The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1040: Wednesday Comics #12, September 23, 2009

Alright, alright, let's wrap this up!

My votes for the best three features in this series are "Metamorpho," "Supergirl," and "Hawkman." Not how I would have seen things turning out when I started the series. Each does something cool or different with the format. "Metamorpho," much like its protagonist, shifts and melts and fits into the tabloid-sized page in a number of different ways. There are traditional panel arrangements followed by a two-page table of elements-as-dialogue/maze that really pushes what one is able to do, visually at least, with this kind of space. The story was okay - clever, but not really that entertaining.

"Supergirl," on the other hand, uses a very traditional technical structure, but tells a story that is just charming. It's nicely-plotted, something interesting happens in every segment - I think what I want to say about it is that it suits the medium of its publication - the newspaper strip. It wasn't trying to be deep and philosophical. It was trying to be entertaining Saturday morning breakfast comics. And it succeeds.

I have to admit that "Hawkman" was not one of the strips I'd have said I'd enjoy - he's never been my favourite character. But in this iteration, told by Kyle Baker, he's much more interesting. Add to this that somehow in the space of these 12 pages, Baker manages to tell us two really awesome, really short, superhero stories disguised as one story. It really is pretty great.

And we're done with Wednesday Comics. Not my favourite series that I've read, but overall pretty cool.

Tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow.

We'll start with early Image stuff. Oh yes.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1039: Wednesday Comics #11, September 16, 2009

Climax achieved! (Not that way - get yer mind out of the gutter!)

All that remains for each story is a brief moment of crisis, and then a denouement. I'll be in a better position to comment on the narratives tomorrow, I think, as I'll finally have all the pieces I need to see them fully. There are definitely strips that got it right, "it" being that feeling of the newspaper comic supplement strip, but there are others that were more 12-page comic stories published as 12 separate pages. There's a difference, I think.

One strip that I'm actually consistently entertained by, and that I've overlooked thus far, is Kyle Baker's "Hawkman." It's good, solid, adventure, full of terrorists, aliens, dinosaurs, and superheroes, and is actually a very interesting look at the superhero in crisis management - (SPOILER) the plane that Hawkman is rescuing crashes on an island populated by ferocious dinosaurs, and his harness is destroyed. And there's no help coming. We get to see what kind of a hero Hawkman actually is, I think. He's brutal, often to the point of savagery, and in that way resembles at his best that other famed comic book superhero survivalist, Wolverine.

To be continued.