Today Jesus saved me... MONEY! Or, this week in review

Anyway, I also got the new Y and Wolverine, the latter of which is a return to form by Rucka. The last issue followed Logan's dream and contained the obligatory surrealist plotting, yet another example of a work incurring my antipathy for this limpid narrative mode. But Rucka, whose strengths lie in his dialogue, and not just any sort, but of the garrulous type with the attendent snappy bons mots (thus why the Logan-focused issues have been marginally dud, and why his run on Elektra is forgettable), returns to bread and butter and gives Logan a dialogue "partner" to play off of, someone who very much likes the sound of his own voice.

30%, damn, they've gotta be selling them at cost. A place nearby had a 20% off sale last weekend and my girlfriend came home with like $100 in trades (I got a Grant Morrison JLA, Warren Ellis's Hellblazer trade, and another Hellboy).

I got a fair amount of singles this week...Y, Wolvie, Swamp Thing, Hard Time, Rucka's Batman miniseries, Wolverine: The End. I don't have much to say. They were all solid, especially Y and Wolverine. I never really read much Swamp Thing so some of the continuity and characters in the restart are lost on me. It seems like it had been a long time since Rucka's previous Batman issue, so I had forgotten a lot of what was going on, including that Superman was hanging around at all (annoying bastard that he is). Oh, and Wolverine: The End is not solid at all. It's horrible, actually.

Ok, a belated attempt at weighing in on the last Y.

As though responding to VG's complaint that Yorick was too snarky for his own good, he says that he's done being a smart alec and finally taking things seriously. Unfortunately, this latest turn (brought upon by the previous arc) is relatively less compelling. The sense of danger, though at this point in the arc too early to state definitivelly, has diminished stakes and so that much less engaging.

Part of the fun in reading the series is how contrived the perils were because of Yorick's unnecessary risk-taking. Explaining it away as some sort of thanatos-complex, while possibly sound psychology, is akin to associating the Force with midichlorians (partly due to the fact that Yorick's whole breakthrough took only 3 issues).

More sales!

Showcase Supes (I'm going out of my comfort zone on this one)
collected Enigma and Girl (two Vertigo Milligan titles)
collected LOEG v2
latest Runaways

Final tally: less than $30!

Girl's really great stuff, but Enigma is so great...words cannot express how much I loved Enigma.

Milligan has to be the most consistently great (and maybe overlooked) Vertigo writer.

Yeah, but I'd say the same for Grant Morrison and if Vermont Girl was here, she'd say the same for Neil Gaiman, apart from the overlooked. Fans tend to push the good up to the great. He's probably the most consistently good, not a blot on his record, but for every Human Target there's a Minx, for every Face there's an Extremist, for every Shade pre-50 there's a Shade post-50 (er, not literally), for every Enigma there's a... well, Girl.

Minx wasn't that bad, though it surely ended up being underdeveloped. And I like many of the last 20 shade issues.

I don't know why, but I don't think of Morrison as a Vertigo guy anymore. Maybe that's because the last few years he had a great deal of his output outside of the imprint...I can see Grant never writing again for Vertigo, but I can't see Milligan doing the same and never coming back

there's a COLLECTED Girl? homina homina Fegredo re-readability

on Wednesday I bought two Steve Bell ...If collections and Bretecher's Frustration at a second-hand book shop, then yesterday I got FIFTY-FOUR comics out of dollar boxes at a comic shop in another city!

Sorry, I don't know why I said "collected." What I was supposed to say was a complete set of singles.

Shade sort of kicked the bucket when he turned into a gurl and they bought that hotel, didn't it? Sort of a Golden Palace effect.

oh and the Bell & Bretecher were about 4 bucks each