Quick Thoughts: Wednesday Comics #1

Wednesday Comics (Banner)

It’s huge. The most impressive strips are the ones that actually make use of the larger canvas — Adam Strange, Hawkman, etc.

A lot of the creative teams don’t have a good sense of how to tell a story one page at a time. Not many of the strips work well stand-alone. The Cat and The Demon may have been the most successful one in that regard.

I liked the art style on Wonder Woman, but it made really poor use of the space. Panels were tiny, and worse, the words were tiny. It actually felt cramped on a giant newspaper-sized canvas. Almost like someone had taken 6-8 pages of a regular comic book and shrunk them down to digest size, then rearranged them to fit into the space of 4 regular comics pages.

The Flash strip was fantastic. I love what they’re doing with the parallel Flash/Iris West strips.

Having driven along the central California coast a number of times, I can conclusively say that the first panel of Green Lantern is dead on. It looks exactly like any number of stretches of Pacific Coast Highway.

I liked the moody intro to Hawkman, but the Teen Titans into didn’t do much for me.

Supergirl was good, and actually made me laugh out loud at 11:30 at night.

I wasn’t expecting so many of the strips to have such a retro feel. Green Lantern was outright set in the early 1960s, Metal Men was clearly the 1970s, Metamorpho and Flash had the feel of the early Silver Age. (Flash even brought back the logo from the 1940s. And the one from the 2000s. Using both next to each other looks a little awkward.) And everyone seems to be comparing Kamandi to Prince Valiant. I guess it makes sense, given that nostalgia is one of the driving principles behind the series. (That and DC’s quest to keep people coming into the comic shop every week.)

That may be in part why I didn’t like the Neil Gaiman-scripted Metamorpho as much as I’d expected.

I’m not sure how I’m going to store these.

Share

6 thoughts on “Quick Thoughts: Wednesday Comics #1

  1. Luke

    I am still trying to figure out what was so visually impressive about Hawkman. Kyle Baker is really ill-suited to the character and the strip looked flat and simplistic. Having big panels doesn’t impress me when you can use a normal sized one and get the same effect.

    Flash Comics was one of my favorites, especially the different styles for Flash and Iris West.
    .-= Luke’s latest blog post: Hawkman And Hawkgirl Sketches By Paul Smith =-.

    Reply
  2. loko

    Man, finally someone in America gets it. This is how to do comics, respectable format [why shoould only Europeans do them properly, we can too] weekly. All is perfect for a start. I would slowly add more pages [never decrease the size of this beauty!] maybe add some different genres in there slowly like one manga page [not those large eye one, but more realistically drawn eg, Naoki Urasawa], comedy eg, Sergio Aragones etc. western Jonah Hex by Jordi Bernet that would be awesome…

    Reply
    1. Ben

      I’m not sure the page count should be increased, partly because we have yet to see the collected edition of Wednesday Comics. Another reason is due to the fact that we have yet to fully succeed as an idea, meaning sales wise. Plus according to Dan Didio in a Newsarama interview it was made a 12 issue series due to having trouble with creators’ schedules.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.