The Ettatorial for the Week of 7-8-09
A small week of releases for me this week, only a couple of books. But in that tiny amount of purchases comes a truly beautiful, must buy pick of the week. What is it you ask? Why should everyone get it? Well, read on.
Your pick this week is DC’s newest weekly series, Wednesday Comics. Truly revolutionary, this new weekly series (actually only a 12 week event, but still) is a thing of beauty. Wednesday Comics isn’t what you might call traditional, at least in form-this “comic” is built like a traditional newspaper/broadsheet comics page, with dimensions of 14″ x 20″ all on a higher quality fold-out newsprint. To put that in context, that means each page is basically two comic books tall and two comic books wide. Each of it’s 15 pages features a story by a different “A” list creative team about a different character or team. So each week you get the cream of the crop telling/continuing it’s story, all of which are done in a unique style. The creator list on this series is a who’s who of creators, ranging from Neil Gaiman to Paul Pope to Kyle Baker. All of these creators in turn are on characters ranging from Superman to Adam Strange to Metamorpho. As I said, a broad mix of both creators and characters, all done in distinct styles. From romance to sci-fi, everything that made the comics pages something everyone enjoyed back in the good ‘ol days, this series brings it home.
I found myself enjoying all of the parts of this for different reasons, and even with a couple missteps (Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman strip is absolutely breathtaking artistically, but confusing as all get out due to the panel layout, size and count), it’s still terrific. I even found a couple favorites that snuck up on me, including Baker’s Hawkman and Bullock and Heuck’s Deadman. I was really looking forward to this series, and anticipation usually leads to disappointment, but in this instance, I was rewarded not just with my anticipation met, but exceeded. This series is truly art, and I mean that in every aspect, from the creator’s work to the form in which it comes. Special recognition and credit is due to the art director of this project, Mark Chiarello, who has put together one of the best projects to come from DC ever. I can’t recommend this enough, going so far to say that every one needs to pick this up. Make that everyone needs to pick up two, one for yourself, and one to give to someone else who is a non-comics fan to have them discover this truly magical series.
Well, there you have it folks, your pick for this week. We’ll see you back here next week, same time, same channel.
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dc comics, neil gaiman, paul pope, wednesday comicsRelated posts
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