This was an uncharacteristically light week for comics with the excellent new issue of CRIMINAL being the best of the bunch. Here are the picks for this week.

DC

Countdown #49 - The DC weekly comic follow-up to 52 continues this week, but I can't help but think that it has yet to start. Like 52, the events of the individual issues aren't all that exciting without the hindsight of the grand picture (which we won't have for many months). Issue #49 has Killer Croc mauling Jimmy Olsen as he's coming out of his interview with the Joker in Arkham Asylum, but Olsen inexplicably demonstrates Plastic-Man-like powers and survives Croc's attack. The guards eventually restrain Croc, but it's clear that something is going on with Jimmy. We also get a scene from a tribunal of the Monitors and the Rogues are still unsure about their new members. Finally Mary Marvel happens across a major player from 52. See what I mean? These events don't stitch together into a very compelling single comic, so I just have to blunder forward blindly with the belief that something worthwhile awaits me. More Darkseid please, thank you.

Wonder Woman #9 - This issue is a tie-in to the AMAZONS ATTACK mini-series where Wonder Woman's mother Hippolyta is currently destroying Washington, DC with an Amazon army. This particular issue is just OK, nothing great. I think it suffers from too much dialogue. When I flip the pages and see that many word balloons, I just know that I'm in for lots of exposition and probably not much action. Writer Jodi Picoult tries to place some of the exposition during the action scenes, but it ends up reading like the wrong text was placed in the word balloons. Wonder Woman and Circe have an exchange while battling, but they might as well be sitting and having coffee. I mean, I would think that superheroes fighting would make a great deal of noise and render casual conversation pretty useless.

Marvel

Captain America #26 - Is it weird to still have a CAPTAIN AMERICA comic running after he's dead? Maybe a little, but most of the Marvel comics seem to be dealing with Cap's death one way or another, and the CAPTAIN AMERICA book focuses on the supporting characters from when Cap was alive. It isn't public knowledge (to the characters) that S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Carter actually fired the final shots that killed Cap or that she was being controlled by Dr. Faustus and the Red Skull. Issue #26 shows her dealing with the aftermath as well as Falcon attending the wake. Tony Stark also reveals to Sharon that Cap's body appears to be aging. Overall kind of a boring issue. I'm just waiting for them to bring him back.

Criminal #6 - I bought CRIMINAL #1 on a whim because a) it was #1 of a new series written by b) Ed Brubaker who writes CAPTAIN AMERICA with art by c) Sean Phillips who did the art on MARVEL ZOMBIES. The first arc is over and #6 starts a new storyline. From the looks of it you don't have to be familiar with the first arc to understand the second one, but some preview pages I've seen for later issues include characters from it. The new storyline may not be a direct continuation of the first, but I expect them to intersect somewhere. The trade for issues 1-5 was just released (titled "Coward"), and you should definitely pick it up. If you're looking to get on board, #6 is a perfect jumping-on point. We're introduced to our protagonist, Tracy Lawless, right in the middle of murdering someone, so already he's a much different character than Leo from the first arc. Tracy's been buried in a military prison for a while and is just now finding out about his younger brother being murdered. Now he's out and looking for the culprits. If the story sounds cliche, it's because CRIMINAL takes a lot of inspiration from old noir movies (including the art direction and voice over), but without the SIN CITY hyperbole. There are no superheroes, super powers, or extravagant characters. It's just straight-forward crime stories, and some of the best comics writing and cinematic art I've seen in a long time.

Fantastic Four #546 - In the last issue, Black Panther basically ran away from a big fight with the Silver Surfer, Stardust, and Galactus way out in outer-space. Black Panther fans worry not, T'Challa has not turned coward, but was rather just implementing his "Galactus Contingency Plan". If cosmic stories and outer-space weirdness are not your thing, just skip this story. The ending was a little too "feel good" for my tastes, and when Galactus appears in a comic, I'd like him to do more than just speak loudly. Galactus has been turned away from consuming planets so many times he's hardly a threat anymore. Someone make Galactus threatening again. Galactus commands it!

Next week the new issues won't be out until Thursday due to the holiday, so this post will go up on Friday.