Powers

If you're looking for a good new comic book to read (and who isn't) let me recommend Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I read the first, second, seventh, eighth, and ninth trade paperbacks last week at the beach and it's really solid stuff through-and-through. The basic premise is that you're reading noir-style detective stories focused on two homicide comics working the "powers-related" beat. It's a neat way of dealing with super hero themes, iconography, and other good comics-y stuff without making it a super hero book per se, since it has much more the look, feel, and tone of crime and detective stories.

The complete first story arc, "Who Killed Retro Girl?" is available online.

Comments

Ooh, yeah, POWERS is good stuff. Bendis' faux-Manet dialogue gets a little tiresome in large doses, and he's done a lot of (quite mediocre, except for his 110+ issue run on ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN) standard superhero work for Marvel recently, which has caused the quality of the last year or two of POWERS to suffer a bit, but it's still good. Check out some of Bendis' earlier indie noir stuff (JINX, FIRE, TORSO, GOLDFISH) while you're at it.

If you like one-book takes that create their own superhero universe, I also recommend Robert Kirkman's INVINCIBLE.

If you want to "sample" runs of comic books before you buy them (and have a suitably flexible notion of IP rights), there's a large community of scanners and uploaders making them available on most public torrent tracking networks.

Posted by FMguru | June 4, 2007 1:29 AM

I'm reading Powers right now, and ah'm liken' it.

I also just finished the limited Marvel series NYX (about a year old I think) and I just want to say that Joshua Middleton is an absolutely amazing and wonderful artist. I was surprised that I hadn't seen his work before; a kind of lyrical genius.

One nice thing about rediscovering comics later in life is now there are so many breath-taking artists working in the field ... Alex Maleev and Leinil Francis Yu spring immediately to mind.

I wish comics had been like that when I was growing up (or that there were writers like Bendis and Peter David around). It really is a kind of golden age of comics now.

Posted by Triskele | June 4, 2007 1:38 AM

You forgot to mention the monkey sex.

Bendis does totally rule. His Ultimate Spiderman is the best super hero comic going these days (and his run on Daredevil was pretty great as well).

His early stuff is well worth checking out. Fortune and Glory (his comic about trying to get one of his comics turned into a movie) is one of the funniest graphic novels ever written.

Posted by Art School Guy | June 4, 2007 1:38 AM

I want to agree with FMguru above.. if it hadn't been for downloadable comic scans (created primarily by the Digital Comic Preservation [DCP]group), I never would have re-entered the world of comics/ graphic novels and never would have realized what an enormous sea-change had taken place in my absence.

Reading the first 100 issues of Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man in a single weekend made me fall in love with comics all over again (and prompt me to buy the bound volumes afterwards).

Posted by Triskele | June 4, 2007 1:55 AM

Be aware, it gets real stinky towards the recent stuff.

Posted by Davey | June 4, 2007 2:13 AM

if you like Powers, you may want to check out alan moore's Top Ten as well -- it's about the police force in a world where everyone has super (or science-) powers

Posted by groobles | June 4, 2007 2:28 AM

Bendis is a comic writing deity and Powers is one of his best works. The letter pages are worth the price of the comic for themselves,as they are quite profane and amusing. Besides Ultimate Spiderman he has writen the Avengers to place where a right wing government has created a land where hero fight hero and Captain America is dead because of it. It is very easy to pick up anything he wrires and know it will be of a high quality.

Posted by libraryian | June 4, 2007 2:42 AM

if you like Powers, you may want to check out alan moore's Top Ten as well

Better yet, you can always skip Powers entirely and just read Top Ten. Seriously, it's Alan Moore, people.

Powers started off well enough, even if the premise wasn't particularly unique (the whole "superhero cops in a noirish setting" thing has been kicked around since the 80s), but it started going off the rails well before the infamous "caveman sex" story. There's a tendency for plotlines to be suddenly introduced or dispatched in way that's utterly independent of the established motivations of the characters involved (X was engaged to Y that whole time, but they were barely even talking to each other? Why did whatshername just kill that dude? etc.). I kind of lost track of it around the second or third government conspiracy arc so it's entirely possible that it's gotten better, but there's a "Lost"-ish "we're only pretending to know what we're doing" cloud hovering about it all.

It also needs to be said that Brian Bendis has some of the most infuriating writing tics ever: lengthy stretches of back-and-forth, monosyllabic "banter", a tendency to write every character with the same voice, a determination to stretch a three-part story out to six parts, etc.

Switching gears entirely, you know what's a shockingly good comic book? Sock Monkey.

Posted by Christmas | June 4, 2007 8:32 AM

100 Bullets.

That's what you have to read if you're into noir and such.

Posted by JRVJ | June 4, 2007 8:39 AM

100 Bullets has an X-Files problem. The individual stories are neat; the "mythology" is a mess.

Posted by Christmas | June 4, 2007 8:49 AM

Yeah, 100 Bullets rocks. Of course I was in the minority that always liked the big-picture X-Files episodes better than the one-offs.

What do you think of Loveless, JRVJ?

The other comic I've been liking lately is Local, a very different sort of thing. But if you're into Tomine's Optic Nerve, it's quite good.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | June 4, 2007 10:01 AM

So you're saying its Gotham Central?

Posted by Rob | June 4, 2007 10:43 AM

TRANSMETROPOLITAN and GLOBAL FREQUENCY. Transmet is Warren Ellis' vision of shitkicking journalism in a future which wound up being terrifyingly prescient to today's politics (it's journalist as mythic hero, and it works), an GF is a great one and done about heroic open source netwroks. I may be biased as I wrote the TV pilot for GF, but there's something genuinely beautiful in there.

Posted by jonrog1 | June 4, 2007 10:55 AM

Haven't read Loveless yet.

Probably will once Y finishes and am looking for something to add to what I read (Fables, JoF, DMZ, 100 Bullets).

Posted by JRVJ | June 4, 2007 11:17 AM

Eh. Y and Fables have really gone downhill after strong starts, for my money.

How about The Hollow Grounds and the Nikopol Trilogy? They're weirdly hard to find, even in NYC's well-stocked comic shops, but they're both a blast and interestingly skew to American books.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | June 4, 2007 12:14 PM

I disagree on Fables (I sort of see your point on Y, though I did a re-read recently, and it held up surprisingly well).

I think Willingham was putting all his pieces together so as to take the series in a very powerful and new direction.

Posted by JRVJ | June 4, 2007 1:24 PM

So you're saying its Gotham Central?

Nah, it's not as good as Gotham Central, to be honest. But all of these books are also going for pretty distinct tones. The standard (and somewhat cliche at this point) line is that Powers is NYPD Blue, Gotham Central is Homicide LOTS, and Top Ten is Hill Street Blues.

Posted by Christmas | June 5, 2007 9:47 AM

As the dude responsible for posting Powers online daily I would like to thank you Matt for profiling this on your blog! Powers at the beach -perfect.

Fot those that jumped off, I would whole heartedly recommend that you jump back in for a try with Powers #25 coming out sometime later this month. And then really get the scoop with the upcoming Encyclopedia issued sometime this summer (shameless plug as I'm co-writing with Bendis.

Like LOST if you hang around long enough with Powers I think you're going to find out you might have made some assumptions...

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