The Intimates is Joe Casey's latest attempt to reinvent the superhero genre.  Of course, Casey's experimental superhero books have a rather dodgy commercial track record - Automatic Kafka, anyone?  But put that one out of your mind.  Intimates is much more conventional than that.

It's a series set in a school for superheroes, some of whom are obviously hopelessly immature, and most of whom don't really look like natural candidates for the job.  This isn't an original idea, of course - superheroes in training have been done before in books like New Mutants and Sidekicks.  The originality here comes more from the style than the content.

Casey plays the book for light comedy, while bombarding the readers with information.  There's a running stream of footnotes and information across the bottom of every page, and little flashback scenes with their own excitable captions.  ("Special origin flashback!  Destra has a summer romance.")  A close-up panel is labelled "Magnification Moment."  Maps and diagrams are worked into the page.  The book seems to be going for the watching-two-things-at-once sensation.

The results are a little mixed.  There's an all-pervading air of ironic distance.  What personality the characters show - and they do show some - is undermined by what amounts to a continual reminder not to take the book seriously.  It's all a bit cooler-than-thou.  It's not that the book isn't funny or entertaining - it is, but not in a way that draws me into the characters or makes me want to see more of them.  And while it's amusing, it's a joke I've seen many times before.  Yes, the superhero genre is absurd.  I think we all know that, don't we?

Oh, and a pet niggle: Punchy's message board posts don't work.  "Disgrntld has-beens frm the Twenth Cntry wn't mke a sngle rpple in the cnflct to come...  You cn tke yr suvivl cmp crp and choke on it whle yr scrnging fr food whn society as we knw it crumbles undr its own weight!"  This reads like an extended SMS message, not a message board post - he's missing out letters, not misspelling, and when you correct the spelling, his grammar is perfect.  It rings false.

Artist Giuseppe Camuncoli is pretty good with the characters, but weaker on backgrounds.  We're told that the Seminary has some sort of ultra-clever fractal design, but what we get here is a sort of blank Star Trek room design repeated ad infinitum.  You might have heard that Jim Lee is working on the book - that's true, in that he provides panels from a comic-within-a-comic called Supersonic Espionage Boom.  Two of them, to be precise.  In fairness, DC haven't overplayed his role in promoting the book, but I figure it's worth flagging up.

I want to like this book, because it's trying to do something different, and that's a good thing.  But it doesn't really work for me.  Every time I try to get into it, I find myself skidding off an impenetrable shield of heavy irony.  It makes it so hard to care.

Rating: B-

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