Comic Roundup: May 29, 2008

• Why does anyone need 10 copies of a comic book? What possible reason could you have for buying that many? Especially when you're holding up the line when I have to drive back to work on my lunch hour?


• Final Crisis issue 1: What in the world is happening here? If there was ever an event comic aimed solely at the fanboy contingent, this is it. I know some of the characters from reading Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, two books I could get my non-DC-reading mind around. But I feel like I picked up this story in the middle, but not in the cool in medias res sort of way. More like starting War and Peace on page 275. As much as I could get into the prior events, I just can't see myself riding this one out.


• Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men issue 1: After four years, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday finally bring their saga to a close. It really was everything it needed to be: a big action piece with deep character issues addressed and exploited in the Whedonesque way. Anyone who did not enjoy the prior issues is not going to find anything to change their mind. Anyone who did will find a great, fitting, and touching ending here.


• Judenhass: Although we have been clued into the general subject of Dave Sim's Secret Project One, we did not know exactly what he was trying to accomplish with this book or how we would go about it. Instead of retelling the Shoah story, Sim instead focuses Judenhass on the insidious way the smallest verbal and written dehumanizations of the Jews could lead not to an aberration in Nazi Germany, but the inevitability of disaster. Even though I was reading this at work, I could not put it down until I had finished reading. And afterward, I could not shake the feeling that when we say "Never forget" that we're focusing on the wrong thing. It's not enough to promise not to allow a genocide to run unchecked; we must also never allow ourselves to fall for the intellectual trap of thinking another person or group of people are somehow less than how we see ourselves.