I had no idea what the above image (click it to see larger version) was supposed to be when Paul Pope posted this on his Flickr page - a two-page Adam Strange story? - but this week I found out. It's a new DC anthology called "Wednesday Comics" with a very unique format. Every page is the first chapter of an individual story, each with its own writer and artist, using a who's who of DC characters including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Hawkman and more obscure characters like Kamandi, the Metal Men and Adam Strange. It's printed like an old newspaper comic strip, all folded up on actual news stock paper (very unusual in this age of glossy paper comics), the upside of which is that the pages are HUGE, 14" by 20". The format is very evocative of the good old days of superhero comics when they were less about the angst and more about the fun, more for kids in other words, and the stories themselves have the same sense of sweet superhero excitement. And the art is spectacular: I only know about half the artists - Mike Allred, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Joe Kubert, Kyle Baker (who does for his Hawkman story the single best page I've ever seen him do) - but even the ones I don't know are really good, Ryan Sook's Kamandi and Lee Bemejo's Superman stand out in particular. The whole thing has a surprisingly consistent high quality, not always the case in an anthology, and it's no mean feat to make an impression with a single page and almost all of these stories do. This is one of those high-concept projects - single page, cliffhanger stories printed on newspaper - that could easily have fallen flat on its face, but instead they pulled it off in spectacular fashion. There are going to be 12 issues of this book, and I'm almost tempted to wait for the inevitable collection, except that it might not be full-size and that's the best part of this thing! Here's hoping that this will pay off in the end.
Read the interview with editor Mark Chiarello about the project here.
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