Hi all. I’m Derek, friend and colleague of Scott, though I suppose for these purposes I’m nerd number 2 (though I prefer ‘geek’ to ‘nerd’, as the latter, to my mind, infers a certain level of scientific and/or mathematic knowledge, while the former connotes a devourer of a given aspect of media culture, owing back to its original meaning: a sideshow freak who would eat anything put in front of him. Which I also identify with. But I digress.)

My list this week:

Action Comics #12

Animal Man #12

Swamp Thing #12

Batwing #12 (isn’t it a little weird that Batwing has the same numbering as Action? But I digress.)

Dial H #4

Sweet Tooth #36

A Vs. X #9

Daredevil #16

Hawkeye #1

Ultimate Spider-Man #13

Fury: My War Gone By #5

Beasts of Burden: Neighborhood Watch One Shot

Harbinger #2 (yes I realize a couple of these came out previous to this week, but I just picked them up, so they’re new to me!)

Dark Shadows #6

Lone Ranger: Snake of Iron #1

The Wheel of Time #28

(whew)

So either I read entirely too many comics or you don’t read enough.

In any case, I agree that Fury, DD and the Animal Man/Swamp Thing combo are the books I’m most excited about. However, since I tend to place my “main course” books somewhere in the middle of my reading pile, I figured I’d get the ball rolling with the one of the first books I read: Action.

It goes without saying that Grant Morrison is one of the smartest, most adventurous writers out there. He’s one of the few writers that court controversy not merely by the content of his stories, but by the way he structures them. He not only juggles a lot of balls at in the air; he zaps some of them with a time ray mid-flight so that he can catch them in the future and then send them hurtling through a vortex back to the past. And it’s up to the reader to keep up. There’s an exuberance to his approach that I’ve always found appealing.

Having said that, this issue, with its talk of Neo-Sapiens, Million-Pointed Spears, and the Oort-Kind, started to get a little too….abstract? What did you think?