As far back as the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel in 2004, writer-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley clearly had a destination in mind. Twelve hundred pages later, that journey finally ends with book six, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Oni). And although it isn’t literally the series’ finest hour, it is a fitting and entirely epic finale. Picking up where book five’s cliffhanger left off, Finest Hour finds Scott—now 24, depressed, addicted to videogames, and pining away for his lost love Ramona—struggling to come to terms with his yearlong battle against Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. Only one such villain remains: the suave, slimy Gideon Graves. As Scott confronts exes of his own and starts to come to terms with his own pathetic lapses in the relationship department, one of the most charming and affecting qualities of O’Malley’s storytelling shines through: His ability to inject science-fictional hipster soap-opera with flashes of charm, wit, and true poignancy. On a strictly technical level, O’Malley has never been sharper or more evocative. His manga-influenced artwork is a visual feast, his dialogue snaps without stretching, and his layouts and design sense are more inventive and playful than ever. It’s hard not to read a bit of the author into his creation, especially as Scott wistfully revisits the events of the previous five books—even mentioning a volume by number in one of Finest Hour’s silliest bits of fourth-wall breaking. But Scott’s arrested development gets jumpstarted when he faces the most nightmarish of prospects: becoming one of Ramona’s evil ex-boyfriends himself. Finest Hour’s only fault is unfortunately a whopper: Almost half the book is devoted to the gut-wrenching yet hilarious showdown between Scott and Gideon. That may be proportionate to the series as a whole, but it also renders Finest Hour the least freestanding and most awkwardly paced installment. It’s a bittersweet irony that Scott Pilgrim is ending just as its Hollywood adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, is about to be released—and, of course, it remains to be seen whether O’Malley’s hyperkinetic, reference-packed storytelling will translate well to the big screen. Regardless, Finest Hour is a worthy and satisfying, though somewhat rushed, culmination of one of indie comics’ funnest rides… B+
In his introduction to the $2 one-shot The Man With The Getaway Face (IDW), writer-artist Darwyn Cooke describes it as an “underpriced bitch-slap.” He’s more or less right: The concise 24-pager is intended as a teaser for Cooke’s upcoming The Outfit—a graphic-novel version of Richard Stark’s classic crime novel, and the follow-up to Cooke’s previous Stark adaptation, The Hunter. With Getaway, Cooke illustrates what he considers one of Stark’s lesser Parker stories. And yet he handles that iconic character—a coldhearted, brutally calculating, yet perpetually downtrodden career criminal—with a deft sensitivity and quiet reserve that drive home just how existentially empty Parker’s heist-to-heist life is. After getting a new face from a plastic surgeon in order to evade the mob, Parker scares up a sketchy armored-truck job with a couple of old accomplices. Cooke handles Stark’s leapfrog of cause-and-effect as efficiently as Stark handles Parker’s scheme-within-a-scheme, even though the big payoff—the heist scene itself—is depicted in a minimal, yet almost muddled sequence. Cooke’s sleek, polished retro art circa DC: The New Frontier has continued to erode into a hardbitten, grainy, David Mazzucchelli-esque style, and here, his black-and-white-and-drab-yellow artwork is a simply stunning eye-feast. It may be a mere bridge between The Hunter and The Outfit, but The Man With The Getaway Face definitely packs more than a bitch-slap… B+
Though Jonathan Hickman’s writing run on Fantastic Four with artist Dale Eaglesham has only lasted a year (and counting), it’s already one of the long-running series’ best, combining the cosmic adventuring that’s always been an FF strength with some thoughtful reconsideration of the team’s dynamics. Hickman’s stories smack of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s homages to the Silver Age, with some of the psychological underpinnings of James Sturm and Guy Davis’ Unstable Molecules, but mostly, it reads as an inventive, involving superhero comic, during a time when those are in short supply. It’s a shame, though, that Fantastic Four Volume One: Solve Everything (Marvel) is such a slim book, covering only the first five issues of the Hickman/Eaglesham era—two of which weren’t even drawn by Eaglesham. At least four of those five issues are winners, with the first three showing Reed Richards joining a council of alternate-reality Reed Richardses in an effort to solve all the universe’s problems, and the last one beginning with a lighthearted birthday celebration and ending with warnings of an imminent apocalypse. But that means the book closes on a cliffhanger, which does a major disservice to potential new readers, especially given that these issues are packaged in Marvel’s usual nondescript trade dress, with no introduction or context of any kind. That’s a shabby way to treat comics this good… B+
Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art And Culture (MBP) is a bit too haphazard to serve as a standard reference book, and its almost-exclusive focus on contemporary work renders it useless as a general history, but it’s still a must-buy for anyone interested in the incredibly dynamic world of non-mainstream black comics. A series of mini-essays by authors John Jennings and Damian Duffy on various aspects of black comics—the convention scene, the Glyph Awards, the influence of rap culture on comics, the Black Superhero Hall Of Fame, and so on—break up profiles of individual artists. Some are young creators who deserve more attention, like hip-hop-influenced stylist Jamar Nicholas; others are old pros whose work deserves reassessment, as seen in the opening essay on Dawud Anyabwile, creator of the beloved Brotherman. There’s also choice information on manga’s influence on black artists, and a delightful intro by The K Chronicles creator Keith Knight. Finally, like most books from the design-focused Mark Batty Publishers, it’s simply gorgeous to look at… A
There isn’t enough room in this column, or maybe on the Internet, to explain the convoluted history of Marvelman, or the legal troubles surrounding him. Extremely short version: He was a 1950s British extension-under-another-name of the character Captain Marvel, later revived by Alan Moore in the 1980s as a commentary on superherodom. Then the history gets really complicated. Everyone from Neil Gaiman to Todd McFarlane laid claim to Marvelman, sometimes known as Miracleman, in the ensuing decades. Last year, Marvel announced it had bought the rights to the character… kind of. Currently, Marvel only has the rights to the Marvelman and his related characters, while the Moore and Gaiman-penned stories from the ’80s and ’90s remain in legal limbo. Still, Marvel likely intends to exploit the property to its fullest. This month sees the arrival of the one-shot Marvelman Primer and the first installment of the six-issue miniseries Marvelman Family’s Finest. The former is little more than an extended ad for the character, in spite of a brief interview with nonagenarian Marvelman writer Mick Anglo and a once-over-lightly history of British comics. It also contains this ignore-the-sour-grapes-and-don’t-mention-Alan-Moore-by-name statement: “If you only know him from his dark, deconstructionist ’80s revival, then you don’t know the real Marvelman!” Family’s Finest #1 seeks to correct that by reprinting select 1950s adventures. Trouble is, the real Marvelman just isn’t that interesting on his own. The indifferently drawn, Anglo-penned stories have a kiddie-book charm, but it’s pretty thin stuff, more interesting as historical curios—and for the dark, deconstructionist fantasies they inspired—than on their own… Primer: D+; Family’s Finest: B-
Say what you will about Dave Sim, he puts his money where his mouth is. One of the few indisputable success stories of the first wave of independent comics, he’s managed to make a pretty decent living in a field where many people, even those employed with the big publishers, barely get by. Back in 1997, he published a slim, cheap instruction manual detailing how he pulled it off. Now, he’s issued The Cerebus Guide To Self-Publishing Expanded Regular Edition (Aardvark-Vanaheim) with a bigger page count and a vastly inflated cover price (up to $18 from $4). Much of the original material is intact and still sound, which is a good thing, because the updated information should be taken with extreme caution. Sim’s reach has sorely exceeded his grasp in recent projects, and while his understanding of new publishing technologies is essentially sound, his ability to put them into practice is limited by his own prejudices: He refuses to use e-mail or any kind of social networking, and doesn’t maintain any kind of web presence. Readers seeking real-world advice on how to make it in comics are probably better off consulting the original edition; the new one, like much of Sim’s recent work, is tainted by his personal obsessions, of limited value, and too expensive… C
Begun in the early ‘70s as an alternative to the Avengers, the Defenders were always a bit of a mess. With no fixed membership, no guiding principle, and practically no organization, the Defenders were a super-team that Marvel never seemed to know what to do with. But part of that sloppy quality is what made the band of second-stringers so appealing. They had a much more freewheeling approach than their responsible older brothers in the Avengers, and while the result often wasn’t great, at least took chances others wouldn’t. Essential Defenders Volume 5 (Marvel) collects 15 issues from the early ’80s and a few affiliated Marvel Team-Up stories, mostly written by a young J.M. DeMatteis. The ever-shifting artists and inkers are evidence of how little Marvel cared about the title, and DeMatteis took this as a hint that he could go nuts with it. The result is a terribly inconsistent but often daring and never boring collection. The Defenders got even stranger in the mid-’80s, and DeMatteis jumped ship to DC and made his version of the Justice League one of the oddest super-teams ever; this volume is an interesting glimpse at how those two events got started… B
For those who haven’t already read it—and who aren’t yet sick of the zombie phenomenon—now is a good time to catch up with Robert Kirkman’s and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead. A high-profile television adaptation is planned for the fall season on AMC, and the title was a big buzz-generator at San Diego, so the release of The Walking Dead Volume 12: Life Among Them (Image) is fortuitously timed. The storyline revolves around the beleaguered survivors of a zombie apocalypse finally reaching Washington, D.C. and its long-promised respite from the constant struggle against the undead for survival. But things are rarely as they seem in this world. Life Among Them is a solid story on its own and a satisfying culmination of what’s gone before; it’s also a good place for newcomers to begin catching up, since it ends with issue #72, and the current issue on the stands is #75. Be warned, though: The good timing is part of a major marketing blitz, and this book is disappearing off the shelves with extreme rapidity. The next volume won’t come out for six more months, so if you’re interested in a generally well-executed zombie story among a glut of crappy cash-ins, hop on board… B+
By this point, few comics fans need to be sold on the value of Planetary, Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s archeological exploration of decaying pulp mythology. Now complete, the full run of Planetary works as a chapter-by-chapter evocation of the grandeur of fantasy-adventure icons, and as the epic tale of one jaded hero’s effort to beat back the people who sullied those icons, in order to restore that grandeur. The now-back-in-print Absolute Planetary: Book One and the new Absolute Planetary: Book Two (Wildstorm) do the series justice, reprinting Cassaday’s gorgeous art on good paper at a larger size, and packaging both books in handsome hardcovers with slipcases. There are few extras here that can’t be found in the original paperbacks, but still, this is the ideal way to experience Planetary—the rare comic that merits the “Absolute” treatment… A