The Wednesday Review: NYCC Hangover Edition

Happy Wednesday! New comics are out. I don't know about you, but I'm still recovering from New York Comic Con. A metric ton of stuff came out last week, this week's relatively slim pickens, but thems the con-month breaks.

There was some biggish news from the Con: Dan Slott and Allred & Allred are doing Silver Surfer, and it sounds pretty boss. Marvel is putting Miracleman back in print, all the way through Gaiman and Buckingham continuing their unfinished story, and it's about time. And I'm really keen on reading all this, finally. Finally, finally. Anyway, I was reporting from the Con, typing up panel reports for The Beat with my mad qwerty skillz - see them here. Onto the comics.

First up, Dogs of War by Sheila Keenan and Nathan Fox is out today. Read my original advance review here. (I liked it.)

It's been a while since we've gotten our Hawkeye fix but Fraction, Aja and Hollingsworth make the wait worth it. Issue 13 is all nine-panel grids, no real action but after-action. The point of Hawkeye isn't the punch-em-ups, but the recovery, the time in between, the quiet dark, the hangover, and issue 13 inhabits this space. Taking place around the same time as the Annual, Clint is falling deeper and deeper into malaise if not depression, falling into a bunch of bottles if not the bottle, always on the mend and never quite mending, his life spinning slowly if not spiraling out of control. This is superb visual storytelling, delicate, sublime. More Hawkguy and Lady Hawkeye, please.

Hoo, dilly, I've been digging Infinity, but Avengers 21 and New Avengers 11 were kind of messy, visually. Deodato's incursion and Yu's annihilation were muddy, and neither seemed up to the meatiness of Hickman's slightly over-dense scripting. But the cover to Avengers 21 is pretty awesome, so props to Yu.

Fables 134 is one of the best issues of the series in years. Bill Willingham and the aforementioned Mark Buckingham deliver an emotional gut-punch. It's hard to pull off twenty pages of just two characters talking (half in front of a blank background, no less), but Willingham's scripting of two old friends (of the readers if not each other) and Buckingham's expressive, beautiful art pulls it off.

Zero 2 was quite good. Writer Ales Kot is joined by Tradd Moore in this issue (it has rotating art teams, thanks for the heads up, Ales).  Kot takes Zero's story to the beginning, a child soldier forged in a cauldron of pain and hate. Moore's stuff takes some warming up to, but the last three panels are astonishing.

Invincible 106 was fun, Adventure Time 21 played some Watchmen 11 trickery-doo, and Fantastic Four 13 shows me again why I just can't stand Mark Bagley's art.