Rise of the Robots: reading log, third quarter 2013

Once more the clock of the year arrives at quarter to midnight... well, practically ten-to now, but I’m doing the best I can here. It’s been a busy quarter covering the summer holiday period, although I know I make that excuse every time. My holidays were particularly great this year and I’ve been enjoying the Indian summer culminating in an amazing, albeit fleeting, literal trip to India for work.

So once again I find myself being thankful for all the gifts that life has brought while working hard to squander, ruin or debase them. Oh well, mustn’t grumble!

In the meantime, I distract myself with writing – the writing by others and writing of my own. In this reading report I’ll mainly be talking about Comixology, the gradual failure of my anti-gadget resolve and a bit more about – perhaps my final word on – the death of science fiction.

Reading report - second quarter 2013

Summer is typically a busy time of year for me and this year is no different. The unexpected arrival of hot weather and sunshine has further kept me away from the keyboard, and I admit that the blog has had to take second place recently to some fiction I’m working on (gasp!) and a Secret Project: the latter two will hopefully come to fruition in the autumn when I suppose I’ll make another of my misguided attempts to make something of my dreary creative ambitions.

So, there’s not been a lot of time or motivation to consider my quarterly reading report. I’d hoped to have the three volumes of the History of the Science Fiction Magazine wrapped up by now, but that hasn’t happened. The fact is that the necessity to blog about each story holds up the reading: as I get behind, I’m disinclined to read more. This means I’m on track to have read even fewer books this year than last year. But, as I approach volume three, it seems a good time to think about what these volumes have shown us about what SF and where it came from, and that’s mostly what this review is going to look at.

But first, let’s have a look at what’s turning into my primary source of reading love: super-hero comics.

It makes for a long post, but there you are: these reading reports always get out of hand.

Grant Morrison explains his take on Batman

Here's a terrific video (via Bleeding Cool) where Grant Morrison talks to Kevin Smith about how he approached his recently finished run on Batman.



I read most of it, starting around about issue 666 and bailing out about halfway through Batman Inc. It's one I'll come back to this someday, I think, filling in the gaps with trades, as I did with Jonathan Hickman's run on Fantastic Four.

I'm reading his run on X-Men - New X-Men - at moment. It has its moments but it's a bit up-and-down, I think. I might write more about this in the near future...

Marvel Essential Warlock - part 9

Strange Tales featuring Warlock #181

Warlock wakes up from his stupor in a bizarre cosmic-Marvel weird-scape. He just has time for a quick recap page when he meets his foes.

Uh oh: clowns. Mad, evil clowns.

Reading log - Q2 2012

Well, what a few months! For those who don’t know, I moved house on 7 March and found myself at the centre of one of those yuppie nightmare movies like The Pit where a likeable upwardly mobile couple buy a ‘fixer upper’ in a nice neighbourhood and then slowly go mad as the money-eating problems build up. The final scene is a comic denouement where the house ends up a smoking ruin, but the couple have learned to value the important things in life rather than money.

I guess we must still be in act three because say the house is still standing and I still believe money is pretty damn important. In fact, I’d say I think it’s more or less half as much again as important as I did before I started. And I’m still assuming this is a comedy farce and that the final act won’t involve an Indian graveyard.

This has rather taken time and energy away from my usual pursuits. Nonetheless, the commute to work and the minutes between bed and sleep have allowed me some reading time and I’ve done a little writing too.


After the jump, I'll be talking briefly about The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and various artists and Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, and then in more depth about:

DC Showcase All Star Comics by Paul Levitz, Joe Staton and others
DC Showcase All Star Squadron by Roy Thomas
The Inifinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin, George Perez and Ron Lim
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Great Beast: The Life and Magic of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds
I, The Jury by Mike Hammer

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison et al

Sorry for generic pics lately - scanner broken!

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading The Invisibles. At the time it started I was getting a bit burned out with comics in general and in particular with the boundary busting work of the Vertigo crowd. The Invisibles sounded like the worst kind of self-indulgence to me at the time and this put me off.

However, a few years back I began getting interested in Grant Morrison again, and I started to think that maybe I should read The Invisibles. I was put off now by the wallet-busting seven volumes, even despite my healthy budget for pamphlets. What finally swung the deal was the new library in Deptford, the Deptford Lounge. It’s a smart modern library with a swish coffee bar and computers and wifi and most attractively a huge selection of brand new graphic novels including all seven volumes of The Invisibles.

Needless to say, after all these years avoiding it I loved it!

My Reading Year 2011

Well, all in all, 2011 wasn't quite as horrible as 2010. I have a new job and will be shortly moving house, so it's all change here. A change is as good as a holiday, as they say, although having cashed-in a week of leave at my old place before starting at my new job, I have to wonder if that's true.

At the end of the year, I self-published Panoptica as an ebook on amazon, thus surfing the breaking wave of publishing phenomenon or throwing my lot in with a passing fad, depending on which way the future goes. To be honest, it's hard to imagine the impact of ereader going away. Maybe it'll all be through more—sophisticated tablet computer things, but it's clearly here to stay and has some expansion yet to do.

It's nice, however, to have it out of my hair, buried in the torrent of slurry, so I can move on to the next project. I'm not sure if my own entry comes a little late, and publicity remains a challenge, but at least it's out there. If you're a regular reader of this blog, I urge you to buy a copy – I mean, at worst it'll sit on your hard-drive harming no one. You might even enjoy reading it, but if you do, don't forget to leave a review on amazon! (A hard copy version is coming soon!)

Okay, that's the sponsorship over with. Let's get serious. Let's talk about books!

Cutting to the chase, the best books I read in 2011 are:

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft
Supergods by Grant Morrison
The Immortalisation Commission by John Gray
The Big Knockover & Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Supergods by Grant Morrison

I have reviewed Grant Morrison's book Supergods over at the Zone. I knew I was going to have a lot to say about this, so when Tony asked me if I wanted to review it, I said yes. Making it a review means I have to focus it a little more than I might if I did it here, so I thought that might be a benefit, as well.

The review was an interesting one to write because the book engages three of my favourite topics: comics, cranky beliefs, and authors writing about their own fiction and process.

Grant Morrison is part of what I consider my generation of artists and writers. He's one of those 80s guys I first encountered in 2000AD and Warrior, who stormed America and beat them at their own game. He's the same sort of age as me, and clearly has had a lot of the same cultural influences on his life. When I was a kid, there was a section of the book shop called “cult”, which covered everything from Aleister Crowley and the Marquis de Sade, to William Burroughs and Hugh Selby Junior, to underground comics and Robert Anton Wilson. I read deeply from that shelf, and so, apparently, did Grant Morrison.

2000AD Part Three: Savage and Defoe

I keep saying this about different people, but if there's one guy who really embodies the values of 2000AD, it's Pat Mills. He was, of course, one of the motive forces behind establishing the title back in the seventies, and over the years he's never been far away. You could say the same about John Wagner and Alan grant, of course, who were similarly involved in 2000AD's earliest days, but it seems to me that no one quite expresses the conflicting impulses of 2000AD quite like Mr Mills.

While I've been reading the reprint volumes (you can find the reviews by clicking the 2000AD tag, an Harlem Heroes is awaiting review, NB) I think it's his stories that I have – so far – enjoyed the most. I don't think I'll be going back for more Robo-Hunter or Rogue Trooper, but I am hungry to get to ABC Warriors and to read more Nemesis. His stories have a restlessness about them, an impatience that expresses itself in a wilful, almost destructive desire to make us face up to the darkness that the stories are built on. It's right there at the start of Dredd (and Mills wrote a lot of the early classic strips, including the entirety of the Cursed Earth series, which contains a lot of intriguing morality plays), and in Ro-Busters, which starts as an amusing and enjoyable Thunderbirds-style adventure story and develops to combine elements of animal cruelty (via some very explicit references to Black Beauty) and – more obviously – slavery. It's almost as if Mills can't bring himself to write this stuff any more, as if he feels this massive moral obligation to a bunch of comedy boys' comic robots, to take them seriously and address their concerns.

2000AD Part 2: Strontium Dog and Judge Dredd

Having discussed my personal history with 2000AD in part 1, let's take a look the most recent progs in my possession, progs 1689 to 1702.

That's 13 progs, three-month's worth. It's amazing how quickly they pile up! I only make it to the comics shop once a month or so (Gosh in London, by the way, and consider this a plug for the friendliest friendly comics shop in London) and so I've been reading them in a slightly different way to how I read it in the past. Instead of three or four page bites, I've been reading the stories in longer stretches. Some of them, I've been hoarding up and reading all in one go, and some of them I've gone through and re-read again for the purposes of this review.
 
This is more like how I've been reading the reprint volumes I've been reviewing than how I used to read progs in the old days, and it's thrown up a few contrasts between then and now, but I'm probably going to hold on to these until the end of the series. Howzabout that then, suspense fans? In the meantime, though I'm going to look at each story in some detail (some more than others), starting with two of 2000AD's most enduring characters, Judge Dredd and Johnny Alpha.

Comics Crossroads!

I've got friends who can't really fathom the appeal of super hero comics. In fact, I'm pretty sure that a number of people I know think that it's an entirely unseemly pre-occupation for a grown man with literary leanings and that I'd be better off directing my time and money elsewhere.

Well, I can't really argue that it's an a pretty risible genre, a ridiculous and bizarre mix of adolescent fantasy and naked commercial opportunism. What does it say about me that not only do I find these stories innately appealing, but that I have lost count of the times I bought a comic long after I've stopped enjoying the series out of a misplaced sense of completionism or brand loyalty.

Well, I'm working on the latter – a family man now and I can't really afford to drop thirty or forty quid a month on comics – but I can't see myself ever losing that innate love of reading about guys and gals men and women in skin tight spandex knocking the crap out of each other. With end of Marvel's Dark Reign storyline, though, I find myself at a crossroads. It definitely feels like the end of an era. It feels like the events that started with Civil War have finally run through the system, and the themes and plots that it engendered have run their course.

It's been a wild ride, and I feel it's led to a real flowering of the whole idea of continuity as it was created by Stan and Jack all those years ago. The writers and editors in charge of Marvel right now come in for a lot of flack online, but they seem to me to have really understood the mix of cliqueishness and huckterism that made classic Marvel such a joy.

I think it's good, though, that the last few years have seen the Marvel Universe basically re-set. I can see the appeal of wanting the world and story to develop in real time – DC's Earth 2 titles All Star Squadron and Infinity Inc were what drew me away from Marvel to DC back in the 80s – but I also think that that these types of developing story gradually alienate new readers. Original characters become stale, the pillars that made them interesting gradually give way after they've been explored over and. The classic example is the romantic tension of the Clark Kent/Lois Lane variety. You've got to choose – they either get hitched or they move on. Either way, the tension that fuelled so many stories goes away.

So, Marvel's hit the reset switch. They've gone for a soft reboot rather than the universe bashing “Crisis” tactic of DC (who claim to have sworn off Crises for now), although the Spider-Man “Brand New Day” story line was a rather heavy handed way of doing away with various elements of Spidey-lore that had become inconvenient. It's fair to say, though, that Spidey works best as the frazzled college student/twenty-something than the thirty-ish family man with a public identity he had become.

Much of Marvel's realignment is based on the movies, of course, and its no coincidence that the new Avengers feature the movie heavy weights of Wolverine, Spidey and Iron Man, as well as upcoming movie stars Thor and Cap. DC seem to be playing catch up a little with their “Brightest Day” storyline, which will eventually see Bruce Wayne back in place as Batman, Hal Jordan as Green Lantern (he's been back for a while after an ill-advised sojourn as the Spectre, of all things), Barry Allenas the Flash and... er... whatever they're doing with Wonder Woman this year. (I'll post about the wonderous Grant Morrison's Batman later in the year when that story wraps up.)

So, what to do? I'm inclined to stick with Bendis's Avemgers, as he's regularly delivered over the last four years. Aside from that? I don't know. Maybe I should be heading back to underground andf arts stuff. Maybe I should dig through the Marvel Essentials and trade paperbacks and enjoy classic stuff. Maybe I should grow the hell up and start putting my money in the bank... NAH!!!

We3 and Civil War

I ordered these two from amazon to cover a brief in-between books embarrassment. I'd been meaning to read them both for a while, and I thought that a couple of comics collections would just last the few days between finishing Moxyland and the arrival of Far North.

Also, they were cheap. Both books cost about twelve quid, including postage, which I think is pretty good value. This pleased me, because among my many frailties and quirks, I am rather parsimonious. I hope I'm not so around friends, or where generosity to others is expected, but in respect of my own indulgences I am rather careful with my money.

For this reason, I've always felt a bit odd about the price of comics collections. I realise it makes no sense at all, because even if they seem expensive, they're still cheaper than collecting pamphlets. Six pamphlets will put you back about eighteen quid, depending what they are, while an album of collected issues is typically about ten or eleven pounds for the same pages of story. All you miss out on are anti-drug and army recruitment ads.

It's partly the illusion that three quid is a small purchase, where ten is a big one, but there's something about the slow drip of story from the monthly schedule that builds anticipation. I read each pamphlet a couple of times, and frequently do “catch up” sessions where I read a collections-worth in a sitting. It's the length of time between purchase and satisfaction that makes the difference, I think. What makes the collection seem expensive is when you've finished it by the time you've got home. The pamphlet keeps on giving over many months, although there's something perverse, about paying extra for the masochistic pleasure of waiting.

As it happened, these two were hand-delivered to us by our local post man just as the four of us were on our way out. When we were a few streets from the house, about to cross over the railway line into Brockley, the Postman came up and asked if we were the family from Number 90? He was just heading round to deliver a package, but if we were on our way out, he said he'd give it to us now, rather than write out a missed delivery card. He stopped his regular round and we all walked back with him to his little trolley, where he dug out our package.

If we hadn't encountered him, or if he'd just ignored us or not remembered who we were, I'd have to have had to have waited a week for my wife to them up from the sorting office, but as it was I was able to enjoy them right then and there. After we'd looked at the house we were viewing, we took the kids to the play ground where I ripped the amazon packaging off and got started, book in one hand and pushing a spinning tire swing with the other.

By the time we'd progressed to the climbing frame, I'd nearly finished We3. This isn't a testament to my speed reading, but to the brevity of We3. As I'm sure you know already (as I'm the last comics fan on the planet to read it, I think) it's the story of three experimental weaponised animals. They escape from their lab and go on the run in a quest for freedom that's been compared to Watership Down and An Incredible Journey. Animals don't talk much, and so the story is told mostly in, pictures, making this a pretty quick read.

Morrison and Quitely let the illustrations do the work, exploiting the visual aspect of the medium to the limit. There's a lot of borrowing from the cinematic vocab of establishing shots, wide-screen action scenes and drama expressed more through facial expressions than those easily mocked *chokes*, *gasps* and *sobs* that characterised the old fashioned approach.

There's as a little as possible of the author sneaking through – the dialogue is what it is, the world is as it is so richly depicted by Frank Quitely. Instead of relying on a caption to tell us, Stan Lee-style, what to feel, each beat is carefully measured – from the panicked chequer board of the animals escape from the lab to the moment of the full double-page spread as the three animals flee into the countryside. It's an effect that rewards re-reading. The brevity of the script allows you to connect with story on a visceral level that sends you careering through it without a rest.

Standing in the park, there, I began to get a bit worried I was going finish this in the grass, and sunshine and drifting chip wrappers of a Deptford playground. So, while holding a tiny hand to steady the child jumping stump to stump on the climbing frame, I took a peek at Civil War.

I found myself powering through this one, too, even though it's fairly heavy on text. It's dialogue rather than captions, presenting a pretty straight-forward story that doesn't require much thought to follow. In between big super-hero bash-ups, characters occasionally stop to deliver info dumps to keep you up to date with the plot, but finesse is not the point here. It's a story about stuff happening, not about emotional engagement of any but the most cursory sort. On the surface there's a a debate about the ethics of super-herodom, but really it's all about continuity.

Civil War – and the Marvel Universe events since – are the current acme of a way of telling stories invented by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the sixties. Cross-overs started as a way of promoting new characters in the companies established titles, and a gimmick to attract "true believers" into the fold. Stan had a knack for running gags and knowing winks at his audience, which fostered a kind of intimacy with the reader. "We know it's crazy, but we all love it too," Stan seemed to saying. Whenever you got the reference in an "... as seen in issue #87 of Invincible Iron Man", it felt like being part of a club.

The continuity approach was codified by Roy Thomas in the seventies, and in the 80s the first co-ordinated cross-continuity events appeared. In the nineties, the rise of the trade paperback collection provided a venue for short-runs of books with a limited story arc, first within series themselves, and ultimately leading to a proliferation of short series written with the collection in mind.

In short bursts, minor characters can get a brief moment in the sun in a limited story line without either the publisher having to make a an open-ended commitment. If they do well there's a chance of a relaunch off the back of it, and if not, the loss is limited, and think this has led to more risk being taken with the characters over the last few years. On the other hand, they can be useful to reset characters, returning them to their roots after a period of change and, quite often, actual death (as has happened with DC's Blackest Night has will happen as the end of Marvel's Siege storyline).

I really like these big events. It's like the biggest team book in the world, with a cast in the hundreds and all kinds of intricate webs of intrigue and plot. Instead of forming a loyalty to a book or a character or a team of characters, I'm just following a storyline. I'm reading the Avengers at the moment, and if you do that you have to buy into the whole Dark Reign/Seige storyline. If I didn't buy into that story, I wouldn't buy the comics. It's the soap opera continuity and the delicious agony of waiting that keeps pamphlets appealing for me. These collections are useful for reading things I've missed, but I don't think they'll ever replace pamphlets in my heart!

Well, anyway. we returned home from the park and I might have dozed off for a while in the afternoon. I finished We3 that evening, and Civil War ran out on Tuesday. Still, I'm glad I got them when i did, and then my friend the post man brought me a Fortean Times and finally, last Friday, my copy of Far North.

Grant Morrison on Batman and writing comics

For a long time I had a pretty ambivalent opinion of Grant Morrison. While I liked Zenith a lot, I felt that on the whole his influence on 2000AD led to a disastrous decline in quality (Big Dave, ffs!). I appreciated his work he on Doom Patrol and Animal Man, but I felt there was a lot of acting up in those books that was less to do with a commitment to a fictional vision than about freaking the nerdy comics norms. I thought that The Invisibles looked like pretentious crap (I only lasted a few issues before chucking it in).

Recently, however, I've been re-assessing him. I think it started with reading his Kid Eternity update for The Zone a few years back. I remember rolling my eyes at it when it came out and giving it a swerve, but reading it for the first time at a couple of decades remove, I was struck by what a solid piece of work it is. There was a still a bit "ooooh edgy!" going on, but to be honest that looks more prescient than wilfuly obnoxious now.

What really impressed me was his control of the fractured narrative - he'd broken it apart in a way that was a little hard to follow, but, with due attention paid, made rock-solid sense. He wasn't just showing off, he knew exactly what he was doing!

At about this time, I was getting back into supers comics after a period away from the genre and one day in the comic shop my kid asked for Batman comic. I ended up getting him one of the Morrison issues (it was the latest one out at the time - about 650, IIRC). I'm not really a fan of Batman as a character, but I read it and was really impressed by it. It was a cool and interesting story (ending in the revelation of Damien Wayne) and I checked the writer - yep, Grant Morrison.

Now, I'm not really big on the DC characters, for various reasons, but I've been following Morrison's work at DC every since. I thought 52 was fantastic and Final Crisis was genuinely brilliant. I bought up the Seven Soldiers trades and loved them to bits.

I've been reading his Batman regularly since the Batman RIP storyline offered a nice hopping on point, and his work on Batman & Robin is first-rate. It doesn't matter that I don't like Batman much, as Batman's not really what it's about - it's all pure Morrison mind mess and crazy super-hero fun.

This little puff piece on i09 makes a couple of interesting points about the Batman character, but also about Morrison's approach. I particularly liked this:

Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa. It's a shame when so many comics are storyboard-style, low-budget pitches for movies. Let me see the weird stuff.

This is why Grant Morrison is a brilliant comics writer: he loves the medium and he understands it. That's all any writer really needs.

(NB: I thought this little critical piece on Morrison from i09 a couple of weeks back was also pretty interesting, but I don't have much to add.)

Final Crisis

I re-read Final Crisis, as I threatened I'd do after reading The Seven Soldiers of Victory. This is my third round with the series - once as it came out, again when it was complete to get a perspective on the whole thing - and I think i got much more out of it. Some of this is certainly due to context provided by the Seven Soldiers series, inparticular it gave me a better understanding of what was up with the New Gods. As I have previously mentioned, I don't keep up with DC continuity.

Additionally, after an online discussion about it a few months ago, I had a much better handle on what was goin on in the last couple of issues. The break downs of time and narrative causality are easier to deal with when you're ready for them!

I was struck this time around by the influence of Alan Moore's Supreme on the Superman sub plot, this time around. At the beginning of issue six there's a scene between Superman and Braniac 5 of the Legion of Superheroes where they are descending a spiral staircase that was amazingly similar to that featured in the Legion analogue in Supreme, and the army of multiple versions of Superman also seemed like a development of the ideas in Supreme (themselves, of course, following various ideas established in Superman during from the fifties to the seventies through to their logical conclusion).

On the whole, I was once again really impressed by Morrison's work here. DC tends to take a more high brow and serious approach than Marvel, and while that can be incredibly pretentious and pompous, when it's done right it really is quite something!

The Seven Soldiers of Victory

I've been reading quite a bit of Grant Morrison scripted comics recently, one way or another. Over the last couple of years I've followed the big DC events Infinite Crisis, 52 and Final Crisis, as well as All Star Superman, parts of his run on Batman and Batman & Robin (which seems to haev stalled, so who knows what's happening there). On a whim, I decide to take a look at his "mega-series" The Seven Soldiers of Victory.

I'm not sure why I chose to read it, really. Unlike my usual pattern of relying on fate to deliver me something to read, I had to actively go in search of these (later volumes don't appear to be in print, even!). It's true that I like to read comics at bed time rather than prose, so I'm often after something to fill this wind-down part of the day, but I can usually make my monthly comics purchases last, and then a new copy of Fortean Times will arrive or a Private Eye to fill in the nights before I can get back up to Gosh.

However, I seem to be on a bit of a Grant Morrison kick at the moment. Over the years I've read a lot of his work starting with early 2000AD and bits and pieces in Warrior and Crisis. Back then, he seemed to be over-shadowed in the younger generation (that came after Alan Moore, Pat Mills, Wagner & Grant etc) by Pete Milligan, who was producing some pretty nifty work with Brett Ewins, Brendan McCarthy and Steve Dillion, among others. However, in the meantime Morrison's star has ascended through his work on American comics, starting with mini-series and graphic novels for the then-new Vertigo label, such as Kid Eternity, and then on his big breaks, Animal Man and then Doom Patrol. After these came even more cultish work The Invisibles (which I have yet to read) and similar stuff like The Filth and We3, which have made him a cult figure for certain types of comic fans (of which I guess I am one, although I hasten to point out that I am neither tattooed nor excessively pierced).

Alongside that stuff, though he's been working steadily for some of the main characters of the big two, which seemed to climax with with Final Crisis in 2008. Only Alan Moore combines these two streams of mind-bending oddness and deep understanding of super heroes and who they work. Like Moore, the oddness absolutely feeds right inot his supers work, is absolutely necessary for it, and I think it's that aspect that I really like about Morrison. There's nothing I like more than a beautifully unapologetic nutter willing to back their vision to the hilt!

The Seven Soldiers came out a year or so before Final Crisis and seems to be an early run on some of the themes, albeit with a cast of minor-characters in the DC Universe. In this one, the re-envisioned New Gods get their first (I think) outing and we get a glimpse into the fourth-wall busting metaverse that Morrison has flirted with for years (on Animal Man, eg).

So, for those who can't be bothered looking it up one wikipedia (which is a great source for comics continuity) THe Seven Soldiers of Victory were a golden super-hero group of those old-fashioned type of superheor that are always a little kooky and strange. Super heroes are tied to the fashions and concerns of their time, of course - Morrison (and even more so Alan Moore) have spent twenty years or more telling us that's so - and these guys are no different, existing in that strange transitional period when pulp cowboys, detetctives and generic adventurers still mixed with the super-powers.

Morrison doesn't bother much with these original characters, except for an update of the Shining Knight, and concentrates on various other obscure characters,plus Zatanna, daughter of Zatara and occasional member of the Justice League. That continuity's pretty much superfluous here though as anything other than background detail. While it's clearly set in the DC Universe of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, this is more of a generalised deconstruction of various super hero cliches. The difference between this and Top Ten, say, is that this has that DCV resonance to rely on that Alan Moore has to create whole cloth. This is most effective in the recasting of the New Gods - the names Darkseid, Mr Miracle, Granny Goodness, Metron and the Black Racer immediately evoke decades of comics history. It also provides vital emotional context for Zatanna's story - the death of her father (during Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, of course) weighs heavily on her mind and she gets similar scrapes along the way.

Morrison notes in the introduction his desire to create a team of heroes who never meet, but make up a separate part of a larger story, unaware of the role played by the others. Each of the Soldiers' four issue miniseries is illustrated by a different artist, and each one has a very distinct atmosphere and plot arc, yet they all kind of join up into one long narrative, book-eneded by a one-off at the beginning and the end. He largely pulls it off, but as with all his more disjointed works I found it a little hard to keep up with the main story line. Actually, I think it's simpler than I thought, just complicated by the presentation (although I'm still not entirely certain how Melmoth fits into the Shee plotline). That's okay, though, I expected to have to work at it and it's nowhere near as baffling as Final Crisis!

This comes in four trade paperback collections, featuring the comics in the order they were published, rather than as discrete miniseries (at two to a book, or something) although you can read them that way if you like. I may well do so in a few months when I've let the first read through settle, and in fact I'm rereading the Final Crisis at the moment. However, I do hope to get to the comic shop soon and I'll have another big pile of fresh comics goodness then.