Thanks to the nuptials of our beloved overlord, it’s a holiday weekend here in the UK.  And that means disruption to the postal service, which in turn means that I haven’t got this week’s comics yet.  Not that I’m particularly bothered about that, to be honest – I’m still catching up on the books that came out while I was on holiday.

In the meantime, let’s catch up some other new books that started while I was away.  We already talked about Butcher Baker, Journey into Mystery and Super Dinosaur on the last podcast, but here are a few other new titles from the last few weeks:

Dark Horse Presents #1 – The direct market has never been entirely sympathetic to anthology titles, but the original Dark Horse Presents was an exception to the rule, which managed to carve out a space for itself for 157 issues.  Admittedly, this was a period when the market was also strong enough to support Marvel Comics Presents, of which the less said the better, but DHP had a fairly impressive track record of big name contributors producing high profile work like “Sin City” and “Hellboy”.

The original series ended in 2000, and following a three-year online revival at MySpace, Dark Horse are bringing it back to print as an 80-page series which crams in a ton of different contributors.  This is a less forgiving market; but if there’s an anthology with the name value to survive these days, Dark Horse Presents should be it.

The format here is a collection of fairly short strips – most are 8 pages, the longest gets 11.  And understandably, aiming for a sense of occasion, Dark Horse have brought out as many of the big name creators as they can get: Paul Chadwick, Howard Chaykin, Neal Adams, Carla Speed McNeil, Michael Gilbert, Richard Corben, Paul Gulacy.  There’s a Frank Miller interview with a preview of his upcoming work, and a short story by Harlan Ellison.

An impressive line-up, yes – but it’s also one that tilts heavily towards the creators of yesteryear.  It’s decidedly light on big name creators from the current generation.  Only McNeill really qualifies under that heading (and even she contributes a Finder story, continuing a feature that dates back to 1995).  David Chelsea and Patrick Alexander also contribute material, but it’s shoved at the back of the issue.

So there’s a certain whiff of nostalgia about the project, and the content largely plays to that expectation.  Chadwick’s Concrete story, “Intersection”, and Michael Gilbert’s Mr Monster revival, are both well told and entertaining, but they’re also very much cases of venerated artists playing the old hits.  Chaykin’s “Marked Man” is a crime story about a suburban husband whose wife doesn’t know he’s secretly a hitman; it looks suspiciously like it’s been arbitrarily guillotined eight pages into a longer chapter, and never really gets going in the opening pages.  Similarly, Neal Adams’ “Blood” opens with eight pages of a supporting character telling us that the main character is coming, which would have worked rather better as the start of a longer chapter.  It’s still quite good fun in a seventies-melodrama throwback kind of way, though.

McNeill’s Finder story, shorn of wider context, still works as a mildly surreal vignette about a delivery agency – the last two pages both ramp up the weirdness in a nicely judged way, and feature some beautiful storytelling that sells the joke perfectly.  Richard Corben’s “Murky World” seems to be a squarely generic sword-and-sorcery affair, though it does serve as a good vehicle for his art.  Then there’s an 8-page trailer for a Star Wars miniseries, which feels wildly out of place in the book.

David Chelsea’s “Snow Angel” is probably the most memorable contribution; it’s a largely silent, brightly coloured piece about a girl who literally turns into a snow angel, and it hovers somewhere in a grey area between dreamily peaceful and gentle superhero pastiche.  And Patrick Alexander turns in two single-page gag strips, both of which make great use of a 15-panel grid layout for comic timing.

The general standard here is solid to decent, but for my money, there’s too much emphasis on the big name creators of the 80s.  The book would really benefit from mixing in more material from their present-day counterparts (though granted, the rise of exclusive contracts may make that easier said than done).  I’m not convinced, either, about building a monthly series around 8-page serials; that’s a very slow pace, and even many of the experienced creators here seem to be struggling to deliver a satisfying chunk of story in the space.  With 80 pages to play with, I’d expand the length of one or two features.

I’d like to see a Dark Horse Presents style anthology succeed in 2011 – but I’d like to see it succeed as a contemporary comic.  Perhaps my biggest concern is that this first issue seems, first and foremost, like a homage to the original Dark Horse Presents, rather than making a case for the relevance of the book today.  But with some of the best material coming from the younger contributors, it’s something the book should be able to address.

Fear Itself #1 – The villain may have emerged from Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America, but the focus of Marvel’s 2011 summer crossover seems to be firmly and synergistically on Thor.  There are riots on the streets of New York over a vaguely defined controversy about construction at Ground Zero; the Red Skull’s daughter Sin recovers a magic hammer, becomes one of the Worthy, and revives the real villain; and a plan to rebuild Asgard is suddenly derailed when an increasingly erratic Odin suddenly decides that they’re all going home.

It’s a mixture of the decent and the clunky.  Stuart Immonen’s art certainly looks good throughout; and if you’re going to build a summer crossover around Thor, there are worse ideas than bringing in some sort of rival All-Father with his own batch of magic hammers.  The threat is only vaguely defined, but there’s enough going on, and enough in the way of build, to get away with that in the first issue.  The book does sell the idea that something big is coming, even if it remains vague about what that something actually is.

On the other hand, the big central metaphor of Fear Itself – which is supposed to tie the book in some way to the troubles of the real world – feels clumsily bolted on.  I haven’t seen much in the way of build-up for this sudden rise of paranoia which the Marvel Universe public are apparently undergoing, and it can’t help seeming hopelessly artificial.  Scenes of people discussing job creation in Oklahoma scream “I’m about something, honest” without really saying anything in particular.  Superheroes and real-world problems often don’t sit well in the same story; the likes of Thor and the Avengers work on an operatic scale that can easily seem absurd if they try to tackle The Issues too directly.  There’s a clear risk of this story toppling into bathos.  Then again, Matt Fraction’s not really concerned about any given political issue, so much as feelings of political insecurity in general – and on that high level, it’s the sort of big theme that could conceivably make for a decent story.

My gut tells me that this will be a fun story when it’s dealing with people chasing after magic hammers, and that it probably won’t quite work when it gets to the big idea.  But you never know, and at least the art is fantastic.

Fear Itself: The Home Front #1 – The tie-in anthology mini, on the other hand, pretty clearly doesn’t work.  I picked this up because it’s got a Peter Milligan story in it, but I can’t really see myself coming back for more.

The lead strip is a Speedball story by Christos Gage and Mike Mayhew, which has all sorts of problems.  For a start, the whole thing is premised on the idea that loads of people still hate Speedball because of Civil War, which requires the story to open by backpedalling on some previous attempts to tie off that thread.  But more fundamentally, the story has Speedball trying to atone for Civil War by doing voluntary work for an anti-Speedball community group under an assumed name.  And that just makes everyone look stupid – Speedball himself for attempting something so ridiculous, and the group for not recognising him in the first thirty seconds.

Milligan and Elia Bonetti’s story is officially a Jimmy Woo strip, though in reality it seems to have the whole Agents of Atlas team in it.  Milligan seems to be trying to tie in the modern-day paranoia theme of Fear Itself with the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, using the Agents of Atlas as his link to do so.  That makes sense, since the Agents’ gimmick is that they’re a team of 1950s characters, and Woo in particular is supposed to have had his memory recently reset to the 1950s, making him essentially a man out of time.  But with the paranoia aspects of the crossover rather vague at present, it comes across as a bit forced; I assume Woo’s acting weirdly out of character for a reason, but even so, there’s a definite sense of the characters having been shoehorned into an argument instead of an organic story.

Then there’s a page by Howard Chaykin of J Jonah Jameson blaming superheroes for everything.  It’s an uninspired exercise in telling us something we already knew.

Finally, Jim McCann and Pepe Larraz do a 7-page story about the town of Broxton, Oklahoma, which works quite well – largely because it doesn’t spent too much time labouring the themes of the crossover, and focusses instead of the town’s sudden lurch from “home of Asgard” to “who cares”, which it plays for decent laughs.

Still, two lead serials that don’t interest me mean that I won’t be buying more of this.

Herc #1 – This is the latest incarnation of Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente’s highly entertaining Hercules series, which started off by usurping the numbering of Incredible Hulk, wandered through a couple of minis, and is now back in an ongoing series with its own numbering.  While it’s never been a huge seller, it’s always been well reviewed; I’m pleased to see that it seems to have become one of those second- or third-tier properties, like Black Panther, that Marvel just won’t seem to give up on.

Relaunching a series from issue #1 is always a little contrived.  In this case, at least, the series has just completed a multi-year storyline and cleared the decks for a radically changed status quo.  It’s not really the first issue, but it is a genuine fresh start.  The Chaos War miniseries built to Hercules becoming omnipotent before finally giving up all his godly powers; now he’s just a mortal in Brooklyn, albeit one who’s still carrying some Olympian paraphernalia around with him.

Of course, “X loses his powers and has to prove he’s still a hero without them” has been a stock superhero plot since at least the 1950s, and no doubt they’ll hit the reset button on this at some point.  But it does seem to be intended as at least a medium to long term direction for the character, which is good enough for me.

Obviously the temptation would be to play it for laughs, but in the Marvel Universe, Hercules has been wandering around Earth for years, and it would be silly to pretend that he can’t blend in if he really wants to.  So instead, the book is taking the more difficult route of doing Hercules in reduced circumstances, lowering his sights to what he can still achieve, and just trying to help out in a neighbourhood in Brooklyn.  In the first instance, that leads us to the old standby “ethnic restaurant owner faces racketeers”, which is disappointingly obvious.  Still, I’d prefer to see the book stick to its guns by keeping Hercules at this sort of level for the moment, rather than work him too directly into the Marvel Universe mix.  By all means pair him against the Spider-Man villains working for the New York mob (as this issue does), but let’s try and keep him away from the cosmic stuff for a bit.  That said, this opening arc is a Fear Itself crossover, so I may not get my wish there.

I like the general idea for the series, which really is a new direction for the character and a complete change of pace.  Hopefully, once it hits its stride, we’ll be able to move past the stock plot elements, which do let the issue down a bit.