Comics Briefly: Action Comics #6, Animal Man #6, Swamp Thing #6

Favorite Book This Week: Action Comics #6
All issues were new in stores on 2/1/12


Action Comics #6
Writer: Grant Morrison, Penciller: Andy Kubert, Inker: John Dell, Colorist: Brad Anderson
Backup: Writer: Sholly Fisch, Artist: Chriscross, Colorist: Jose Villarrubia

An interesting, if weird, issue. This wraps up the story from last time, the one about the Legion helping to fight the anti-Superman army, who stole the Kryptonite engine from Kal's rocket. It's not boring, but I'm not sure that it's all that coherent either. The twists are quite zany, the end makes comic-book sense but ignores a bunch of plot holes and runs the risk of making the Legion origin more recursive than it already was. All of that said, at least there was a plot. That's more than I can say for a lot of DC issues these days. There's a back up story as well that fleshes out some of Clark's childhood, although I didn't find it anywhere near as interesting as the little flashbacks in the main story.


Animal Man #6
Writer: Jeff Lemire, Artists: John Paul Lean, Travel Foreman, Inks: Jeff Huet

Most of this issue focuses on the low budget superhero movie that Buddy (Animal Man) starred in during a previous low point in his career. I though that sounded interesting, but in execution it fell rather flat. The whole movie section is sort of cliche and cuts off melodramatically so we can have a few pages of recap about what's going on with the characters. News flash: nothing happens to them in this issue.


Swamp Thing #6
Writer: Scott Snyder, Artist: Marco Rudy, Colors: Val Staples and Lee Loughridge

I want to like this book. I like Swamp Thing, I like Scott Snyder, I like the ideas that they are playing with, but it's taking an awful lot of issues for very little to happen except people angsting. More angst in this issue, as Abby is lost. I don't feel that I've gotten much of her character yet in this series, so I don't feel any emotional reaction at her loss/transformation/turn to the Dark Side/whatever. So little happens here that I feel like I'm reading in real time, as if the 5 minutes it took to read the issue are the same as the 5 minutes that passed for the characters. The cliffhanger-ish ending (it's obvious what has to happen next and the action by the villains makes no sense) I found especially silly.