The cover art was plenty to convince me that I need never open one of the books to look inside.

SA, this might help.

Or "help."

I've flipped through a few issues. They are laughable. In one panel a guy (I'm assuming one of the strippers) is wearing shorty gym shorts that have slits on each side cut up to the waistband and wearing a see through tank top.

Also the Rat King in one panel is shown standing naked with Ken Doll anatomy and in another he's shown wearing Daisy Dukes. I rather like the Rat King character in the books and I just felt so embarassed for him.

I can't tell if the writing is any good because I'm so distracted by the bad art.

I do like how the artist always draws Anita with the same dubious, vaguely worried expression that an actress might wear contemplating what playing this character could do to her showbiz career.

Not so much "Aaaah! The evil vampire/sorcerer/zombie is about to KILL me!" as "my agent didn't mention there'd be nudity and a mud pit..."

Haaaaa. Okay, now I don't have to bother reading. I saw a panel on scans_daily that was vaguely intriguing, and I didn't know if they'd actually gotten a writer to write it instead of LKH. Apparently not.

According to my weekly e-mail from Newbury Comics, Astounishing #20 is out this week.

Hee. This just in from Warren Ellis:

The twelfth and final issue of NEXTWAVE is released today.

There is a place for you to share your memories of this deceased serial, the only comic released by Marvel in the last year that is in fact inside the Marvel Universe’s official continuity.

The NEXTWAVE #12 Comments And Weeping Thread is open for your remembrances.

It’s a sad, horrible and strangely endless day in the history of the universe. In some ways, every day will now be Death Of NEXTWAVE Day. For as long as you live. Whether you know what I’m talking about or not. Something will always be missing from your heart, and that constant incompleteness will drain the joy from every single moment of your existence until you lay on your death bed, listening to your pulse stutter and stop, knowing that somehow, someway… you failed at life.

Knowing that nothing in the world had been right since Death Of NEXTWAVE Day.

So, has anyone read Batman #663 yet? I hadn't seen any previews for it, and hadn't read anything about it, so I wasn't expecting it to be what it was.

I thought it was fantastic. And disturbing and creepy and oddly funny in places.

I've been poking around the interbunny, and the only place I'm finding any reaction to it is the DC forums, which aren't always the type of discourse I'm looking for. (And, in fact, the thread on #663 degenerated into an argument about whether people who didn't like the issue were lame. Or something like that.)

Anyone?

Huh. I'd given up on Batman -- so, it's good? Is it the beginning of something?

It's not the beginning of a story arc. The Joker returns (which I don't think is spoilery, given that the cover pretty much indicates that, but I'll whitefont it if people want).

The format of the issue is what's so striking (though it's been done before in comics) -- it's mostly prose, without the standard art format of several panels and word balloons and/or brief thought/narration text. There IS art, but it's not traditional panel-style art. So basically what you have is a text-heavy story that allows for an enormous amount of internal narrative, particularly on the Joker's part. And, frankly, given the direction the story was taken, I don't think that a traditional format would have worked to tell that story.

t edit If you go to DC.com, you can download the first 6-7 pages of it: [link]