Also among this week's comics...

ASTRO CITY: LOCAL HEROES #3 - Apparently this is the story originally scheduled for Astro City #24, a couple of years back.  A girl is sent to the country for the summer and, as you might expect in this series, discovers a new perspective on life, which happens to involve the local superhero.  As you might also expect, it's arguably rather corny, but it gets away with it.  Busiek and Anderson have the talent to run with these sort of stories (city girl goes to country, learns important life lessons) and make them work, even when my inner cynic screams that there ought to be something wrong here.  A-

BLACK PANTHER #61 - Part 3 of "Ascension", somewhat undermined by the fact that they gave the ending away in Crew #2 last week.  Mind you, it wasn't entirely unexpected that Kasper ends up as a superhero; the interest is in how Christopher Priest gets to that point.  And granted, this is not quite the route I'd been expecting.  Maybe Priest's been planning for this odd publishing schedule better than I'd expected.  B+

BORN #1 - Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson do the Punisher in Vietnam.  The big idea of this series is that the Punisher would have had to be fairly nuts before his family got killed in order to react the way he did.  So Ennis and Robertson have Frank Castle as somebody who went to Vietnam and actually enjoyed it enough to return for a voluntary further tour of duty.  Compared to the regular series, Ennis plays it straight.  Granted, not a great deal actually happens in the first issue, but as an exercise in setting the tone, it's a pretty solid start.  A-

CATWOMAN #20 - New storyline, as Selina and Holly go on a road trip which looks suspiciously like an excuse to have a bunch of DC characters guest star.  In this case it's Ted Grant, a character I generally couldn't care less about.  It brings the series into fairly conventional superhero territory, but Ed Brubaker does interest me in the cast, and that's good going in itself.  I'm a little sceptical about stories built around mystical cat statues, but the good far outweighs the bad here.  B+

EMPIRE #0 - It amazes me that Mark Waid didn't work in a plug for this book in any of the shenanigans over Fantastic Four.  Anyway, this is a reprint of the two issues that were published by Gorilla, in preparation for the series restarting under DC.  And it's pretty good, in fact.  The basic premise of this is a world where the supervillain finally won and conquered the planet.  But rather than do the obvious angle and follow a cast of rebels, Waid and Kitson build the book around Golgoth's inner circle, giving us a comic about political manoeuvrings among the villains.  I'm not generally a big fan of Waid's work, which usually strikes me as a bit retro, but this is really rather good.  A

HULK: NIGHTMERICA #1 - A six issue painted Hulk miniseries, presumably to tie in with the film.  Unlike Bruce Jones, who holds the Hulk in reserve on the regular monthly title, Robin Laws brings the Hulk out in force here.  Which certainly means that it provides an alternative for people who were alienated by the largely Hulk-free approach on the ongoing series.  As a series in its own right... well, it's alright.  Fairly standard stuff, really, and not particularly outstanding one way or the other.  B-

SWEATSHOP #3 - Self-publishing retro superhero comics.  Hmm.  Okay, I really like Peter Bagge's work, and the characters are all pretty well observed here.  If you're a comics fan, then it's funny stuff.  But let's be honest, who's the expected audience for this book?  Much as I enjoy it, I'm increasingly alarmed that this is a comic seemingly aimed as a tiny audience of hardcore comics followers who'll get jokes about how the attendees at comics conventions react to indie publishers with a strong Walt Simonson influence.  I enjoy it, and most of the people reading this probably have enough knowledge of comics to get the joke as well, but I can't imagine that the long term prospects for this book can be all that great when it's playing in such a narrow territory.  B+

WILDCATS #11 - This is sort of the payoff for the running subplot about accountant Sam Garfield being driven nuts by Halo.  I'm still not entirely convinced by Joe Casey's grasp on the accountancy industry - I've never met an accountant who desperately wanted to stick to strict accountancy rather than giving business advice.  Frankly, in my experience, most of them are desperate to be promoted to the level where they can concentrate on business advice and delegate the actual accountancy work to the juniors.  Notwithstanding that, this is a weird little story about Garfield snapping and Halo taking steps to cover it up.  Casey and Friend are obvious enjoying the moral grey areas here, and I'm increasingly starting to look forward to this book every month.  It may be weak on the technicalities of accounting, but it's consistently good reading.  A-

Last week's Article 10 is still up at Ninth Art.

Next week... oh god, next week is depressing.  On the plus side, New X-Men #143, which should be good.  On the minus side, everything else - two Chuck Austen comics in Uncanny X-Men #427 and Exiles #29, another issue of Weapon X, and more pointlessness from X-Men Unlimited.  Ever get the feeling that quality control has been abandoned altogether?

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