More from the 'bary and the 'bary

Nightwing: Year One is a good retelling of Dick Grayson's transition from Boy Wonder in the pixie boots to independent Nightwing. Along the way, Grayson visits with Batgirl, Superman, Deadman, even the new Robin. It's an excellent tale of a man moving on from his childhood role to that of an adult, and it's a nice retelling of the birth of one of the best new hero creation from DC in the past couple of decades. The artwork is very cartoonish, but it's okay because the tone here isn't exactly dark and brooding - something that Dick's character has always been written to avoid as a reaction to the darkness of Batman. Now, if Batman could just get another Robin to stick around...

Spider-Man: The Last Stand is pretty redundant crap if you ask me. It turns out that the Black Cat has a thing for Peter. Oh, shock! And one of the villians knows who Spider-Man really is. Ah, the suspense! And that villian has endangered one of Petey's family members to get back at him. No way!?! And all the rogues work together to (not quite) defeat Spider-Man for good. Seriously?!? Yeah, I think I've read this about a hundred times before. Sure, the artwork by the Dodsons is pretty good (except where you can't quite tell if it's Aunt May or Felicia Hardy in the hospital bed), but overall, this is the same Spider-Man story that's been told a hundred times before.

Ex Machina: Tag was next on the docket (everything from here out came from a visit to Borders this weekend - I love using them as a library.) This second volume of the excellent Ex Machina series reveals a little more about the background of Mitchell Hundred, first super-powered mayor in the US - and of NYC, no less. He's a politcal independent - decried as bleeding-heart liberal by one side and as neo-con by the other. Here we see him consider school vouchers and officiate at a two-man wedding. No issue is beneath him or too hot for him to handle - except for his history. That he avoids like the plague. The pacing's excellent in this series, and the characters fascinating. The artwork throws me here and there with odd looks on the characters, but it's ane excellent series, and this volume (while not quite the quality of the first) is a great pick up of the story.

Batman: Hush Returns makes me start to wonder what's up with Hush. We saw in the first volume of tales with him that he was Dr. Tommy Elliot, childhood friend of Bruce Wayne, privy to the dual-identity secret now, hopeful killer of Batman. But he died at the end of Hush. Apparently, though, he's not dead. He's pissed, determined, and smart, but he's clearly not dead.

I don't really understand, and I'm curious to see how the non-death is explained as well as any possible superpowers that Hush has, because he's way too fast, strong, and brilliant to not be some sort of mutant/metahuman/whatever.

Decent enough story - kind of engrossing - and the artwork's not bad, but it's not a must-read for any real comic geek.

Flash: Rogue War leaves me kind of curious. On one hand, there's the interesting relationship that the various rogues in Flash's gallery have with each other - some gone good, some plotting together, some being a quality chaotic evil character and killing almost at whim. They're some of the few villians who've gotten enough of a chance to get character development. In this volume, we get character studies of a half dozen of the rogues, getting their background and motivation before the story really starts rolling around.

On the other hand, the fact that the Rogues have been flip-flopped from bad to good to bad to good by The Government, the Top, the Flash, Zatana, Zoloft, Percoset, and a hair dryer so often is a little odd. Does kind of make sense that if a lot of them think somebody's been messing with their brains, they'd be a little peeved.

Good artwork. Good plotline with the return of a few character's we'd been missing. Nice bastagely work by Captain Cold who continues to move further and further from the inkling of decency we saw in Catwoman just a while back. He's really, truly, definitely evil. Simple as that, and I look forward to the eventual showdown between him and Flash. What else could things be point toward other than a really crappy upcoming year for Wally?

Superman: In the Name of Gog is visually sloppy and rife with time travel foulups. I don't see how the various Gogs of the future (one for every minute of his life) have been attacking Superman to wear him down without causing a problem in the future. And how would they have unlimited time to spend back here? What happens to them if they die? So many problems...

And the artwork isn't much better. We do get Gog bringing back all of Superman's foes - sort of a "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" feel to it...to tucker our Supes and ready him for Gog, but in the end, we get a bunch of papges of buildup and like a page of resolution. Good luck with picking up the continuity after that crap, folks. Luckily, by the end, effectively nothing has happened. Oh, and Doomsday saves Superman because he's become intelligent and respects Supes. Yeah, that's all cool and sutff...

Ultimate Galactus: Secret continues the tale of the Ultimate universe's coming of a being referred to as Gal Ack Tus (or something like that - hell, it's Galactus coming...big problem for all of Earth). This isn't really the tale, though, of Galactus. It's the tale of Captain Marvel coming to Earth and flipping sides from the Kree (who are here to watch Earth die at the hands of Galactu) and helping our heroes toast the Kree.

I've said it before, I'm digging the whole of the Ultimate universe. I love the reworking of the Marvel history with the various shifts and changes throughout. I like the visual design of Captain Marvel. I like the characters of Iron Man and the rest of the Ultimates (their version of the Avengers). It's a blast to follow things along, and it works well for me because I know enough to get a lot of the references, but I'm not left out of the loop because I've not been reading the whole of the Marvel Universe for the last like forty years. It's good stuff...you really can't go wrong with any of the Ultimate line.

Tomorrow...music...I've been listening to a bunch of stuff this week - big trip to the family for shared birthdays...four hours in a car...