COMICS: Wed. 6/8/05

Well, new comics day is tomorrow, so maybe it's time I get around to talking about last week's comics? It was a slim week; I only got three, and one of them is slipping my mind right now. But as for those first two:

Punisher: Wow, that was crap. After going to so much trouble setting Nicky up as a believably challenging menace to Frank, after building him up into such a chilling psycho killer, this issue abruptly and inexplicably turns him into a sniveling coward. Is that some kind of message from Garth Ennis -- Nicky's homosexual acts in this issue have unmanned him? It's hard to read it any other way. And then, to top it all off, he's shot (though not confirmed dead yet) by some random guest character, rather than by the Punisher? A guest character who has to save the Punisher, who has willingly put himself into a trap he wouldn't have otherwise survived? CRAP, I say. Maybe Nicky is still alive, and the real confrontation awaits, but still, this was an awful issue, completely derailing all the suspense and drama that preceded it.

Fables: A similar complaint here: we wait all this time to get a look at the Adversary, and SNICKER-SNACK, off goes his head with no effort whatsoever? I assume it will be revealed either that the Adversary has survived the head-removal somehow, or that that giant wasn't the actual Adversary after all, but still. As it stands, this is another great build-up of a villain, culminating in a severely disappointing confrontation.

Oh, yeah! The third comic was Batman: Dark Detective. This tale is a lot of fun, with a Batman you don't see much of these days -- one who can express emotion, one who can step back, albeit slightly, from his obsession -- mixed with tremendously entertaining, larger-than-life, colorful portrayals of big-time Bat-villains like Two-Face and the Joker. Great throwback fun.