Don’t Ask! Just Buy It! – Apr. 28: Iron Man is Resilient, Lulu Gets Tubby, and Spider-Man Doesn’t Need Any Adjectives At All

Savage Critic and "Reading Comics" author Douglas Wolk runs down the hottest comics and graphic novels coming out this week.

KEY

* Animists

¢ Classicists

^ Formalists

% Iconoclasts

% BLAZING COMBAT

A paperback edition of the collection of this short-lived mid-'60s war comic. Written by Archie Goodwin (doing his best impression of the EC war comics of a decade earlier) and drawn in black and white by an all-star crew (Alex Toth, Wally Wood, Gene Colan, Frank Frazetta, etc.), it managed to get shut down after four issues, basically because its philosophical stance was "war is horrible and futile, and by the way American soldiers are slaughtering innocent civilians in Vietnam."

¢ DC COMICS CLASSICS LIBRARY: JLA BY GEORGE PEREZ VOL. 2

That's right: there was a time when George Pérez drew Justice League of America and The New Teen Titans every month. That's a lot of characters. And a lot of rubble. This volume reprints JLA #193-197 and #200, the latter of which was an 80-page everybody-break-up-into-teams-for-mini-adventures blowout in the grand All-Star Comics tradition, with a Pérez framing sequence and individual chapters drawn by Brian Bolland, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano and others. Even in 1982, I remember thinking that I wished I could see it with less supremely crappy reproduction. And now I can, for a pair of Jacksons!

* GIANT-SIZE LITTLE LULU VOL. 1

A $25 paperback with 664 pages of John Stanley/Irving Tripp comics! Preview. Is there some kind of foundation sponsoring the reproduction of everything John Stanley ever worked on? Or a conspiracy? It'd be really cool if there were a conspiracy.

¢ INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #25

Double-sized! Fraction/Larroca! New storyline! In time for the movie! Too soon for the end of Siege! And Rian Hughes came up with yet another gorgeous new trade dress! There is a foilogram variant! Aargh! Preview! Speaking of Invincibles, there's also a one-dollar reprint of the first issue of Robert Kirkman's Invincible from Image.

% JLA DELUXE EDITION VOL. 3

Continuing to reprint the Grant Morrison JLA run (and not the Mark Waid and Mark Millar issues that appeared in the middle of it); this volume features the Starro/Dream story from #22-23, the DC One Million tie-in from #1,000,000, the Ultramarine Corps story from #24-26, and the "Crisis Times Five" arc from #28-31.

¢ SPIDER-MAN #1

The new adjectiveless Spider-Man series is a relaunched version of the Marvel Adventures series, still by Paul Tobin and Matteo Lolli and involving Peter Parker in high school, but now four dollars instead of three, at least this month. Here's apreview. Also in the Spider-department this week: Peter Parker #2, collecting the web-webcomics by Bob Gale and Patrick Olliffe (preview), and Amazing Spider-Man #629, notable for a backup story launching the four-part Zeb Wells/Chris Bachalo Lizard story that'll be running in that title next month.

* STUMPTOWN #3

Wasn't this terrific Greg Rucka/Matthew Southworth series about a P.I. in Portland supposed to be monthly? (The first issue came out in early November.) It's worth the wait, in any case--and hey, it looks like Rucka's got more time to spend on the creations he clearly cares a lot about now that he's not writing half the Superman line.

^ SUPER SPY: THE LOST DOSSIERS

This isn't exactly a sequel to Matt Kindt's espionage-and-formalism collection Super Spy, more of a bonus volume--a few other short stories in the same mode, some preparatory sketches, annotations for the original book, and so on. Inessential if you're not a huge fan of Super Spy, and probably if you are, too, but I'm happy it exists anyway.

^ THE TALE OF ONE BAD RAT

New, remastered, Neil Gaiman-introduced edition of Bryan Talbot's childhood-sexual-abuse/Beatrix Potter-inspired 1994 miniseries.

^ WILSON

Daniel Clowes' first original graphic novel: a sequence of one-page black-humored blackout gags about a bearded misanthrope attempting to stave off loneliness by reassembling the family he blew his chances to hold together years earlier, drawn in a spectrum of cartooning styles along the bigfoot-to-realistic continuum. It's a work of the interrogating-the-medium, Ice Haven-ish side of Clowes, more than the understated, character-focused Ghost World side, if that makes a difference to you. Preview.