Comics Reviews (January 13th, 2016)
Digital edition codes will work for the first person to try to use them at marvel.com/redeem.
Secret Wars #9
This is the way the world unends. Not with a bang, but with a monstrously delayed issue that’s basically the long lost final act of Hickman’s now four-year-old Fantastic Four run in which large swaths are conveniently set in a featureless white void so that Esad Ribic doesn’t have to draw backgrounds. This isn’t necessarily a bad conclusion to Hickman’s big Marvel story; indeed it’s a pretty good one if you’ve been following and committed to Hickman’s thing for the six years plus he’s been doing it in the Marvel universe. And if you’ve actually kept track of that, more power to you. But as a conclusion to Secret Wars it’s a soggy mess.
Digital Code: THMBJBG0UQD2
All-New All-Different Avengers #3
Hobbled by the extent to which Waid is determined to reiterate both the classic Lee/Kirby Avengers #1 and the first Whedon film. When Waid is writing a team book about the specific characters he has here – and it’s one of the best Avengers lineups in memory - this is a real treat, but he doesn’t get to it nearly often enough to make up for the formulaic punch book it is the rest of the time. One of the most disappointing launches in memory, doubly so for Adam Kubert’s sleepwalkingly generic superhero art.
Digital Code: THMJUXG01VD2
Guardians of the Galaxy #4
There’s a part of me that just wants to say “dude, stop trying to make Yotat happen” at this point, but for all that the cliffhanger’s a bit of a swizz, the bulk of this book is the first real demonstration of the appeal of Bendis’s Guardians that this relaunch has had – a team book full of personalities and with the space for them to get multiple good moments per issue. Unpretentious and at this point a well-worn Marvel style, but as I often say about Bendis, when it works it is like slipping on your favorite pair of shoes. Actually I’ve never used that metaphor before because it’s an appalling cliche. But that fits too.
Digital Code: THMMALB8XVI9
Darth Vader #15
Vader Down ends strongly, if with an issue that suffers from having too many things to tie off. The limitations of the form are evident – most obviously in the way in which Vader and Luke can only ever have a near-miss encounter here – and at times the pull of restoring the status quo so this can still be “canon” between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back make the construction a little too visible. And I’m not entirely thrilled with Aphra ending up in the book I don’t read instead of the one I do. But on the whole, this was a glorious little Star Wars romp that was well-timed to coincide with when the cultural mood was right for a Star Wars romp. Interested to see what the book does once it gets its head down and goes back to its own plots, though. …
I’m joined by Chris O’Leary of 
Seth Aaron Hershman revisits 
Monday’s regularly scheduled post will be up at noon EST.
It is January, 1988. Alan Moore is thirty-three, and writing the introduction to the collected edition of Watchmen. His relationship with the publisher is in tatters, a fact he alludes to only vaguely when he notes that it is “the very last work that I expect to be doing upon Watchmen for the foreseeable future.” He looks back to 1984, when the idea originated, and the giddy enthusiasm of it all. And yet there is something he cannot quite locate in this. He notes that at the start “we wanted to do a novel and unusual super-hero comic that allowed us the opportunity to try out a few new storytelling ideas along the way. What we ended up with was substantially more than that.” But he cannot pin down the transition. Instead he describes a growing realization of the story’s complexity and scale, but without a sense that the realization had an end point. Instead, “there was the mounting suspicion (at least on my part) that we might have bitten off more than we could chew, that we might not be able to resolve all these momentous strands of narrative and meaning that seemed to be springing up wherever we looked, that we might be left at the end of the day with a big, messy, steaming bowl of semiotic spaghetti.” But even when the project ended. But even now, in 1988, Moore is lost in the process, saying that it is only now, in writing the introduction, that he realizes “how dazed a state I’d spent that year in, as if I’d been slam dancing with a bunch of rhinos and the concussion was only just starting to clear up,” a claim that oddly undercuts itself; the daze clearly extending beyond the year, simultaneously located “now, twelve months after” he finished the final script and in the past, as indicated by the past tense in the concussion metaphor.
A similar temporal ambivalence exists in the previously discussed description of how his “nostalgia for the [superhero] genre cracked and shattered somewhere along the way and all the sweet old musk inside just leaked out and evaporated,” a statement in which Moore is clearly lying, albeit as much to himself as the reader, the description of the “sweet old musk” evoking precisely what he says he has lost, so that the sentence offers the very experience it exists to reject. Moore casts superheroes away, but in doing so only draws them back in, a tension implicit in the very idea of nostalgia, which is of course an intense feeling for a thing that one is not actually experiencing at the time. He is nostalgic for his nostalgia, relishing in the scent of its memory even as he pushes the genre away, grimly certain in the necessity of all his burnt bridges.…
I’m joined for this by Jon Blum, the other half of the legendary Ormanblum from whence the best Doctor Who novels emerge. We talk Sherlock, then do a nice career-spanning interview that includes the sordid tale of the fourth-best Zygon story ever filmed. It’s good stuff, and 
First off, and unrelated to comics, I guested on this week’s installment of Oi! Spaceman, where I talk Moffat and feminism, Mawdryn Undead, and Vox Day. It was great fun, and 
With The Player of Games, Banks’s series immediately becomes the legend of science fiction that it is. Simply put, it’s one of the most compelling premises in science fiction, on par with A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: a post-scarcity utopia that conducts warfare via a board game.
Well that was odd.