Planetary

After a weekend in which I mostly kept to myself, I decided I needed to get out and see people, so last night I went to a stickering party for a mailing that SF3 is doing to clean up our mailing list. (This is the mailing for which I was learning CGI over the weekend; we have a page for people to respond to the mailing if they choose.) Although my head was spinning after two and a half hours of stickering, it was basically a good time, since I'm pretty good at menial tasks, and there was plenty of conversation.

Why stickering? Well, partly because for the mailing we're sending out recent WisCon flyers and we had custom stickers (yay, Kinko's!) with response information; the goal of the mailing is for the recipients to respond if they want to remain on our mailing list, otherwise we'll be dropping them. And, we're only sending the mailing to a subset of our list which we have reason to believe may no longer be valid (e.g., people who haven't been to a WisCon in seven years). We're doing this mailing using bulk mail, so we had to put address labels on and group the flyers together for the Post Office (bulk mail means "pre-sorted"). Of course, the computer which printed the stickers did all the sorting ahead of time; we just need to apply them to the flyers so as not to screw things up.

Boy, that was probably way more than you needed to know, huh?

And then tonight, I went down to the weekly SF3 social thing, and hung out for a while. It sounds like there will be a going-away party for me before I head to California, which is pretty cool. It's nice to be liked.

This week's haul included:

• Conjurors #1 (DC): This is a pretty cool first issue of a three-issue series, which features several of the leading mystics of the DC universe. The twist is that it takes place in the present day, but it's a present day in which magic works (10% of the populace are adepts), science is frowned upon as "not really worth it", and a band of adventurers (the Challengers of the Unknown) are either about to set things in motion to fix everything, or else make everything a lot worse - it's impossible to tell.

  I like this issue because it really roped me in and made me think, "What the heck is going on?", and it's sophisticated enough not to spell it out; I have enough information to make some guesses, but I don't really know. I've also appreciated Eduardo Barreto's artwork a lot more since he started working on quirky, intriguing projects - like the outstanding Martian Manhunter: American Secrets series of a few years ago - and he doesn't disappoint here. Barreto isn't flashy, but he seems to pick his projects well these days.

• Fantastic Four #14 and 15 (Marvel): Okay, they're doing the alternate-future-reality thing, and something weird is happening to the Invisible Woman. That's enough to persuade me to jump on board, at least for a little while.

• Martian Manhunter #3 and #5 (DC). I've not generally been a fan of writer John Ostrander's collaboration with artist Tom Mandrake, mainly because I simply don't care for Mandrake's art style. So I didn't care much for their work on GrimJack, or their revival of The Spectre. This series, though, is a little more intriguing: It takes DC's seminal Martian super-hero and plays with the fact that as a shape-changer he can have dozens of secret identities, and may have preferences for some of them. And, whereas recently his powers (which include shape-shifting and telepathy, two really powerful abilities) have seemed to make him nearly unbeatable, his opponents in this series are neatly tailor-made to confound his skills. I don't know where it's heading, but it's not bad.

• Planetary #1 (Wildstorm): My pick of the week. Planetary is a three- (or maybe four-) person group of adventurers who are investigating a "shadow world" on their fictional Earth: Paranormal events which have been hidden from mankind. This isn't really in an X-Files vein, it's apparently more in a "secret super-heroes" vein. This first issue involves the three protagonists (themselves being paranormals) who discover a hidden cave in the Adirondacks which turns out to be the headquarters of Axel Brass, an adventurer who disappeared in 1945. When they investigate, they discover the fate of a clutch of little-known adventurer from that time period, who obviously are based on various pulp heroes such as Tarzan, The Shadow and Doc Savage (who of course is the aforementioned Brass). It's got terrific art by John Cassaday and some clever references by writer Warren Ellis, but I think is quite enjoyable even if you don't get the references. Check it out.

• Starman #52 (DC): The latest issue in the "Stars My Destination" storyline has Jack and Mikaal on the planet Rann, where DC's silver age space hero Adam Strange is continuing his renaissance as an enjoyable hero after some truly execrable stories in the 1980s. It's not as good an issue as #51, "Midnight in the House of El", where our heroes end up on Krypton when Superman's father was a young adult, but it has a surprise ending and is a solid read as usual.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)