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One of the most eagerly anticipated
comic events of the summer began this week with the
release of DC's Wednesday Comics #1. Every Wednesday
for the next twelve weeks, DC will publish a
16-page newspaper consisting of 20-inch x 14-inch
newspaper sheets; each sheet will provide a one-page
story of a different DC character or superteam, with
the story arcs continuing through all twelve newspaper
issues. My fellow reviewer Dave LeBlanc and
I have split the reviewing duties for issue #1 between
us, so check-out Dave's My View column for eight of
the story reviews. My assignment was to read
and review the Kamandi, Adam Strange, Demon &
Catwoman, Wonder Woman, Teen Titans, Hawkman and Flash
story sheets, as follows.
Of the seven stories listed above, the writer/artist
creative teams on the Kamandi, Demon & Catwoman,
Hawkman and Flash stories provide the strongest
first issue efforts. Writer Dave Gibbons and
Artist Ryan Sook rise above the pack with a beautifully-rendered
Kamandi broadsheet. While the page merely summarizes
Kamandi's origin, both the artistic and narrative
style are a beautiful homage to the old Prince Valiant
comics. Walt Simonson, Brian Stelfreeze and
Steve Wands partner on an excellent Demon & Catwoman
tale, which kicks-off with Selina Kyle visiting Jason Blood
a.k.a The Demon at his English castle, and preparing
by the end of Part 1 to burglarize the place in her
guise as Catwoman. It should be fun to see her
come face-to-face with Jason in his Demon Etrigan
persona in an upcoming issue!
Kyle Baker devotes his Hawkman sheet to five large
panels, presenting a narrative from Hawkman's bird
allies's perspective as they fly with him to rescue
a highjacked airliner. The bird narrator's dialogue
is poetic, with beautiful lines such as "We Flap.
Though our wings ache and our lungs burn, we flap." The
art is classic and simply mesmerizing, conveying a
dizzying sense of bird and Hawkman aerial acrobatics
comparable to a film scene. Karl Kerschl and
Brendon Fletcher present two half-page Flash stories,
through which they very creatively present Barry Allen/The
Flash confronting his traditional foe Gorilla Grodd
in the top half of the page, while in the bottom half
wife Iris Allen struggles with the marital stress
of trying to carve-out a normal relationship with
a superhero. It was interesting to see their
perspectives on differing events that each experience
in their respective half-pages within the
same timeframe.
My reaction to my remaining three assigned story sheets was
to place them in lower-quality tiers below the four
A-quality efforts detailed above. The Teen Titans
story, produced by Eddie Berganza and Sean Galloway,
didn't provide much substance beyond welcoming the
reader to meeting the team, and seemed geared to a
pre-teen readership level. Ben Caldwell both
wrote and illustrated the Wonder Woman page.
While I applaud his risk in trying a unique take on
this iconic DC A-list character, Caldwell's artistic
style is to draw Wonder Woman as a carbon copy
of Princess Jasmine from Disney's Aladdin movies.
The effect is unsettling and frankly kind of creepy
in that I really felt like I was reading a comic story
from that movie series instead of a Wonder Woman tale.
While both of these tales are at least average, I
found Paul Pope and Jose Villarrubia's Strange Adventures/Adam
Strange story to be a disappointing failure.
The art borders on the amateurish and while the story
concept wasn't bad, the written dialogue is primitive
and terrible, reminding me of something pre-high school
fanboys would produce as they fantasize about someday
growing-up and producing "real comic stories."
The few criticisms in the paragraph above aside, overall
this is one very unique and Just Plain Fun comic story
product, taking the best of the DC Universe characters
and presenting them in old-time newsprint format.
The result is a completely different and
enjoyable perspective on these characters as we are
entertained by them in this fresh and restructured
format. So my advice is to run-out and grab
an issue of this fun summertime event every Wednesday
for the next twelve weeks. I certainly don't
plan on missing a single newspage panel, and I think
I'll suggest to my fellow reviewer Dave that we re-visit
reviewing Wednesday Comics about halfway through the
remaining eleven issues, maybe switching-off on reviewing
the other half of our issue #1 review characters.
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