Looking back on Wednesday Comics – Part 1
Wednesday Comics, brainchild of Mark Chiarello, is a weekly collection of 15 strips starring various DC characters presented in 20” x 14” newsprint pages and it has finally reached its conclusion after its intended three months in publication. I hesitate to call it a comics “experiment” because, as many have pointed out, the project draws heavily from regular, newspaper Sunday comics so it’s nothing completely new. It is however, presented with a different mindset, in different times and to a different market. As a whole, I really enjoyed it and I absolutely wish to see this become a yearly event. The individual strips tell a different story though as there are clear discrepancies in quality between them.
In two parts, I’m going to give my general thoughts about each of the 15 strips and rate them from worst to best.
Below are numbers 15 through 8.
15) TEEN TITANS by Berganza and Galloway - Bland artwork
ruined by incredibly dull coloring and a story that chooses, for Heaven knows what reason, to be mired in current continuity. Doesn’t take advantage of the format and doesn’t tell an interesting story. Easily the worst of the bunch.
14) SUPERMAN by Arcudi and Bermejo – I love Bermejo’s artwork and it’s great to look at it in this oversized format but he just can’t save Arcudi’s mess of a story. Perhaps the slowest strip of all, we get a whiny Superman for over 6 weeks and then we get a showdown with some aliens as Superman explains what most of us probably figured out by week 3. Slow, predictable and pretty bad in general.
13) THE DEMON AND CATWOMAN by Simonson and Stelfreeze – It’s around this point in the list that we move from being flat-out bad to simply bland or mediocre. This strip does the opposite of what any good team-up story should do and foregoes character and relationship exploration in favor of plot as we get two wildly different characters that don’t really interact in any meaningful or interesting way. Toss in a villain (or villainess rather) who never really seems like a true threat and solid artwork despite the overly dark coloring and we get a strip that’s not terrible but hard to recommend nonetheless.
12) SGT. ROCK by Kubert and Kubert – This is a case where
neither the story or the artwork live up to its full potential. Joe Kubert provides some great artwork as always but either him and/or writer (and Joe’s son) Adam Kubert have chosen to restrict themselves to a rigid 9 panel layout for nearly every week. It was boring by week 3 and, in a book as visually oriented as Wednesday Comics is, it becomes a letdown. The story itself is mildly entertaining but moves at a slow pace and doesn’t vary much in its setting. I guess what’s really upsetting about this strip is that it could’ve been great but it settles for much, much less.
11) METAL MEN by DiDio, Lopez and Nowlan – Metal Men was shallow but it still managed to be somewhat entertaining. Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez’s artwork is fantastic and he probably made this strip a lot better than it really is. Dan DiDio’s plot is light and boring at first and the story seems to drag for the first six weeks or so. It only gets a bit more tense and interesting after we’re introduced to a proper supervillain for the Metal Men to face after the book’s halfway mark. The strip became a fun read after that point but still nothing to write home about. Did I mention Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez’s fantastic artwork?
10) DEADMAN by Bullock and Heuck – Deadman started off
strong but somewhere along the way it just faltered a bit and never really got back in its feet. We had an interesting set-up and some pretty amazing page layouts at first but the story soon started to drag a little and we got a twist towards the end that was predictable to say the least. The non-ending doesn’t help the story much either. Heuck’s Darwyn Cooke-like artwork was good but most of the time I was just wishing for the real Darwyn Cooke to pencil the thing. If it had kept its initial momentum it would’ve been much higher in the list.
9) GREEN LANTERN by Busiek and Quinones – Another strip where a vanilla story is saved by great artwork. Busiek spends perhaps too much time trying to make us care about a character he created for this story to give people what they really want in a Green Lantern tale, namely aliens getting beat up with green constructs in space. The build-up to the main threat was too slow, the flashblack too long and the resolution too clichéd. Only in week 11 do we get that space moment with Hal Jordan and it was so upsetting because that’s what I wanted to see the entire time and it was only given to me a week before the last. But again, newcomer Joe Quinones did a fantastic job here and the disappointment of not being able to see him flex his artistic muscles as I would’ve liked is softened by that one page in week 11. Gorgeous stuff.
8) SUPERGIRL by Palmiotti and Conner – Perhaps too cute. 
Then again, that’s what Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner were admittedly going for. As always, the strength in Conner’s art lies getting that one expression just right and she did a bang up job on that here. The coloring was suitably bright and cheery and a couple of Streaky drawings were so cute that it’s nearly impossible to hate this strip. The story was fun and lighthearted, the highlight of which is probably Aquaman’s appearance. I didn’t feel the cliffhangers were particularly compelling most of the time though and some weeks this strip felt either stretched out or as if nothing had happened. Solid fun in general and an ending that had me in stitches.
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[...] Wednesday Comics was such a fun read. I’ve talked extensively about it but, to abbreviate, I felt that even though the strips individually were kind [...]