8.27.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

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The Massive #26 (Dark Horse): There’s a ton of great stuff out this week, everything from the sales juggernaut that is Saga #22, and Black Science #8 (probably the best thing Rick Remender has produced since that career-high Uncanny X-Force run) to Charles Soule’s Letter 44 #9 and Joe Casey’s post-genre Sex #15. I also want to direct people’s attention to Fuse: Volume 01 by Antony Johnston and Justin Greenwood, which is basically CSI: Galactica if you want some pitch shorthand. For me, #BookOfTheWeek was a very close call, which came down to The Massive #26 and Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #2. Tom Scioli’s take on these 80’s nostalgia properties is just perfect. It captures this manic sense of nostalgia and invades your childhood with an indie comics aesthetic that is equal parts reverence to the source material and deep subversive intent. It was a brilliant move to have Scarlett lead an away team to invade Cybertron(!), I love the sly details of certain scenes actually looking like action figures being played with due to their small scale, or the ruthless Bumblebee head necklace Megatron wears like a baller(!), and Scarlett's interplay with cats like Wild Bill is just sublime. It’s highly recommended and no doubt one of the best books of the year. But. Then there’s Brian Wood, Garry Brown, and Jordie Bellaire exponentially intensifying The Massive to such a degree that these final, I’d say three, arcs are just paying off so brilliantly. There isn’t a whole lot else I can say about the plot itself without encrypting things with big [REDACTED] marks all over it, but needless to say, the three central mysteries that have surrounded the series since the beginning - The Crash, The Massive, and engimatic Mary - are all starting to become more and more clear. Wood has said all along that The Massive is about the end, planned at #30, so I'm very excited to see exactly how he's going to stick the landing. I was also really impressed by John Paul Leon’s rendition of The Pieta on the cover, which is very gripping.