COMICS: Wed. 3/30/05 (spoilery)

Concrete: I was lying on the couch reading my comics. When I got to the last page of Concrete, I sat bolt upright, knocking all my other comics to the floor. I may even have yelped. Holy cow, I was not expecting that. We knew there were changes happening to Concrete's body, and that they would most likely tie directly into the overpopulation theme of the series. But I assumed that Concrete was developing reproductive organs of his own, not that he was already baking a Concrete Jr. in his rocky oven! (Strangely, it made me think of my favorite line from Raising Arizona: "Her insides were a rocky place, where my seed could find no purchase.") The rest of the issue was as smart and well-told as always (although it was no surprise that Larry's one night stand got pregnant, though the revelation was presented with artistic creativity, if not narrative creativity. And that conspiracy nut character is fairly lazily assembled; who do you think he's going to kill, or try to kill: Maureen, Larry, or Mini-'crete?), but that ending is a real kick in the teeth.

JLA: Classified: I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League. I didn't even read Identity Crisis, and this comic still gives me the creeps. It's light and fun, and Guy Gardner is always a hoot, but still, all that Sue Dibny pregnancy humor: creepy.

Countdown to Infinite Crisis: Made even creepier by my reading this the same day (I didn't pick up JLA: Classified last week). Switching right from Booster Gold and Blue Beetle wacky hijinks into this thing... creepy. Way to make me care about Blue Beetle for the first time since... well, ever, only to kill him off on the last page (even though it's been fairly well bandied-about on the intar-web for the past few weeks that that was what was going to happen). I will give the writers credit: they actually did get me to care about Blue Beetle, if only a little, and only for a little while. But that feat is outweighed by the many things this comic does wrong. I don't think I can enumerate the blatant and subtle ways in which this comic doesn't work in nearly as great detail as Brian Cronin does, in oh-so-Socratic fashion, at Comics Should Be Good (which blog I have just added to my sidebar). Suffice to say: I don't buy the villain, I don't buy his scheme, I don't buy his need (nor the writers' need) to kill Blue Beetle, I don't buy his inability to kill Beetle before then if he actually wanted to, I don't buy the contemptuous fashion in which the other heroes treat Beetle (especially Batman, who may be a dick, but is -- or should be -- smart enough not to dismiss the suspicions of someone with Beetle's intelligence), and if this comic hadn't been one dollar, I wouldn't have bought the comic at all. Well done, DC, suckering me into sampling your big, dumb, clumsy mega-crossover. Bad job at giving me any reason to stick around for any of the rest of it, though.

Still to read: Fantastic Four and Grimjack. More tomorrow.