Comics

Rereading G. Willow Wilson’s and MK Perker’s regrettably short-lived Vertigo series AIR, I’ve worked through volume one (Letters From Lost Countries) and two (Flying Machines). The protagonist is Blythe, a stewardess who finds herself in an on-going battle between the good guys (or are they) and the sinister Etesians over the power of hyperpraxis, the ability to fly instantly across any distance, which Blythe happens to possess. To further complicate things there’s her possibly terrorist boyfriend Zayn, a lost country that doesn’t exist and Amelia Earhart as Blythe’s mentor. Fun.
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE SEA DEVILS reprints the first 20 or so appearances of the Sea Devils, one of DC’s Silver Age adventure teams (along with the Challengers of the Unknown, Rip Hunter and the original Suicide Squad). Four divers, each with personal reasons driving them to the sea, join forces as divers-for-hire—though before long they’re moving away from normal adventures into a zany version of the Seven Seas where running into a merman (“I’m really a fish, but I’ve been transformed into a half-human freak!”) or King Neptune is just part for the course. The stories here (mostly by Robert Kanigher) are uneven but entertaining; it helps that as things go along, the Sea Devils get more and more matter-of-fact about the weirdness (in contrast, Kanigher’s War That Time Forgot series suffers from having everyone emphasize in every story how unbelievable everything is).
AVENGING SPIDER-MAN: My Friends Can Beat Up Your Friends is a collection of Spider-Man teamups with Red Hulk, Hawkeye and Captain America, with the Red Hulk story (the two of them going up against the Mole Man) the best. Overall though, none of this was very memorable.
Nor was I very impressed by Dave Gibbons’ THE ORIGINALS, a too-familiar story of a graffiti artist getting involved with a street gang and falling into nastier sorts of crime and rumbles with rival gangs. The fact it’s happening in a near-future SF story doesn’t help this one.
SPIDERGIRL: Like Father, Like Daughter, by Tom DeFalco and Pat Oliffe has Peter Parker’s daughter (in a parallel world where the Marvel Universe heroes are 20 years older and Peter’s retired) coping with new super-hero Ladyhawk, veteran super-hero Nova (and the idea of this 1970s teenage hero now a stuffy older statesmen in the hero community is a hoot in itself), finally convincing Dad to accept her career choice and getting sent back in time to her father’s early teenage years (very Back to the Future-ish but fun). A series I highly recommend.
IRREDEEMABLE is the companion series to Incorruptible in which the Supermanesque Plutonian goes crazy and proceeds to kill everyone by the millions. In Vol. 8, the Plutonian escapes the aliens who captured him and returns to Earth with a team of ET super-villains. Can the heroes of his former team, the Paradigm, do better against him than they’ve done in the past? I wasn’t impressed with the start of this series, but it’s picked up a lot of steam since.