It’s a mark of a good story, in my mind, if I’m one to like it when everyone else hates it.

Well, maybe good is too strong a word – look at something like Alien vs. Predator. Schlocky, brainless action-fun with the only decent acting coming from that guy from Millennium. I love it (mostly for the Predator bits) while almost every other human being I know over the age of 18 thinks it’s crap.

I tend to be a bit of a magnet for storylines and people that most of my companions would rather live without, which has now tended to be the case with the works of Scott Lobdell. As I’ve previously covered I was quite surprised by how much I loved Superboy but was surprised to find most people online hated the pants off it. Apparently the reinterpretation of a goody-two-shoes Superman ripoff into a cynical, jaded youth (with minimum angst) who can blow up trains with a flick of his finger is something to be feared and ridiculed. From what I understand Lobdell’s taken many, many hits about Red Hood and the Outlaws‘s overt sexism and female proportions on par with a six-foot hourglass with basketballs mounted on the top, and the vitriol seems to be flowing thick and fast for his current Teen Titans run.

Now, if you cast your mind way, way back into the mists of Sunday Dash prehistory, back when I was still a penniless Facebook reviewer with a penchant for annoyingly tagging people in posts they didn’t want to read, you’ll see I checked out a Blackest Night tie-in involving the Titans; I’m guessing they dropped the Teen from the title so as not to provide fuel for pedophiles. I did enjoy the experience, and found the miniseries to be one of the better of the crossover event over others like Superman (no surprise) and Batman (lots of surprise).

This iteration is so far away from the original formula it’s evolved almost into its own lifeform, as far as I can understand it with limited knowledge of the Titans beforehand. It kind of evokes Season 9 of Stargate SG-1 with a dude (in this case, former Batman protege Tim Drake) assembling a team of like-minded individuals to take on baddies who are coming after emerging metahuman teens. On the roster for this gathering is Cassie Sandsmark (don’t call her Wonder Girl), a dude named Bunker (who takes the prize for most awkward dialogue), an out-of-time Kid Flash (who may or may not be a murderer/thief/political activist/botany enthusiast) and two other randoms named Solstice and Skitter.

The plot also crosses over with Superboy a lot, and it really casts the former Boy of Steel in a rather antagonistic light. Obviously we all know he’ll turn good and join the team at some point, but for now if this was a high school drama then Superboy would be the hot senior who beats up nerds and cheats on Emma Stone’s character with a blow-up doll.

I really cannot understand why so many fans are outspokenly against this title. It’s not the greatest piece of graphic literature ever devised, but it’s fun! Seriously, who can’t see the appeal in a bunch of superhuman teens (and Red Robin) wrecking up an aircraft carrier or messing with Time Square during New Year’s? And why can’t people see the enjoyment in a teen book that doesn’t have Chernobyl-level angst radiation going on? You’d think being as depressing and whiney as a malfunctioning jackhammer was something of a prerequisite whenever teenagers are involved in a story.

The artwork by Brett Booth is pretty good, even though the faces get a little weird every now and then and make them all look like they’ve had botox recently. Shading can get a little excessive, but on the whole it’s fleshed-out and visually appealing.

Dialogue is a bit clunky here and there (including an absolutely awful admission of homosexuality by the aforementioned Bunker that I believe was meant to come off as casual but ending up sounding shoe-horned in) but overall is fairly good. As I said there’s very little angst (apart from a bit of Superboy-introspection that comes and goes quicker than a lit match in a snowstorm) and it makes for a refreshing change to the regular teen-story affair. Of particular note is Kid Flash, whose every line of dialogue made me giggle.

I really should find a more masculine version of “giggle” to use in these reviews.

Something my father taught me is that you can’t fully condemn something unless you know the thing. You can’t knock Fifty Shades of Grey until you read it, and you can’t say a political party’s bad news unless you’ve really looked at their policies, people and the number of times their leader has stood out in public wearing Speedos. Having now experienced Teen Titans: It’s Our Right to Fight, I can safely say that it really is good. It’s not William Shakespeare, but it’s not Stephenie Meyer. It’s got charm, wit, an appealing story and some great artwork.

And at the end of the day, what more can you ask for?

Today’s one of those rare days where I have time to squeeze in some recreational writing alongside the washing, sweeping and genocide gaming I usually have to get done, and so I figure it’s time to take a brief look at one last prologue to the upcoming Avengers vs. X-Men hardcover.

“Dash!” I hear you all yell, “You’ve already covered three prologues already, what’s with there being another one?”

Well, I’d reply, it’s because apparently there’s a lot of ancillary material one needs to explore before getting into the meat of the crossover…which, when you think about it, isn’t a point in its favour. If there’s that much required reading beforehand, would that not alienate readers and make them fearful of the long-winding continuity cavalcade that needs to be explored, which is an indication of the stigma superhero comics suffer on a regular basis?

Sorry, too deep. Let’s back up and talk about a dude beating the Avengers up.

X-Sanction marks the return of comics veteran Jeph Loeb into the spotlight as he revives longtime X-Men ally Cable, fresh from his “death” in Second Coming, who then embarks on a mission to maim, bludgeon and kill any Avengers within spitting distance to protect future mutant messiah Hope. Over the course of the short, tight storyline Cable makes mincemeat of Captain America, Iron Man, the Falcon, Red Hulk and a slew of other related heroes.

That’s it. That’s really all there is to the story. It’s not incredibly deep – although there are some good pages where Cable’s motivations are explained, ish – and consists mainly of superhero smackdowns that smack strongly of the style used in AvX VS, where two heroes spend an entire issue beating the crap out of each other. It’s not a bad thing in this case, and it’s actually kinda fun to see Cable beat seven shades of piss out of some of Marvel’s most beloved roster. It’s also refreshing to see someone flensing heroes alive with a motivation that doesn’t involve brainwashing, an evil clone or extraterrestrial possession, since Marvel have a tendency to flog that dead horse with such regularity the whip now resembles a garrote wire.

Artwork’s pretty good – I hadn’t checked out Ed McGuinness before, but what I saw wasn’t too bad. It does get a little chalky at times, and Cable’s absurd muscle proportions can be a bit – ahem – distracting on some pages, but overall it’s pretty well-handled.

Dialogue is…a bit lacking. It’s not really notable for atrociousness or standout soliloquyising, but it’s passable. Hush was better, but then again this is a different kettle of fish.

So yeah, brief review for a brief book. It’s worth checking out (if you can ignore the absurd price you pay for the hardcover) and, if nothing else, does a great job of showing that superhero comics can give good narratives without particular depth. It’s just shallow enough to be enjoyable – not quite Attack of the Clones, but definitely above The Clone Wars.

STORY: 3.5/5
ARTWORK: 3.5/5
DIALOGUE: 3/5

OVERALL: 10/15

BEST QUOTE: “The Avengers. I’m coming for every single one of you.” – Cable

Hype can be a terrible thing sometimes when it comes to mass media, as fans of Peter Molyneux can probably already tell you. While it does usually lead to greater turnouts, profits and first-day collections whenever a big movie or TV show comes out, more often than not it can end up going on to dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations and the innate desire to throw rocks at the creators’ cars. Look at The Last Airbender – advertised and hyped up the wind-twiddling butt, and yet turned out to not only be a major disappointment to fans but also signposted the moment when M. Night Shyamallama finally jumped that bloated, nadir shark.

Comic books are no less a victim to the same hype syndrome, and it’s entirely possible even for characters like Batman to suffer the same fate as a Michael Bay movie. So it was with what some might say was trepidatious enthusiasm that I approached Aquaman: The Trench after enjoying the underwater adventurer’s exploits in Brightest Day, being under the impression that it might live up to its status as a new Geoff Johns treasure to sit beside his acclaimed runs on Green Lantern and The Flash.

Unfortunately, what we end up with is a meandering, rather abruptly-ending narrative that starts off a new arc-based story in the vein of Swamp Thing and Animal Man, yet doesn’t have any of the grand, epic scale of the former or the smaller, interpersonal nature of the latter.

Aquaman as a character has received a lot of stick for his rather lacklustre powers, appalling characterisation and a slew of hilariously awful quotes, mostly ripped from Superfriends, and it seems the inhabitants of DC’s new universe are fully aware of this. Throughout The Trench the eponymous hero gets a lot of “help” from local law enforcement who really just like taking the piss out of him, even when he’s bleeding after beating the everloving crap out of a bunch of underwater fish-people with a trident large enough to make even a Viagra addict go floppy in shame. While it is nice to see a bit of a meta-example of sticking real world dispositions in the comic book world, it does get a bit tiring when all we see is either Aquaman killing things or people telling Aquaman he sucks before he goes off to kill more things. If it weren’t for the established reputation as a Justice League member, you could easily confuse him for a befuddled serial killer.

The plot, such as it is, deals with recent landowner Aquaman and his wife Mera (do not call her Aquawoman) taking on a bunch of aforementioned fish-people who emerge from the eponymous Trench, an area deep under the ocean. Once that’s all sorted (which happens alarmingly fast) there’s a bit of an interlude where Aquaman gets lost in a desert and Mera buys dog food – then there’s a haphazard link between the end of this book and the start of the next title, which promises an arc to answer the question of who sank Atlantis.

I’ll be up-front – I was left disappointed by this book. It’s not because Aquaman’s a useless, schmaltzy hero – if anything, his recent outing in Justice League showed he’s more than capable of being a badass – or because we like to take the mickey out of him. It’s because there’s almost nothing relatable about his character, besides some quick slivers of backstory about his human dad that are inserted as a smoothly into the narrative as an obese man in a swimming pool, and because the plot goes in a bunch of different directions without settling on anything interesting or coherent. The enemies from the Trench don’t seem like that much of a threat – especially given the alarming ease with which they are dispatched – and are about as complexly layered as a cockroach. On top of that, almost every human character is presented as a quasi-racist asshole whenever the underwater superheroes are around, as if to highlight how put upon Aquaman and Mera really are.

This isn’t helped by art that really misses the mark visually and stylistically – the veteran team of Ivan Reis and Joe Prado do some good visuals here and there, but for the most part it’s pretty uniform. Where it majorly falls down is in the underwater scenes; almost every one of them is confusing, poorly drawn and muddled. The final confrontation between Aquaman and the Trench-people was a messed-up, incoherent blob of black and blue that more closely resembled the hair of that girl from The Grudge with bits of orange dandruff thrown in for good measure. Also, everyone in this story has really, really weird eyes – especially Mera, who wouldn’t look out of place in a Roswell conspiracy theory piece.

As the final nail in the coffin, the dialogue is plain – not great, not awful, just plain. There’s none of the really dry wit that pervaded Johns’ runs on Flash and Lantern, and as stated previously none of the characters have relatability the way those heroes did. Aquaman and Mera always seem wistful and two-dimensional while the humans are one thinly-veiled insult away from seeming like Klan members. There were one or two moments here and there that made me giggle, but on the whole it’s nothing special.

So in the end, I’m left wanting more. If there’s one thing the New 52 has done really well, it’s reinvigorate older heroes or teams and make them more interesting – like the Teen Titans, but I’ll get to that later – so I was expecting, especially with Johns at the helm, that I’d get something great here for the sea-dwelling superhero. Instead, Aquaman: The Trench just goes for a plain, bland, unappealing setting with boorish characters and a flimsily-written plot.

But hey, at least it’s not a Tony Daniel book.

STORY: 3/5
ARTWORK: 2.5/5
DIALOGUE: 2.5/5

OVERALL: 8/15

BEST QUOTE: “Bad food.” – Trench-person.

I’m pretty sure every man and their dog knows my opinion on Hush by now, but for the sake of rounding out this little self-indulgent exploration – and since the thesis has left me bereft of the ability to consume new comics this week – I’ll clarify my thoughts thusly.

Hush is pretty much the first major comic book I ever read from start to finish. I can’t remember if Watchmen came before, and there is a good chance it did, but Hush is at the very least the first Batman book I ever read. Coming on the heels of The Dark Knight I was in something of a Batman fever, and Hush was the cure to all my ills.

God that wordplay was awful. If I ever use a medical metaphor in this blog again, feel free to sue.

By today’s standards the story is actually kinda basic; it’s essentially a massive beat-em-up between Batman and almost every member of his Rogues Gallery, all while a mysterious puppetmaster (the eponymous Hush) orchestrates things from behind the scenes. There are moments of cerebral, thought-provoking character development – predominantly in terms of Batman’s growing relationship with Catwoman and the memories stirred with his reunion by childhood friend Tommy Elliott – but on the whole it’s good ol’ popcorn fun from start to finish with some dark undertones throughout.

Admittedly I am quite biased when it comes to Hush, seeing as it was my first real look into the Bat-mythos and one of my first real experiences with graphic novels, but it really is a greatly accessible, enjoyable read. I love it because you can pick it up as a first-time reader and get what’s going on without too much knowledge of backstory. I love it because there’s appearances – big and little – of almost every major character in Batman’s pantheon. I love it because Catwoman is actually decently proportioned without looking like Hugh Hefner’s Fetish Bunny. And also – it’s really, really pretty.

As some of you may remember I’ve got a bit of a thing for the artwork of creative duo Jim Lee and Scott Williams. This was the first time I’d seen their art and by Fishchrist it was beautiful. The colours, the layering, the background details, the lines of articulation…it was absolutely sublime. Even Superman didn’t look too bad – and for a time when I wasn’t open to new ideas, that’s saying a lot.

The dialogue was quite well written, and didn’t swing towards either the Grant Morrison method of telling you nothing or the Tony Daniel gameplan of telling you bugger all. It was a nice, Goldilocks-zone of wording with some great snark on behalf of resident deadpanners Robin and Nightwing. Admittedly Batman did get a little self-indulgent here and there, with some lines bordering on Frank Miller-esque ego-stroking about how kickass he is, but in a story like this – especially as a gateway entry to the mythos as a whole – it actually work really well.

While this is my favourite Bat-book in the whole of ever, there are others that can surpass it in both creativity and storyline, and to the veteran fan it might be a great read but not necessarily top of the list. Despite all the books I’ve read since – and trust me, when it comes to Batman there’s been a lot of them – Hush is still, and probably always will be, my favourite Bat-story of all time, and by extension my favourite graphic novel (at least at time of writing). It’s a solid, durable, engaging, action-packed, deeply character-based story that new fans can enjoy from scratch and old fans will almost certainly get a kick out of anyway.

So that’s the end of my Top 5, for the few of you who decided to join me on this little odyssey of self-indulgence. It’s quite probable that in years to come the list will change, replaced by newer, bigger, darker stories as we move further into the post-9/11 cynical age of global security and lack of social justice. But hey, if we’re all still around in twenty years time – after the nuclear winter ends and the US declares war on parts of itself – let’s get back together here and update the list, yeah?

TOP 5 ENTRY NO. 1 – BATMAN: HUSH

BEST QUOTE: “Criminals, by nature, are a cowardly and superstitious lot. To instill fear into their hearts, I became a bat. A monster in the night. And in doing so, have I become the very thing that all monsters become – alone?” – Batman

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It seems the corner of DC’s new universe collectively known as “The Dark” is really producing some quality work, which is refreshing; whilst I do find superhero comics enjoyable, I do get a bit weary when it’s all I read for a few months. Comic books, much like Australian political parties, need variety every now and then.

As such, I’ve been enjoying what’s come out of The Dark so far; Animal Man back in May was not only an engrossing and well-illustrated tale of supernatural horror, but also a great juxtaposition against the flash and popcorn fun of Justice League. A few months later, Swamp Thing stands as a similar tale of gothic floral nightmare against the airy-fairy wish-wash of…something that’s airy-fairy wish-wash. I dunno, New 52 releases have been kinda ok this month.

But anyway, Swamp Thing: for those of you (like me) who never read Alan Moore’s seminal classic or any of the subsequent works that followed, Raise Them Bones does give a very good recap throughout of how put-upon botanist Alec Holland went from being dead, to being Swamp Thing, to being not-Swamp Thing, to being a postman…oh, wait. There’s quite a bit of expository dialogue that makes me think this book is trying to in some way act as a bandaid for the continuity that’s been as all over the place as an epileptic jaguar driving a sports car, but without prior knowledge of the mythos I can’t really comment – although I can say that I’m reasonably certain Moore wouldn’t have drawn Holland like a bodybuilder in the 80s, back when superheroic men didn’t have the proportions of a person made entirely out of protein shakes.

Holland discovers he’s at the centre of an ancient, supernatural plot by some dudes known as the Rot (whom you may remember from the aforementioned Animal Man title) and that he must once more become Swamp Thing in order to save the world and get out of that deadbeat carpentry job he’s got going on. Holland resists, meets a hot girl with a shotgun, fights an eight-year-old who can twist peoples neck 180 degrees and starts to really question whether or not he’s up to the task of turning into what might happen if Mr Potato Head and a Chia pet copulated.

The story is good, no doubt – come on, it’s Scott Snyder, of course it’s good – but I feel like it’s only really half a story. It’s presented as the start of a grand arc they way Animal Man was, but while Animal Man had a great character progression and ended on a satisfying cliffhanger that left me wanting the next one, Swamp Thing instead ends rather abruptly and leaves me with a sense of “Wait, that’s it?” It doesn’t help that the resolution to that ending won’t appear until April, so overall I’m left the same way the last two Harry Potter films left me – incomplete without the other half.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still definitely worth a read; the artwork by Yannick Paquette is marvelously gothic and brutally gory, and while it can get a bit cluttered at times – especially during the aforementioned exposition – it really does evoke the same kind of dread that Animal Man did, which probably makes sense, since the two are headed for a crossover later. The similarities gave it a sense of familiarity for me, and made me double check no flies or dead pigs were anywhere near my house (it makes sense in context).

The dialogue is the usual Scott Snyder standard of excellent writing, although it does get a bit bogged down when the former Swamp Things are explaining stuff to Holland at length; the repetitious orange speech bubbles detract from the atmosphere a little, and the flow of the narrative does get broken up a bit during these parts, but on the whole it’s still pretty good.

On the whole, Raise Them Bones isn’t bad at all. There’s not a lot more I can say for fear of spoilers, but rest assured it does away with any negative connotations or impressions you might have of the character. If there’s one thing DC are doing quite well at the moment, it’s reinventing superheroes with shot reputations and making them awesome again.

Speaking of, next week on Sunday Comics – AQUAMAN!

I really seem to be pigging out on eaten-words right now.

After last week’s revelatory Superman review I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to maybe check out some other characters in the Super-mythos – I mean, hell, if one’s good there’s a chance the others might be too, right? So, of course, that meant an excursion into the unexplored waters of a prominent Teen Titan, half-clone of Superman and all-around angsty bastard with a rather uncanny resemblance to Shia LaBeouf after he’d gotten a few golf balls stuck in his throat.

Thankfully, none of that’s involved in Connor Kent’s mythos this time around. Instead we’re witness to the birth of the eponymous Superboy as he emerges, rather explosively, from a test tube in a facility run by super-secret-squirrel organisation N.O.W.H.E.R.E., the place of his birth. The genetically-engineered person-of-mass-destruction is then trained by N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to be an awesome killing machine, but over the course of the story he gradually gains an identity, personality and sense of ethics – even if he has to all-but flense the Teen Titans to do so.

One of the things that immediately jumps out at me with this book is the character development, because there’s a lot of it; the inner monologuing gives a clear sense of Superboy’s personality, struggles and internal debates, and really paints the portrait of a lonely, aimless lab experiment attempting to add some meaning to his life somehow. It’s almost tragic, the way he flits about from mission to mission trying to discover who he is as a person and what life he can possibly have outside the walls of his secret prison.

His captors are equally as fleshed out as he is; future Ravager and sword fetishist Rose Wilson comes across as a bit of a tragic villain through the struggles she has with her best friend, Dr Fairchild, who’s trying to come to grips with her treatment of Superboy as a lab rat who then deals with the machinations of Centrehall, leader of a clandestine organisation inside N.O.W.H.E.R.E. and a bit of a well-intentioned extremist who tries to coerce Superboy into stuff…

Ok, you get the picture; point is, almost every player is this super-opera is rounded to the point of being as developed in a few issues as other characters are over years of development. It’s also really refreshing to see Superboy as being both something different from Superman and his own pre-Flashpoint self, even if there is still a bit of angst going on.

One of my criteria for what constitutes a “good” comic book is its ability to hook me in for further installments – a great way to do that is drop a big cliffhanger that actually works for the story and makes me go “OMG WANT.” Superboy achieved this; without wishing to spoil, the ending is a WHAM moment that made me curse in frustration that I have to wait a whole frikkin’ year for the resolution for it. Might not be as impact-y to other readers (especially if you currently read Teen Titans) but to me it was a really solid effort.

So while the writing gets a big fat tick on the checklist, the artwork is where things stumble somewhat. Lean and Silva kinda make the book look a bit too cartoonish; the art is quite basic, with not a lot of fleshing out or intricate detail. While it’s certainly not the worst I’ve seen, it’s definitely not the best; and really, it’d be nice to see some actually properly-proportioned women in the New 52 at some point. Please, no more watermelons on telegraph poles.

Dialogue actually works surprisingly well, offering great introspection on the part of Superboy and explaining his motivations and evolution without diverging too much into drowning you in waves of chokey exposition. While the villain’s dialogue can be a bit hammy at times (lookin’ at you, Rose Wilson) Scott Lobdell does a really good job of writing the characters, on the whole, as engaging and interesting – including, surprisingly, Supergirl, who I’ve now added to my reading list for this year.

On the whole, I’m finding myself really surprised by the great range of flavours the Super-titles are offering right now. It strikes me as a very good move on DC’s part to actually try shaking up the status quo of one of their most beloved characters – beyond giving Wonder Woman pants for twenty seconds – and actually succeed at doing it. Incubation was an intriguing, heart-filled tale of a lost little boy with the power to blow up a city, and my only really big complaint is having to wait another bloody year before seeing the resolution to that cliffhanger.

And before you suggest it, no, I will not trawl Wikipedia to look for the answers. What am I, a scholar?

STORY: 5/5
ARTWORK: 3/5
DIALOGUE: 4.5/5

OVERALL: 12.5/15

BEST QUOTE: “I figured it out. I’ve spent a lot of the last week in the library (you might be surprised at how boring “freedom” can be). I’ve learnt about rum springa; it is a rite of passage in the Amish culture: as a teenager you are sent out into the “real world”, to make certain the life you choose is based on an informed choice. I’m pretty sure that’s what Centerhall did. Or maybe he’s just the angry parent who catches you smoking and makes you consume an entire carton of cigarettes. No, mysterious clandestine organisation – you choke on it.” – Superboy