Comics Reviews (November 2nd, 2016)

Bitch Planet #9

Righteous and angry the way you want tis book to be, but… who’s Eleanor Doane again? I mean, the issue tells me somewhat, but clearly she’s a big part of the book’s underlying mythology, and, well, that’s always rough when a book’s as sporadic as this. This would work if it were coming out on an actual release schedule, but the “an issue every once in a while” is just killing it, and I’m increasingly contemplating switching to trade for it. 

Animosity #3

The meta-arc of this one is feeling cloudy – there’s a big jump between the second issue and the third, enough of one that I went back to the second to refresh my memory, which was a mistake because I’d forgotten just how clumsy the end of that issue was, making the jump even more jarring. But on a single-issue level this is golden – an unsettling and provocative look at animal-human relationships that’s an absolute joy to read. I suspect its problems quite fitting together will eventually overwhelm it, but for now this is a highlight. 

The Wicked + The Divine #23

An ambitious high-concept issue in which Gillen proceeds to get a bunch of real journalists to roleplay interviews with his characters and then write up those interviews as though they were real articles. There’s literal authorial self-insertion. Add to that some gorgeously lush portraits by Kevin Wada and you’ve got something that’s obviously a lot of fun, and that manages to seed hints for where the next arc of WicDiv is going as well. Shit like this is why this is one of the best books on the stands.