Books

As the name suggests, BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS: Vol. 1 collects Adams’ earliest work on the Masked Manhunter, whose look he would redefine for decades to come. The stories are mostly from World’s Finest and Brave and Bold (Adams explains in the intro that disagreements with editor Julis Schwartz kept him from the main Bat-books) so story-wise they aren’t that much. The B&B story “But Bork Can Hurt You” for example has an origin that’s feeble even by comic-book standards, not to mention absurdities such as Flash running to the sun and back. Still artwise it’s good and gets better as it goes along the evolution of Adams’ style is fascinating to see.
SWAMP THING: Raise Them Bones by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette is an excellent entry in DC’s reboot universe. The original Swamp Thing series introduced Alec Holland as a scientist transformed into the title swamp monster, then Alan Moore later retconned this, establishing Swamp Thing had never been Holland but only received his memory when it was created as a champion of the plant world, AKA “The Green.” In the new 52, a resurrected Holland (brought to life as part of DC’s Brightest Day miniseries) is pressured to become Swamp Thing again to stop the triumph of the Rot (the force of decay antithetical to the Green) but has no wish to give up his humanity. But the Rot is growing stronger, and the old Swamp Thing’s lover Abigail Arcane has become its avatar … This establishes a genuinely new Swamp Thing (though we’ll see how the difference plays out in future issues) and Snyder’s accurate portrayal of a Green where plants aggressively strive against each other is a break from Moore’s vision of a peaceful, spiritual plant world.
GREEN LANTERN: Sinestro by Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke attempts its own big change, putting Hal Jordan’s arch-foe, the renegade ring-wielder Sinestro, back in the Green Lantern Corps and enlisting Hal to help him. Unfortunately Sinestro’s smug arrogance makes him hard to take as a central character, and announcing another Big Event That Will Change Everything (following the Sinestro Corps War, Blackest Night, Brightest Day …) just made me give up on the book back when I was buying the individual issues (picking this up from the library doesn’t change my views).
IRREDEEMABLE Vol 7 by Mark Waid and Peter Krause fills my last gap in this series as the Plutonian begins his breakout from the interplanetary asylum and discovers a madhouse filled with superhuman menaces is a great place to recruit allies. Meanwhile, back on Earth the Paradigm’s efforts to rebuild the planet look further and further from success … A good job.

I love Scott Westerfeld’s “Pretties” series but SO YESTERDAY is much less effective. The protagonist is a teen professional trendsetter who helps companies promote the Cool New Thing. Shortly after meeting an pretty innovator (the people who discover or create the Cool New Things), he discovers a plot involving a hip party, a mindwarping camera and a plan to reduce the world’s cool factor. The characters are good, but the story is nowhere near as sharp as the usual (his explanation for why the French Revolution succeeded, for example, is the kind of bad explanation you get in simplified pop-culture history). A time-filler, no more.
HELL HOUSE by Richard Matheson is disappointing only because Matheson did such a good job adapting it for film. As a result, nothing really surprises me (it was a very faithful adaptation) so a lot of the punch of psychics and scientists investigating the world’s most terrifying haunted house gets lost. It’s certainly readable, but it would have been more fun if I hadn’t seen the film so recently. And the sexual content is awkward, as if Matheson’s not quite sure how far he can push it (a common problem for the early 1970s, when the standards were in flux).