Batman, today’s my last issue of Daredevil, so it’ll be nice to cut loose that anchor…
…but the three books I’m pumped for today are Chew, Detroit Metal City, and Ashley Wood’s Fuck It.
Flex Mentallo would make me happy happy, Absolute Edition that fucker even. I’d also like to see Automatic Kafka by Joe Casey and Ashley Wood collected. That’s a sleeper.
Avenger’s Academy is off to a strong start, and I think the “twist” revealed at the end makes for an interesting book.
I enjoyed Young Allies. I’m a big Sean McKeever fan going back to The Waiting Place, and I’m glad to see him finally rebounding after the mess that was Teen Titans.
The story was nice and everything – but $5 was too much. Pin-Ups are nice, but they shouldn’t take up the space that could have been better served by a back-up tale. This should have been $4. It was only $5 because it’s the Super Anniversay issue, and they can get away with charging that much.
Young Allies and Avengers Academy did absolutely nothing for me. Which is a shame, because I had looking forward to both for a while.
I occasionally remember that Doom Patrol is usually decent, and this week’s issue was hitting all the right notes with me. Ambush Bug as a cast character was the best idea Giffen had.
Loved Batman #700, but then again I’m one of those wackos who loves Tony Daniels’ art.
Cap was good, Nomad back up was hilarious (basically the Spirit of Human Kindness sequence from South Park)
Generation Lost continues better than I expected, and Giffen/DeMatteis BG is cool.
oh and Hickman’s SHIELD
oh yeah and Buzzard mini by Powell.
Also random note:
Phillip Tan’s pin-up is better than everything he’s done in the past year. What the hell is up with that?
Trade I would love to own? Great Darkness Saga, but it looks like that is one the way so Flex would be in my number one spot too, 2 would be Legion Lost.
I’ve got a complete run of Blood Syndicate and the Wise Son mini (which is actually kind of weak) so I don’t need a rush on trades for those. But there are always plenty of out of print books I’d love to see collected. Or old trades re released (Great Darkness Saga I’m looking at you)…
This week I got my one remaining DC mainline book with Secret Six. Also Vertigo’s daytripper and The Unwritten. And then, despite my annoyance at having the price jacked up for the premiere issues (which don’t include any extra story pages), Young Allies and Avengers Academy. If I hadn’t found out the price is dropping down to $2.99 after this I probably would have passed on them…
Batman: Same complaints everyone seems to be having. Too short and not enough Quitely. Someone above mentioned that the Tan pinup was the best thing he’s done all year, and I agree completely. If his sketches look like that normally, they just need to stop whoever’s been inking him.
Shield: I like cool history-bending comics, so I’m giving this a shot. It’s certainly seeming entertaining enough, but I expected a little more depth out of it.
Booster Gold: I had gotten worried after last issue that I wouldn’t like the writing changing hands. Now I’m just worried that I need to be buying The Lost Years. Still consistently good, nothing amazing though.
The Unwritten: Book of the week for me. Carey and Gross had damn well better earn an Eisner for this one when it’s all said and done. With all the nominations that Lucifer had and didn’t win, those two really do deserve it.
Also picked up the Cowboy Ninja Viking trade. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this, but I got a lot of fun and action. The art takes some getting used to, but overall it’s one of the more fun action books on the market.
also on the new Cap, I kind of liked Zemu lamenting the fact that he missed Dark Reign completely and appears rigth at the dawn of the Heroic Age
Groan, dudes.
Batman 700 had $5 worth of content, easily. Based on 22 pages of story equaling $3, what we had here of Morrison’s story alone is worth nearly like $4.40 or something (it’s worth $4.50 on the dot if you count the first two pages of the comic as content–which I would, at least the second one with the three images on it). Then ALL the rest of the bonus material, with the Neal Adams preview? Yeah, that works out to like 60-some cents. I think all those pages are worth two quarters and a dime.
C’mon, dudes. Half the damn regular-sized comics you buy these days are 22 pages for $4 anyway. How can you complain about Batman 700’s content in the same article that you mention buying Cap (for $4 with the awful Nomad story)?
Great stuff on the site lately, though.
@the luna one: Batman 700 was a B- to me, and most of the books I buy are three bucks. As far as Cap goes… I like Nomad and I like the main story.
I understand there’s a new two volume Seven Soldiers edition coming out.