I find myself with very little to say about this week’s comics. Well, Fables gave us a werewolf fighting Frankenstein’s monster, we got some time-travel shenanigans (and another appearance by my favorite Golden Age villain) in JSA, and the relationship between Lana and Superman goes in a direction I really wasn’t expecting in Action.
The highlight of the new issue of Mad Magazine, #446, aside from the excellent-as-usual contribution by Sergio Aragones (“A Mad Look at Paparazzi”) is “The Bush Campaign’s TV Commercial If He Was Running Against Jesus.” Obvious, yes, but still amusing. Also good is “Your Candidate and My Candidate” (“Your candidate waffles on the issues. / My candidate sees the merits of both sides of the argument.”) All in all, another fine issue of this American institution. Some of the jokes have a little dust on them, but hey, so do I.
There was also a new volume of the Fantastic Four Marvel Masterworks series, which I can’t afford at the moment, but will buy eventually since this is the only Masterworks series I’m following. It reprints issues 61 to 71 (and Annual 5) — a little past the peak of the Lee/Kirby collaboration on the series, but still great stuff. It’ll be nice to have on good paper. I don’t get the “variant” covers on these…there’s the new trade dress, and then there’s the variant “classic” look of the dustjackets, hearkening back to the original appearance of the Masterworks line all those years ago. Well, I do get why they’re doing it…for those fans who want their new volumes to match up with the old volumes, but why are they five bucks more? Are the print runs on the variant covers that much smaller that they have to bump up the price to cover costs? They’re already fifty bones as it is. (We ordered equal numbers of each cover, by the way.)
Newest self-contradicting title: Essential Super-Villain Team-Up. Gives me an excuse to link to this old post of mine, though. I jokingly suggested at work yesterday that Marvel should do an Essential Marvel’s Greatest Comics, just to screw with people.
Additional linkage:
Chris Karath has one of my favorite comics/media weblogs, but since it’s not on the Comics Weblog Update-A-Tron 3000, I’m afraid some comics weblog fans may be missing it. So go take a look, won’t you?
Also, I finally added The Sock Drawer to the weblogroll.
