Brief comix and match

Jim Henley is en fuego. Here he is on a variety of subjects including the irresistability of Brian Bendis’s Daredevil, the use of same as a model to beat the “wait for the trade” movement into submission, and the lousy writing in highly-moral clothing in Darwyn Cooke’s The New Frontier. And here he is with more thoughts on Watchmen, focusing on character-specific insights of the type we see only too rarely when talking about this book. (For your complete Watchmen round-up, click here.) Those who criticize the comics blogosphere are advised to send themselves in Mr. Henley’s direction. (Do you think all this brown-nosing will convince him to blog his thoughts on Jones’s Incredible Hulk and Morales’s Captain America?)

Grame McMillan presents a quote from Jamie Boardman that neatly sums up the argument against the floppy pamphlet format: normal people don’t like reading them. ‘Nuff said.

NeilAlien does what he does best (and keep in mind he does a lot of stuff very very well): analyze Dr. Strange appearances in recent comics. His main focus is the good Doctor’s cameo in the most recent issue of Daredevil. To a certain extent he’s used as comic relief, but he is within character. Neil is puzzled as to what Doc is doing there in the Luke Cage-staged intervention to calm DD the hell down, but it makes sense to me: It’s reasonable to assume that there’s a sense of brotherhood between vigilante superpeople, even between street-level types and cosmic guys, particularly the NYC-based ones; it’s also reasonable to assume that Dr. Strange, one of the most magnanimous heroes in the Marvel pantheon, probably does truly care about Daredevil, even if they’ve only worked together very rarely. I thought it was actually somewhat touching that Strange and Reed Richards showed up to try to help (as they saw it) Daredevil. Anyway, check out what Neil has to say about it.