More thoughts on this week’s new comics: The Brave and the Bold #13, Grendel - Behold the Devil #7, Countdown To Mystery #8, The Flash #240, Avengers - The Initiative #13, Fantastic Four #557

The Brave and the Bold #13: Mark Waid gets around to doing another classic done-in-one team-up. In retrospect I wish his entire run had been such, because it’s really where this series shines and let’s face it, his overarching plots for the longer runs were more than a little strained. This love letter to the Silver Age resurrects the Samuroids, among the most obscure Flash foes (they only appeared in one two-part story, in The Flash #180–181, thirty years ago) and while admittedly I’m a sucker for a Batman/Flash team-up, Waid hits all the right notes here and Jerry Ordway is doing great work on art. It’s nice to see Batman take a back seat to someone else for once, and it’s nice to see Jay Garrick in a role beyond “the old Flash” or “the Justice Society’s Flash” for the first time in awhile.

Grendel - Behold the Devil #7: Along with the revived Nexus, this series is a rare treasure: a return to the greatest of independent 80’s comics done by the original creator as good as it ever was. The rare Grendel stories completely written and drawn by Matt Wagner alone have always been the crown jewels of the Grendel saga, and they’re far too few and far-between for my preference, so this eight-issue series is a real treat in general. In particular, this issue is a joy for Grendel fans as Wagner sums up the entire history of the Grendel series, shows again why Hunter Rose is the one true Grendel, and draws many characters he himself never rendered as part of the series before. The real triumph is that while longtime readers will certainly be pleased by the book, Behold the Devil would work equally successfully as someone’s introduction to the Grendel series. Reportedly Wagner intended this to be read in collected form, so when Behold the Devil hits your local Borders in an attractive all-in-one black, white, and red package don’t miss it.

Countdown To Mystery #8: The last of the Countdown mini-series sputters to a halt. It’s a damn shame how this one ended up. The Eclipso section was always garbage (and this issue’s lame, cliched “Remember who you are!” conclusion accomplishes nothing but to dial Eclipso back exactly to the character’s original status quo and put everything else back exactly as it was) but Steve Gerber’s Dr. Fate was fantastic stuff, beautifully drawn by Justiniano. Unfortunately Steve went and died on us, the selfish bastard. Last issue’s Fate segment was weakly scripted by Adam Beechen from Gerber’s plot and here we get four different quick four-page wrap-ups to Gerber’s series proposed by Beechen (weak), Mark Evanier (quite good), Mark Waid (a fantastic tribute to Gerber and an excellent imitation of his classic style), and Gail Simone (mm, well-intentioned but trying too hard and a bit cloying). None are completely satisfying, but then nothing really could be. Let’s just agree on Waid’s ending as the “real” in-continuity answer and move Gerber’s Fate into the DC mainstream on the JSA — and maybe keep this Fate around for a bit, eh?

The Flash #240: I guess the “Dark Side Club” banner atop this issue heralds it as some tangential Final Crisis tie-in. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you can probably skip this one. Something does actually threaten to happen in this book in the last two pages, but since it involves one of Wally’s kids it’ll probably end up being nothing more than one of the kids’ power shifts that they’ve been telegraphing since the beginning of this relaunch. What with Final Crisis itself boiling along in the background (starting next week!) and the events of DC Universe #0, this series is looking more and more like it’s just biding time. I mean, seriously, The Flash isn’t even where you go to get good Flash stories anymore: last month, the best Flash story released was in JLA, this month, it’s in The Brave & the Bold (see above), and then there’s that whole DCU #0/Final Crisis deal. And here we get a corny TV villain Alan Moore did twenty times better in Supreme. Yeah, I’d say this is definitely just filler. But then, next week is a big week, and we’ll know more then.

Avengers - The Initiative #13: Christos Gage takes solo-scripting duties and the results are pretty much uniformly superior to anything in this title to date. This issue is funny as hell, and very clever and insightful besides. I gotta say, Gage isn’t yet writing a ton of mainstream stuff but he frequently impresses when I run across his work: his Deadshot mini was great, and if this title was this good every month, it’d be among my favorite Marvel books.

Fantastic Four #557: Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s FF is surprisingly terrible. Coming off of The Ultimates, pretty much the best work of either of their careers, this is, well…just pretty awful. I guess I’m glad Hitch found a way to draw faster again but his work really doesn’t look as good, and Millar’s plot is literally groan-inducing. (Trying to treat giant robots fighting with Kingdom Come-level gravitas was probably a bad idea.) I don’t know, maybe it’s just a bad match, where the creators and the characters don’t have the right chemistry. Too bad circumstances dictate against this team taking over All-Star Superman when Morrison finishes, though.

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