New comics 12/29

Batman/Danger Girl (Andy Hartnell/Leinil Yu, DC/Wildstorm)
I have a sad weakness for Danger Girl comics. I think it somehow ties in with my weakness for Charlie's Angels movies. I really enjoyed the original series, which, yes, took like two years to release seven issues. But it was a fun, light read, with humor and action and really pretty art by J. Scott Campbell. So I buy these sporadic Danger Girl specials, which I generally enjoy but wonder if they are really worth their high cover prices (this one was $4.95). This one is decent, better than the Vegas one but not as good as the Hawaii one. Campbell isn't even credited as co-writer this time, so I wonder if he's abandoned his creation, although Hartnell does fine on his own and was probably always the one doing the scripting anyway. I miss Phil Noto's art from the last two specials; it fit the characters perfectly. Yu is a little too gritty for Danger Girl, although he still draws some beautiful women and handles the action well. Overall this is like most Danger Girl stuff: Fun if you like that sort of thing, but completely missable.

The Monolith #11 (Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray/Peter Snejbjerg, DC)
Damn, Palmiottit and Gray finally get my interest back up just in time for the book to end. After kind of flailing for the last few issues, they come back strong with an interesting story about corrupt police, told in a non-linear, Christopher Priest-like style. I'm not quite sure how this will lead into the book's end next issue, but I assume there will be some sort of general wrap-up. It's too bad that regular artist Phil Winslade won't be around to see the book out, but Snejbjerg is a perfectly capable replacement. It'd be nice to see this character not fade into obscurity and stick around the DC universe, but I'm not counting on it.

Savage Dragon #119 (Erik Larsen, Image)
Larsen's a little late with his election story, but I suppose you can forgive him. This is a fun issue, with Larsen taking some jabs at Bush that are really rather gentle but still funny, and holding up the grand tradition of Dragon beating up sacred figures (God, Santa) with the Dragon-Bush fight. There is also more with Mr. Glum, who I always find amusing, and an intriguing set-up for the next issue. It's just too bad that we probably won't see the results of Larsen's election before the actual inauguration.

What If Jessica Jones Had Joined the Avengers? (Brian Michael Bendis/Michael Gaydos, Marvel)
This was the only one of Marvel's many What If books that I picked up this week, because it reunited the writer, artist and main character of Alias, a book I greatly enjoyed. I was hoping for a cool Alias-style tale, but this book was total crap. Bendis spends nine pages, almost half of the issue, recapping the events of Alias, and then his actual story is told almost entirely in captions, with no real action. And the end result? Jessica averts the events of Avengers Disassembled, so the entire thing is one big annoying Bendis wankfest. What a waste. Between this and the last issue of The Pulse, Bendis is really making me wonder if he's run out of ideas when it comes to telling stories about Jessica Jones.