Welcome to the eleventh installment of Comics Bulletin's reviews column devoted to DC's Wednesday Comics. In this week's column, I will be making a few comments (very few) about the series in general.

Thom Young:

Well, next week is the final issue of this summer project that started off with a bang and seems to be ending with a whimper. I've struggled with what I should write about for this week's column. My greatest inclination is to simply repeat what I wrote three weeks ago. My views are almost identical now to what I wrote then--with some of the specific details about the plot elements of the strips changing a bit (though not by much, unfortunately).

This week's "Batman" sets up a resolution to the story that I saw coming since the first installment 11 weeks ago. The woman did it!

I figured that the plot was so obvious that Brian Azzarello certainly had to have some interesting twist in mind--but, no, it doesn't appear that there is an interesting twist coming up. Instead, what seemed to be the obvious resolution 11 weeks ago is the actual resolution that Azzarello is giving us this week and then wrapping up next week.

In fact, five of the strips in Wednesday Comics seem to be heading toward obvious resolutions that I saw coming weeks ago:

• "Batman"


• "Superman"


• "Deadman"


• "Metal Men"


• "Sgt. Rock"

Of those five, the one in which the obvious plot bothers me the least is "Sgt. Rock"--which is not to say that it could not have been a better strip. It could have and should have been much better than it was. However, the Kuberts essentially just produced a 12-page Sgt. Rock story that would have been right at home in a 1971 issue of Our Army at War. The only drawback is that we only were given that story at the rate of one page per week.

For the most part, reading the last few issues of Wednesday Comics has been like torture for me. I've only looked forward to three strips in the past three weeks:

• "Kamandi"


• "Strange Adventures"


• "Wonder Woman" (an amazing comeback for a strip that I hated for the first few weeks)

Overall, I've felt like I've been in Hell--but not the one that Deadman has been in over the course of his story. I've felt more like I'm trapped in one of the rings of Dante's Inferno--which might be more connected to Etrigan in "The Demon and Catwoman."

Speaking of Etrigan, Catwoman comments in this week's installment on his ability to speak in blank verse, "And how the hell do you manage all that iambic pentameter?"

Three weeks ago I wrote that I wanted to analyze Walt Simonson's use of iambic pentameter for Etrigan's speech. However, I really don't have the time to do an in-depth analysis of it. What I will say, though, is that Simonson's verse has been inconsistent in quality.

He started off with solid blank verse--regular rhythm (in this case, as in most English blank verse, iambic pentameter) but with no rhyme scheme. Simonson included end rhymes in a few of Etrigan's lines, but the rhymes were a rarity and never organized into a definite scheme.

After a few installments, I noticed that the iambic pentameter broke down in a few lines. Simonson didn't always maintain the iambic pattern in each line throughout the five meteric feet. Instead, he might have a line that had three iambs and two trochees. In great poetry, the breaking of the pattern (such as inserting trochees into an iambic line) signifies that something important is occurring in the line at that point.

The disruption of the regular meter indicates a change in tone, idea, circumstance, et cetera. However, I could not find anything significant that would indicate the reason for Simonson to insert trochees into his iambic pentameter. I came to the conclusion that what Simonson was actually doing was just trying to give Etrigan lines of 10 syllables each. The fact that the lines were usually iambic owed more to the fact that the English language prefers iambs over other rhythms--particularly American English.

We say that a pendulum clock goes "tick tock"--not because it actually changes sound from one swing to the next (the sound remains the same), but because English speakers like the sound of iambs. In the US, we like the sound of iambs so much that we'll change a trochaic word into an iambic word so that it sounds better to our ears--such as we do with the word garage as we make an iamb out of that word that is trochaic in some dialects of British English.

Anyway, I don't believe Simonson was intentionally inserting trochees into Etrigan's iambic lines. I think he was just trying to write lines that had ten syllables in them--most of which happened to be a string of five iambs, but not always.

Even worse, though, are those lines in which Simonson could not limit a line to ten syllables, so Etrigan ended up spouting a line with anywhere from 11 to 14 syllables at times. Had I been Simonson's editor, we could have worked on strengthening those lines to make them all iambic, and to change over to trochees for rhetorical effects.

Oh well, at least Simonson was putting in more effort than were most of the writers in Wednesday Comics--with the other well- to adequately written strips being:

1. "Kamandi"


2. "Metamorpho" (at times, but mostly not)


3. "Strange Adventures"


4. "Supergirl" (more so at the beginning rather than the end)


5. "Wonder Woman" (more so at the end rather than the beginning)


6. "Flash" (though Karl Kerschl seems to think the character is more interesting as a time traveler than a super speedster)


7. "The Demon and Catwoman"


8. "Hawkman"

That's a total of eight strips out of fifteen that were either well-written or "adequate."

In baseball, .533 is a fantastic batting average!

However, in education, 53% is an F.

I'm an English professor, not a baseball player.

Additionally, of those eight, I'd say only two were well-written ("Kamandi" and "Strange Adventures"--and the latter faltered two or three times in the past eleven weeks).

Overall, Wednesday Comics has been a great series to look at. Unfortunately, it's not been a great series to read--merely an adequate series about half the time.

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