Last Words (and Pictures)

Hey, I'm back. Miss me?

I want to talk about last pages. It's really the advantage of the singles over the trade. The shocking reveal. The nail-biting cliffhanger. The joke and freeze. Even the summation, moral, and coda. The great last page confirms "Yeah, you just read A Story, a real story, and don't it suck for you that you have to wait a whole 'nother month for what else we got in store." You lose that in the trade. Golden moments, like Superman and Lex Luthor plummeting to Earth in Up, Up, and Away, are frozen in time as you wait weeks for the next issue. In the trade, it's just another page in the middle of the book.

Yeah, it's arbitrary, a product of the medium rather than a creative choice, but good creators can make the boundaries work for them. I bought six comics last week* and all but one had BRILLIANT last pages. (The outlier was Boys #4, which is probably my new definition of "wait for the trade.")

Secret Six #5 employed the classic, reveal and cliffhanger one-two: forgotten character reappears, then immediately puts our heroes in mortal jeopardy. Now you have to read issue #6, the conclusion, to see how our "heroes" get out of this one. If they get out of this one.

52 #25 does the classic with a double twist. Not only does the mysterious mastermind behind the Island of Mad Scientists step forward to imperil Black Adam and Isis, his identity turns out to be a new twist on an old, buried character, and his particular threat references earlier clues in the series itself, drawing the disparate plots together.

Action Comics #844 has a reveal, but really the last page serves as a summation and conclusion. It ends the chapter being told. The story could conceivably just end on that last page, since it establishes a new but relatively stable status quo. Not that it will, because there's a "to be continued" hiding in the bottom right corner and the new status quo is too big a change to be confined to just one book.

Nextwave #9, plotwise, doesn't have that great a last page. Nothing's revealed. The heroes are in no more or less danger on the last page then they were six pages earlier. It certainly isn't the end of the story, or even the beginning of a new one. But it was a PERFECT last page. Because it contained a joke--a joke so powerful that I could not continue reading. That's right, Ellis and Immonen knew that anything read after that page would be lost in its massive wake, so they moved it to the end where it could do no harm to the rest of the story, while at the same time positioning the joke for maximum focus, making it more powerful than you can possibly imagine!

But of course, the comic of the week, my HANDS DOWN pick, is Seven Soldiers of Victory #1. And it had THREE great last pages. Sure it could have ended on page 37. With its narration directed at the reader and image and panels that recall the first page of the first issue of Seven Soldiers, it would have been a nice bookend. Or it could have ended with page 38, the twist ending. But like Nextwave before it, Seven Soldiers had a moment, an image so powerful that it FORCED itself to the last page. The moment certainly isn't the end of the story. It's not even a very important moment to the main plot.

But the image IS the story of Seven Soldiers. It's a monument to unending nature of comics, that every last page is an advertisement for the next issue, that every death and birth is there for later writers to undo and redo. It's an image that mixes the macabre with the sacred, the simple with the mysterious, the absolute mundane with the beyond fantastic. It's an image that says superheroes can do impossible things, and that's why we love them. It's a moment so great that there just can't be another page, even though it's a last page that SCREAMS "TO BE CONTINUED!!!" without saying a word. It has to be the last page, because after seeing that page, there's nothing left to say...

until next month...



*yeah, vacation doesn't stop the habit. Once, when traveling through Alaska, I made a stop at the world's most Northern Comic Book store to pick up Zero Hour #0, which was out that week.

Reviews!

Y'know what I haven't done on this blog? Review the comics I buy every week.

Maybe it's time to start.

52 #15: First off, no, I don't think he's really dead. Everything about the death, from its (mostly) off-panel nature, to the hinky nature of the body (head skeletonized but the costume's intact?), to the hard-sell "he's dead, he's dead he's dead" copy of the cover, plus 52 has three established escape routes (time travel, cloning, and the resurrection cult), makes me think being fried in a nuclear explosion is a minor set back for Michael Jon Carter.

Otherwise, another solid issue of the most ambitious superhero comics project hitting the stands. Any issue with the Question gets the thumbs up. Any issue with the Question punching a guy in the face so hard he makes it concave goes right to the top of the list. And Booster Gold as loser superhero is a riot, even in death.

100 Bullets #75: The jazz of comics. This issue feels like vamping, varying a theme we've seen before without giving us the payoff, but nobody plays better than Azzarello and Risso. I feel like I should review issues like these five months later, because it's not until Azzarello brings back a character, a plot point, or even a painting at a crucial moment later that I realize how good a job he did of introducing it in the first place.

Manhunter #25: Good, but not as good as Manhunter #24. I think the cancelled/not cancelled events hurt this issue specifically. The Sweeney Todd plot is wrapped up without us ever knowing who he really is or how he came to be, as if Andreyko realized he only had one issue to tie up a major plotline, but changes made to set up the next 5 issues denied the sense of closure that a good last issue has. Thing #8, for example also seemed like Dan Slott was cramming a lot in because it was the last issue, but it ended with a satisfying sense of "that's that."

NextWave #7: Believe you me, I will be shouting "YES! I have a hundred of the Earth dollars" next time I'm at at the ATM.

Robin #153: Count me as on board the Beechen OYL Robin. It's been a fun title full of street level superhero action and interweaving plotlines. But I will say that Tim is massively dickish to Owen in this issue. True, Owen is the son of the man who killed Tim's dad, but he's also the son of the man whom Tim's dad killed, AND Owen has no idea that either of those things are true. I can't tell if that's bad writing (Tim's usually more level headed than this) or good (his dad, girlfriend, step-mom, and best friend all killed within a year, maybe Tim's not dealing with it as best he could).

And in an effort to expand my reading, I picked up three recommended titles I hadn't before:

The Boys #1: I learned nothing in this issue that I didn't get in the five-page preview up on the DC web-site. And in fact it looked better in the preview than it did on the page, particularly the coloring. So I can't recommend actually paying three bucks to get the same amount of enjoyment you could for free. However, I loved that preview, so I will be back for issue #2, where the story looks like it will actually start.

Casanova #3: It's interesting, as all double agent stories are, about where loyalties lie and what's the right move. But there might be too much going on as well, because there's also parallel worlds, evil twins, and this multi-face thing floating around. Will definitely be back for #4, though.

Checkmate #5: Maybe this wasn't the issue to jump on. It's a transitional issue, where characters literally stop to catch each other up on what happened in the last four issues and what they expect to happen in the next four. And the main recruitment plot, while well done, feels a little cliched (including having "terrorists" kidnap and torture recruits just to see who holds out the longest). So this may go back on the shelf.