Blood In The Gutters: Week’s New Crime Comics – Activity, PunisherMAX, Officer Downe, Six Guns

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This week down at your comical book store: Super-spies get active; the Punisher makes his third-to-last stand; was this hardcover really necessary?; and the wild west goes way down south.

The Activity #1–We discussed writer Nathan Edmondson in these pages not long ago when the trade of Who Is Jake Ellis? was released, but in The Activity, we have a book that I’d say is less risk for less cash.  The Activity follows Sgt. Leslie Ryan as he joins up with the ultra-secret Intelligence Support Activity, an agency so secret, it even changes its name about every six months so even the US government doesn’t know what it really is.  Now that’s secret.  I get a very Queen & Country vibe off this book, but a very American version of that vibe.  From this interview with Edmondson a couple months back, I get the notion that the book will be more focused on cloak-and-dagger than even Q&C was, that the characters will be more like background to the day-to-day of the super-spy business.  Actually, that still sounds like Queen & Country.  Okay, I guess what I’m trying to say is this book sounds like it will be the American spy agency version of Queen & Country, but hopefully not so easily pigeon-holed.  Either way, I’ll roll the bones on this issue.

PunisherMAX #20–And so, as this book winds to a close, I am having rather uncharacteristic doubts as to how I feel about this story arc.  It’s like this: what writer Jason Aaron and artist Steve Dillon have done here with this title sine its inception is to rework Frank Castle’s rouge’s gallery so that they fit into this more mature-readers MAX universe.  Thus, the Kingpin has become a vicious bastard of Keyser Söze proportions, Bullseye is a quieter yet more violent sociopath, and Elektra is a character more befitting her Freudian name.  Only thing is (and this is purely a Marvel zombie problem) that without Daredevil, it all rings a little hollow.  See, all these characters, including the Punisher, really came into their own during Frank Miller’s run on Daredevil with Klaus Janson, and this whole book has been a sort of love letter to those bygone years of that book.  And that’s great, but as immersed as I am in Marvel lore, when DD is out of the picture, it’s like a missing link in the chain.  But to bring Daredevil into the MAX universe would kinda defeat the whole purpose of the imprint, wouldn’t it?  Ugh, I read too many comics.  And now that I think about it, they’ll probably bring DD into the story in some inimitable, Aaron-and-Dillon way, and I’ll have ruined the whole surprise for myself by overanalyzing things.  Oh, well, wouldn’t be the first time.

Officer Downe: Bigger Better Bastard Edition hardcover–In a weird, kinda pointless hardcover, we have writer Joe Casey’s homage to the over-the-top Judge Dredd type stories that were so ragingly popular in the ’80s.  Along with Batman, Inc. artist Chris Burnham, he did Officer Downe, an big one-shot in summer of 2010, and now we have a year and a half later, an even bigger, more expensive edition.  So I dunno.  First of all, any hardcover, almost-twenty-dollar book had better be at least 200 pages long to be worth the bread, as far as I’m concerned.  This edition is only half that.  Plus, what is the deal with these so-called “director’s cut” books, anyways?  Can a one-shot book/character really have an audience clamoring for more sketchbook pages and other filler?  And if so, why not do another one-shot or a mini-series first?  I know Casey is not the most popular guy amon my other comic-nerd friends, and even though I really have been enjoying what I’ve read of Gødland thus far, I’d have to agree the guy’s got some real stones with this book here.

Six Guns #3 (of 5)–As the more attentive of you may realize, I loved the first issue of this series.  While I certainly did not hate the second issue, I really don’t remember it too well, which is my own little way of damning a book with faint praise.  Be that as it may, I still vouch for this book one-hundred percent, although obviously with a mini like this, you’re gonna wanna scrounge up the first two before you dive into this.  The action comes to a head as Marvel’s revamped Western characters collide way down in fictional South America, proving that the best Westerns (har har) are simply crime stories in disguise.