Another reason Warren Ellis totally rocks your world

Hey, every comic I bought this week helps me keep my New Year's resolution to Try Each Week to Pick Up One New Comic Title I Haven't Been Reading!

THE THING #2 and 3: This comic is fun! Hey Bully!, you are likely to shout at me. "Hey is for horses!" I will shout back. But Bully, if this is Comics Oughta Be Fun, home of "Ben Grimm Totally Rocks," then why aren't you reading Dan Slott's new Thing series? Uh...uh...go away rude disembodied voice! Stop bothering me! Cos altho' I missed the first issue, and didn't pick up the second one when it came out, this week I bought two, count 'em, two issues of The Thing, and golly-wow, it sure is chock-full of Ben Grimm rockin' clobberin' time excitement! As y'all well know, I'm a big fan of Dan Slott's She-Hulk (well, except for the creepy cheesecake covers—even tho' I luv eating cheesecake at Junior's here in Brooklyn, I jus' plain don't like Greg Horn's cheesecake!). But that's not a problem with Ben Grimm. Even tho' he doesn't wear a shirt most of the time! Anyway, these are two action-packed, rollickin' adventure issues. Like in She-Hulk, Dan Slott knows a lot about the Marvel Universe and has a lot of fun working in popular and obscure Marvel characters (Nighthawk, Arcade, Iron Man, the Constrictor, and even Brynocki from Master of Kung Fu) without going completely over the top. The cliffhanger of #2 even features a whole horde o' Hulk robots! The plot's a roller coaster but there's still plenty of time for the traditional Grimm introspection. There's not many people who really "get" my favorite hero, Aunt Petunia's ever-lovin' blue-eyed nephew, but I think Ben is in good hands with Mister Slott.


NEXTWAVE #1: This comic is fun. How can I give away the award for The Best Line of the Week" to Mister Warren Ellis when very nearly every one of his lines in Nextwave #1 is the best line of the week? Really! Let's sample a few, shall we?

• "Hey, I'm from Brooklyn. I'm going to call myself Mr. Friendly? Hell, no. Captain %$@#^."
• "Every day I smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whisky and three bottles of wine with dinner. And dinner is meat. Raw meat. The cook serves me an entire animal and I fight it bare-handed and tear off what I want and eat it and have the rest buried. In New Jersey!"
• "Silence, fleshy one."
• "When her mother died, she went to Hell, and is used as a bucket by giant weasels dressed as cheerleaders. And that's what happens when you tell your kids to get a proper job."
• "Fin Fang Foom! Has been burning with the need to mate since 1956! Fin Fang Foom! Has absolutely no genitals whatsoever! Fin Fang Foom! Oh, you cannot imagine how annoyed he is."
• "Hello, I am a tiny insignificant particle. Put down your guns or I'll bounce off you undetectably."
• "I shall kick you to death with slippers on, so it doesn't hurt so much."
• "I hate broccoli. Let's kill 'em."
• "Oh my God. It's wearing underpants."

And none of these lines make much sense outside of their own context, but inside the comic they're outrageous and milk-snorting funny. Put together a half-dozen abandoned and forgotten Marvel superhero characters into an over-the-top team run by Dirk Anger (he's that much more a man than Nick Fury). This is The Authority without the social conscience, in full-speed-ahead take-no-prisoners and make-no-plans action that's the equivalent of taking your old Marvel Secret Wars action figures and blowin' 'em up with firecrackers just cos it's cool to watch. If I had any quibbles it's that it's harder to justify that this over-the-top approach actually takes place in the Marvel Universe, but that's prob'bly less of a worry in the twenty-first century where various corners of personal continuity seem to have broken out (beginning with X-Statix)...now writers like Ellis can play with the Marvel universe toys in his own sandbox and nobody's going to get mad if his plots don't merge perfectly with this month's issue of New Avengers. It revels in the joy of its own anarchy and Ellis reminds us that hey, it's jus' a comic book: don't take it so serious, bub. Be warned: Nextwave is not for kids (and prob'bly not really for little stuffed bulls). I'm not even certain Nextwave is for adults. But hey! It's got the best letters page since Mike W. Barr had Katana send everyone home with the lungs in a bucket, and it's got Fin Fang Foom in it! And that, as well as a million other little pieces, is what makes NEXTWAVE #1 the most fun comic of the week!