The St. Louis Review of Comic Books | 2009.07.08

Bravo! Although DC Comics warrants scorn for the avarice of most of its high-profile projects of the past few years, its latest demands acclaim: Wednesday Comics ($3.99). Much of that acclaim should go to editor Mark Chiarello, one of the company's brightest lights, who has here merged three problematic forms: the anthology (generally an emetic "showcase" for work by newbies and third-raters) issued as a weekly (customarily a publisher's exercise in gouging its readership) in the form of a 14- by 20-inch newspaper comics supplement (increasingly a form doomed to extinction even before its parent). As the title's debut last week testified, moreover, Wednesday Comics features some of the mainstream's top talents―writers like Brian Azzarello, Kurt Busiek, and even superstar Renaissance man Neil Gaiman and artists like the legendary Joe Kubert, Paul Pope, and Ryan Sook―working on independent 12-week serials starring both DC's marquee players like Superman and Batman and lesser-known characters like Adam Strange and Deadman and Hawkman and the Metal Men and Metamorpho. Chiarello will likely observe the late-September conclusion of Wednesday Comics―named for the day each week when merch ships to comics shops―by having a nice, quite nervous collapse. Frankly, based on this debut, he'll deserve it. -- Bryan A. Hollerbach