COMICS REVIEWS: A FAIR IS A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD-ORGASBORD-ORGASBORD…–in other words, here are five books linked only by the fact that they’re comics. Something for everyone!

The Tick, omnibus vol. 2: Wildly fun superhero parody. Sort of “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast,” or, since I’m pretty sure The Tick came first, Space Ghost is very Tickish, only with more postmodernity and less of The Tick’s wiggy fun. In this volume, The Tick gets his battlecry, “SPOON!” Yay.

Daredevil: King of Hell’s Kitchen: Perfectly serviceable Bendis Daredevil. Con: There are lots of places where Alex Maleev’s art becomes ugly rather than the usual “gritty with flashes of decrepit urban beauty.” And the psychologizing is a bit thicker on the ground than I’d like. Pro: I really like how we get lots of different, well-fleshed-out perspectives on Daredevil’s decision to basically take over an entire area of New York. Everyone’s reaction makes sense, so Bendis can play out some of the vigilantism issues while still keeping a tight focus on character. I also found the Night Nurse extremely creepy, in a good way, and want more of her. And it was very fun to see Spider-Man’s bantering contrasted with Daredevil’s seriously psycho criminal-terrorizing. Loved all those frightening shots of Daredevil in darkness, all gleaming eyes and bared teeth. Overall, I liked this, but it isn’t what I’d recommend you start with for either Bendis or Daredevil.

Doom Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris. I suppose David Fiore may take this as just another sign of my degeneracy, but I was very, very unsold on this book. It’s Grant Morrison doing crazy superheroics, which could be lots of fun (the Doom Patrol fights the Brotherhood of Dada!), and it’s much warmer than the eminently dislikeable first volume of The Invisibles. But I had one medium-sized problem and one huge one: 1) The “journey to the center of Crazy Jane” plot is a) way, way too Sylvia Plath by way of Sybil, and b) resolved in a way so anti-feminist I have to think Morrison just found the plot got out of his hands. I mean, Jane is saved by a man, but it’s okay, because he’s not really a man–he’s a man’s brain in a robot body? Whatever.

2) The big problem: There’s always too much happening. We never get a chance to get to know the characters because there’s always some new creepy pseudo-postmodern villain or henchbeing popping onto the page. It becomes wearying and prevents the book from actually exploring any of the neat-o keen metafictional stuff that I would have thought would be, you know, the point.

Why I Hate Saturn: Such mixed feelings about this book! It’s the story of a tragically-hip New York female, her best friend, and her sister (who thinks she’s from Saturn, hence the title). For the first several chapters, I swung wildly between hating the aching hip-osity of it all, and laughing out loud as Kyle Baker’s dialogue perfectly captured the aching hip-osity of my actual life and my friends’. I eventually settled into liking the book, but I’m pretty sure if you’re not in the right demographic you’ll be bored by it. (I was also very irritated by a scene in which the male best friend has to explain to the protagonist that there’s a beauty double-standard that damages women. No intelligent twentysomething female should need a man to tell her this. Sorry, not believable.) …If you’re twentysomething, overly ironic, and too clever by half, you might really like this. If not, best pass it by. I enjoyed it.

City of Glass: “Close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, friends. City of Glass is a translation of Paul Auster’s novel into comics. I haven’t read the novel, but there are a lot of moments that work very well as comics: for example, a map of the anonymous city streets in which the protagonist tries to lose himself morphs into a fingerprint–from the dissolution of identity to its most vivid representation.

City of Glass is about the attempt to rebuild the Tower of Babel–to recover the lost “language of God.” It’s also about the human sacrifice, the sacrifice of a son, that this attempt involved. There’s a compelling sense of Fallen-ness here: something wrecked, something that once was whole and made sense, could once be spoken, but now twists on the tongue and can’t be recovered. There’s a furious echo of the binding of Isaac here, I think; and of the Pelagian project of saving oneself. There isn’t, I don’t think, an echo of the sacrifice of Christ. That willing sacrifice, and the transformation of identity that Christian believers are called to (putting off Adam, becoming part of the Body of Christ; being baptized into His death and into His life), are so thoroughly absent from the book that saving oneself seems like the only alternative to despair. Yet the Pelagian/Babel project collapses into cruelty, self-destruction, and, ultimately, absurdity.

This is almost a great book. The “almost,” though, is huge: There are no people in this book. There are only counters moved around on the great Snakes and Ladders gameboard. And so it’s very hard to believe in the choices confronted by the abstracted, cipher-like characters.

This was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.