2018.010 Astro City: Reflections

I love that the volumes of Astro City seem to alternate between a big story or smaller, individual character pieces.  This volume has three stories to it.  I love reading Astro City because it always feels like a history lesson.  Sometimes we're seeing characters for the first time, but Kurt Busiek makes us feel like we've been reading about them for years.  Sometimes he uses a classic Astro City character and we're just getting yet another chapter in their history.  Sometimes he uses the perspective of a peripheral character to tell the story of a hero we already know.  This series is so smartly produced, I just don't know how he can continue to turn out story after story like this.  I really loved the Samaritan story and especially the Steeljack story in this volume.  The Furst Family story was kind of meh to me.

Astro City: Reflections

Written by: Kurt Busiek

Illustrated by: Brent Anderson, Alex Ross

Vertigo 

154 John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol 9: Critical Mass

You know how excited you get when you find out one of your favorite writers is about to take over writing one of your favorite characters?  All that giddiness, all the expectations?  I was so excited for this volume because Paul Jenkins meets John Constantine.  What could be bad about that?

Well..... this is probably my least favorite volume of this series so far.  For some reason, this just didn't click with me.  It didn't ring true. The volume starts off with an Eddie Campbell tale.  That just didn't do it for me at all.  I know of Eddie Campbell, but I can't say that I've read much by him.  So I don't know if this is typical of him or not.  The story didn't feel right.  John didn't feel right.  The circumstances didn't seem right.  But I was willing to overlook it.  I can't like everything, right?  Paul Jenkins arrives and starts his story right where Eddie left off.  I appreciate things like that.  More than I can express.  But at the same time, this just didn't feel like John Constantine to me.  I really can't put my finger on it.  Maybe say that this character was Jack Cunningham or something like that and I might like it more, but as a Constantine story, it just didn't work for me.

On the plus side, Sean Phillips' art is amazingly beautiful.  I could just stare at the pages all day long.  I just would rather not read them again.  LOL.  

I'm very much backlogged on this series.  Volume 17 or 18 just came out, so I need to catch up on Constantine's adventures.

John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol 9: Critical Mass

Writer: Paul Jenkins, Eddie Campbell, Jamie Delano

Artist: SEan Phillips, Pat McEown

Vertigo

066 Astro City: Honor Guard

A couple of posts ago, I was complaining that Kurt Busiek, although a solid writer, just doesn't get the Justice League.  Or the DC Universe for that matter.  There's always been something about the stuff he writes for DC that doesn't click for me.  His Marvel work is great and he's so good at what he does, but not when it comes to DC properties.  Astro City is his creator owned book and what he does here makes his Marvel work look like his DC work, if that makes sense.  There's something magical about reading Astro City to me.  It rarely hits a sour note (though there was that maxi-series a few years ago.  The less we talk about it, the better).  He was born to write this book.

Very often in Astro City, Kurt will write a story which involves some sort of flashback.  Sometimes it's a single page showing scenes from previous adventures of the characters.  When you read something like JLA and they do that, you see a panel of them battling Shaggy Man and you remember that story, or they show a panel teaming up with the JSA and it brings you right back to that issue.  When Kurt does that in Astro City, you get the exact same feeling even though what he's flashing back to has never been published before.  Every time I read an issue of Astro City, it feels like a universe I've been heavily invested in since I was ten years old.  How he can manage to do that on a consistent basis is beyond me.

This collection is a little different than the last few.  It's full of one or two part stories that were published in between longer arcs.  Each story is about a different member of the Honor Guard.  You get some decent backstory on some of these characters.  I do love a nice done-in-one tale and these are all solid stories.  Also different about this collection is the stories are all drawn by guest artists.  But that does not detract from any of the stories.

Astro City: Honor Guard

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Jesus Merino, Joe Infurnari, Gary Chaloner, Tom Grummett, Wade Von Grawbadger, Cory Hamscher, Ferlis Santacruz, Agustin Padilla Bob Wiacek, Andrew Pepoy

Vertigo Comics

012 John Constantine Hellblazer Vol 8: Rake At The Gates Of Hell

I used to love Hellblazer back in the day.  I read the series when it first came out and stuck with it for a number of years before ultimately dropping the title.  There was a time when my choice was between reading everything I wanted to or buying groceries.  I was fat.  Groceries won.  By the time the stories in this volume were originally published, I was no longer reading the book.  And that's a shame.  Over vacation at the beginning of December I read the previous volume of this, collecting the first half of the Ennis/Dillon run.  It was wonderful.  This book finishes up their amazing run.  To date, it's been my favorite run.  Garth Ennis did such an amazing job building up (and ripping apart) the supporting cast.  He put John through the fucking ringer and it was so much fun to watch John fall, pick up the pieces and rise again, sticking it to the fucking devil.

DC/Vertigo has done something pretty wonderful with this series.  They've gone back and are in the process of "remastering" the run.  Most every issue has been collected in trade before, but what they're doing with this run is more of a chronological reprinting of the entire series.  Some of the stories presented in the earlier volumes haven't been collected before because they didn't fit the trade paperback format.  I think volume 14 is the most recent one out, so I'm a bit behind, but I'm catching up!

I enjoyed this run so much I ordered the first Preacher trade.  I need to get to that soon.

Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Steve Dillon, William Simpson, Peter Snejbjerg
Vertigo