Did I mention I bought a stack of these? I mean, I know I’m still far behind, but seriously, a stack. And despite being so good, they read easy. So, y’know, probably expect more, is what I’m getting at. The Ultimates is the least transparent title in this new Marvel Universe, so I will specify that it’s a retelling of the Avengers storyline. As the first volume, Super-Human, is an origin story, this means that through various and occasionally familiar twists of fate, Iron Man, Captain American, Giant Man and the Wasp, Thor, and the Hulk will be brought together for the first time and form a team of (not so whimsically as in the original telling, from what I can predict so far) ever-changing heroes tasked with defending America and the planet from the self-acknowledgedly sporadic threat that super-villains pose in the modern age of Bush, terrorism, and of course mutants. (I mean, it’s still a comic book world.)

The thing is, though, wow was this awesome. Broken and unhealthy relationships litter the landscape, the Norse god of thunder is doubling as a hippie who leads demonstration marches against the World Trade Committee, and Tony Stark… well, okay, he’s pretty much the same as in every other medium I’ve seen, but since that translates to a distilled essence of debonair awesomeness, I can dig it. Also I’m pretty sure that, reading between the lines, his butler is gay. Sure, there was eventually a climactic battle in which they came together against a terrifying threat, but it was almost an afterthought, I guess because the story of the characters was holding its writer as enthralled as it held me. Ultimate Fantastic Four that I read yesterday was cool, but still quite kiddish. The Ultimates, however (if the trend holds), is very adult-oriented in all kinds of good ways. I’m going to have to work at holding off on skipping straight to the second volume, thanks to a pulse-stopping cliffhanger.

Last fall during a period when I was buying two or three graphic novels per week, Amazon was quite insistent about recommending me all sorts of additional such novels outside the serieses I’d been focusing on, many of which looked either terribly uninteresting or not quite interesting enough to roll with sans recommendation by actual people. And then there were the three volumes of Hack/Slash, in which a scantily clad chick is taking on an assembled mass of movie murderers. That, I could get behind sight-unseen.

And now, a goodly long time later, I’ve read the one I bought, First Cut. And, well, there’s no denying that it suffered from my unreasonable expectations. The backstory felt both rushed and a little bit shoddy, and the initial storyline took a while for me to warm up to. But as the second and third issues unfolded (there are only three in this first volume, plus a short illustrated Christmas poem and a wealth of sketches and other source material), I was won over.

The biggest part of that conversion, aside from the gratuitous sexuality and violence, was due to the growth of partners Cassie Hack and Vlad. In a world where a teenaged girl and a hulking, slightly deformed guy in a gas mask can wander the country in search of serial killers (that is, folks who murder a lot of people) and slashers (who are basically the same, only they’re a lot more unkillable, and often dead in the first place; the kind you’d expect to see in a horror movie), it’s hard to credit that real character development could occur over the course of three brief stories. And yet, they managed it pretty handily. Credit where it’s due, this could possibly turn into a pretty good series. Downside: I’m not sure where to find the second volume, so it may be a while before I return to this.

I really am reading slowly lately. How else to explain a four month turnaround to cycle through my graphic novel serieses? At long last, I’ve made it to the second Fables volume, Animal Farm. As alluded to in the initial book of the series, not all of the exiled fables can mix with the mundanes in New York City. Talking pigs, just to toss out a random example, would be remarked upon in ways that a high-powered businesswoman, no matter how coal-dark her hair or snow-pale her skin, would not. And so, the giants and the dragons and the Three Bears and Louie from the Jungle Book and Chicken Little and pretty much anyone else you can think of along these lines are kept in a spacious preserve upstate.

As the arc opens, Snow White is off north to perform her biannual inspection of the farm, addressing the residents’ concerns and the government’s alike. She also hopes to reconnect with an estranged family member. What she does not expect is what she finds: a populace tired of being caged away, on the verge of full revolt, and planning an armed insurrection against the Adversary who has driven them from their original homes. An insurrection that, notably, hopes to keep its secrets until the plans have ripened. And thanks to his lack of popularity among the quadruped populace, there will be no Bigby Wolf to protect her this time.

Although the storyline flowed directly from the events of the first book, the tone was quite different. Rather than breezy noir, Animal Farm was packed with political rhetoric and literary references and a fair bit more darkness; thinking about it now, in fact, it was dark on a scale that you’d expect to see in the original fairy tales, before Disney and Charles Perrault took to clean them up. As much as I enjoyed the noir tone of Legends in Exile, Animal Farm pulled all kinds of strings with my more firmly entrenched literary scholar side. Good stuff, and I’m once again looking forward to volume three.