This Week’s Haul

• 52 #24 (DC)
• Ms. Marvel #8 (Marvel)
• Thieves & Kings Presents: The Walking Mage (I Box)
• Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall (DC)

This week’s 52 involves the short lifespan of a new Justice League incarnation, and a few short asides, and overall other than an interesting appearance by Booster Gold’s robot Skeets is pretty ho-hum. Nice art by Phil Jimenez, though. This issue did make me think that superheroes for whom public relations is important (such as Booster Gold and – in this issue – Firehawk) really need to be 100% successful on their missions or they’re just going to get hammered.

Ms. Marvel coulda been a really good comic book. The heroine is a recovering alcoholic who recently had the opportunity to see what her career could have been like and decided to try to bring it up to that level. Instead it turned out to be a pretty good superhero adventure book with pretty good art. And then the big Marvel crossover event Civil War happened. Civil War saw the US government pass a superhero registration act, and those who signed it became duty-bound to arrest those who didn’t. Ms. Marvel is one of the collaborators (as are Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic), and this has completely sucked the life out of the series. I find the actions of the collaborators to be completely indefensible, and this series has become not-fun in an awfully big hurry. The creators could have salvaged it by (for instance) having Ms. Marvel become a collaborator because she had been an “outsider” before due to her alcoholism and she was afraid of not having anyone trust her again. It would have been tragic, but much more believable and powerful than her just happening to agree that if it’s the law then it’s right. Instead, I’m afraid this series has been wrecked by Marvel’s ill-thought-out publicity stunt.

Thieves & Kings has been one of my favorite independent comics, although it’s stumbled in recent years and feels a bit directionless. The Walking Mage is the first of what I guess with be a series of spin-off stories from the central story. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks like it could be very entertaining.

1001 Nights of Snowfall is a hardcover graphic novel featuring characters from the series Fables. It’s probably the second-best graphic novel published this year, and I’ll discuss it – and the best graphic novel – in later posts.