I found a copy of Darkhold #11 in between the pages of Barry Windsor Smith's Monsters, which I lent to a friend last year. Maybe it's his? I'll have to ask. But since it was there I read it and...

...It's probably the absolute worst comic book I ever read. The quintessential awful 90s comic, with bad fake Image art, clichéd and nonsensical script, zero character development, amateurish storytelling and LOTS of gnashing teeth.

Characters strike poses, shout nonsensical itty & gritty things, shoot at each other, get torn in half with no lasting repercussions, and then it all ends in a "to be continued" coda.

I feel blessed to have been away from any LCS or newsstand in those days, because such comics strike me as the nadir of American comic-books. Hard to believe that so much great material would see print just a few years down the line, after the implosion of the market!

Striking a huge contrast, I checked out the Providence compendium from the public library. An excellent Lovecraft pastiche by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows, well worth reading, and showing that the comics can absolutely still be good when creators have something to say.

Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading my way through all 34 issues of The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones. Overall, it's a fun and pretty enjoyable series that any fan of the first 3 Indy movies would enjoy. If you're interested in my more detailed thoughts, you can read them over in the "Series Overview Thread" here.

I finished off the Daredevil Fall From Grace Epic Collection by reading Daredevil #326-332. This is the Tree of Knowledge story. The creative team continues to be D.G. Chichester and Scott McDaniel with Hector Collazo as the main inker.

It has elements with potential, but I find the execution lacking. McDaniel has adapted a very distinctive style in this arc and the prior one. Some panels and pages look very cool. At times, it looks like he's trying to evoke Frank Miller. But at times the style lacks clarity. It's bad for storytelling when you can't tell what you're being told. Also, there's a scene with Karen Page and a friend from her anti-porn activist group where the other character looks more like Karen (based on past depictions) than Karen does.

Chichester tells a story involving hacking, the internet, virtual reality, and other computer concepts, and it's interesting to see how it's presented back in 1994. At times, I felt it was hard to get my head around what bothered me about the writing, but I figured there were a couple of recurring issues. One was the tendency to tell and not show. For example, there's a terrorist group that actually a front for a technology based unit within Hydra called System Crash. The scripting tells us repeatedly that this is leading to the imposition of restrictions on the public akin to martial law, and that the Avengers and Fantastic Four are helping to enforce it. Daredevil is critical of this. But we're not really shown what these oppressive measures are or what the heroes are doing to enforce them or how the response would be different if the authorities knew the real nature of System Crash. Another related issue is repetition. We are told certain things. Rather than developing those ideas with more detail over time, Chichester repeats certain dialogue.

Based on the stories themselves and a Marvel Age article that was reprinted in the TPB, it seems that efforts were made to boost sales based on an edgier take on Daredevil. Either the editor or writer mentions people weren't really talking about the book. It feels like the remedies are too oriented to salesmanship. Suddenly there are a lot of guest stars in the book. Gambit shows up for a dead cameo of a few pages. Also, Daredevil gets his edgy new costume. But the one that really bothers me is the way Daredevil presents himself as a new man. In the prior arc, a newspaper published a story claiming Matt Murdock is Daredevil. Matt does a good job or scheming to cast doubt on the story, to the point where it seems like the general public has decided the theory is garbage. But at the end of the prior arc, Matt fakes his own death.

The idea is that the article made Matt realize how people learning his dual identity puts people close to him at risk. The problem is that one of the big concepts of this period undercuts that aim. Matt starts trying to give people the impression that person in the new Daredevil costume is a different person than the Daredevil they used to know. The problem is that I think a "new Daredevil" arising at the same time that Matt Murdock supposedly died would probably give a lot of people the impression that the news article was actually right and the reason there's a new Daredevil is because the old one is the supposedly deceased Matt. People might not be motivated to attack Matt's loved ones to coerce him if they believe he's now dead, but they very well would be motivated to punish Daredevil's loved one if they get the impression he was Matt and Matt is no longer around to stop them. I think the ideas was to shake up the status quo by replacing the friendly relationship DD has with his heroes with an adversarial one. That happens to some extent in this arc. But it's silly that they would assume it's a different guy when they should be able to recognize his voice and same part of his face that's visible in the new costume.

Yeah, I found it a decent read when I read it for the first time a couple of years back, but probably undeserving of its reputation. Something that surprised me was that, actually, it is a crime noir Batman vs the Mob story, rather than a Halloween-centric case for the Dark Knight Detective, as the title might suggest.

It's kinda over-long though and some of it feels like filler; an awful lot of the "rogues gallery" appearances by the likes of the Joker, the Mad Hatter, the Riddler etc could've been cut and it wouldn't have really affected anything. The exception to that would be Poison Ivy whose appearance in the book was excellent. I also thought that the Maroni and Falcone mob families were utterly one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikable, to the point where as a reader I wasn't particularly interested in them.

On the plus side, the fall of District Attorney Harvey Dent and his change into the villain Two Face is actually quite heartbreaking to witness. The central mystery too has a fairly surprising reveal at the end I thought. The art was suitably dark and angular, with excellent use of light and shadow and it puts the narrative across well enough.

So yeah, it's a decent read that entertains as it goes along, but I'm not sure it deserves the hype.

Probably.  Maybe.  At least partly.  

I don't know if it was ever followed up on.  I've read less than a handful of Batman comics from after than time.  

The Flash #270-#279- Been reading my "The Death Of Iris West" collected edition and it's been, if you'll pardon the pun, a bit of a whirlwind that makes me feel exactly like the "Always Sunny" picture below

It's all kinds of crazy. And now I'm to the point where the Rouges are getting involved in the plot that led to Iris' death. How much further down can this rabbit hole possibly lead? Well, I've got four more issues left and I'm sure I'm gonna find out


I also decided to try Kamandi after seeing so much praise for it, read issues #1-#11. Aside from the obvious "Planet Of The Apes" homage, it does a lot of interesting world building (and re-iterating on said world building that man is little more than a pet) and has a lot of neat ideas. Though I'm not sure how much longer I can read a story where every other issue the main character gets captured, talked down to like a wild animal, and then let go by someone of a position of power

All this aside, it's easy to see why the book is so beloved, regardless of the obvious faults

Well you've got a psycho killer (Qu'est-ce que c'est) who's brain got warped from an experiment to try and turn criminals good, but that didn't work out too well because he was actually dyslexic? Then you've got a psychic teen who's been contacting the Flash because she's got a crush on him. Then you've got Iris who's feeling like Barry's been spending too much time as the Flash and not enough with her. Then you've got a bunch of drug smugglers stashing heroin who tried to frame Barry

If that seems like an overload of plot threads, well, it kind of is...