FATALE #12: This is the most unusual issue of the series so far, and considering the weird shit Ed Brubaker has gotten up to in these pages, that’s saying something. This time out, we go back in time, almost an entire millennium, to meet another Fatale. Mathilda doesn’t know much about herself, except that nothing seems to be capable of killing her. Sure, she feels pain when they burn her at the stake, but she heals right away, and she just can’t die. Now she finds herself living with an old, one-eyed man in the middle of nowhere, but this being a Brubaker story, she can’t live out the rest of her days in harmony. No, the folks who tried to burn her at the stake have come back, and they have an even bigger plan for her than before. On the second to last page, we learn something very, very important about the nature of Josephine, our current Fatale, even though she lives hundreds of years in the future. On the last page, we get a tantalizing hint of what we have in store for us. This series keeps getting better and better. Thank you, Mr. Brubaker, for leaving Cap and Bucky behind you. This is the work you should be concentrating on.
BATTLEFIELDS #4: To be honest, I’m not too gung ho about Garth Ennis’s war books. I like ‘em, but they’re not my favorites. When it comes to BATTLEFIELDS, some stories are fucking great. Some are just good. With this new story arc, we get back to Anna Kharkova, who has had a story in each run of this book. Luckily, her stories are always fucking awesome. This is no exception. She’s just been shot down by the Germans, and now she’s stuck in a POW camp, where another captive, a British medical student, tries to help her heal. Kind of a strange tale for Anna, but things get even more fucked up when the Russians, her very own fellow soldiers, decide she’s a traitor because she didn’t fight to the very last drop. She’s got two more issues to make her way through this predicament. It’s not as good as the best of the BATTLEFIELDS stories (which would be “Dear Billy”), but it’s up there. The Tankies got a more or less happy ending. (More or less. Very more or less.) Anna’s stories tend to be more tragic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes to a bad ending. Plus, this has got one of my favorite lines from the series: “No one ever got in trouble for killing extra fascists.”