Wednesday is Comic Day!

writer: Matt Fraction Pencils: Mitch Breitweiser and Daniel Acuna

This book earns my book of the week award. It's an X-Men annual that strangely features only one X-Man. This is an important book for readers of Marvel's Dark Reign storyline as it sets up the relationship between Emma Frost and Namor, the Submariner. It's a clever story, alternating between two time periods. Present day scenes are drawn by Mitch Breitweiser and flashbacks by Daniel Acuna. These are two artists that differ very much in style, not only from each other, but from much of the mainstream. Breitweiser has a hard, rough pencil look and Acuna a smooth, cartoony painted look. Both are very impressive artists.

I've been looking forward to this issue since Wizard World Texas 2008. At that convention, Mitch Breitweiser was a guest and panelist. He gave a class on page layout and used pages 19 & 20 (including ads) of this issue. The particular scene was rather simple - Emma Frost getting into a limousine and greeting the person already in the vehicle. Mitch gave a great explanation of how he works and the choices he made on those pages. The pages were also beautiful, so I obviously wanted to see the whole book. It didn't disappoint.

Matt Fraction burst onto the scene, at Marvel, about two years ago. He is now one of Marvel's most prolific and gifted writers. He often works with Ed Brubaker. The two have a gift for adding a sense of reality to their work. Uncanny X-Men Annual #2 (don't ask why it's #2, when there have been about 30 Uncanny X-Men annuals) isn't the typical slam bang annual. In fact there are no big fight scenes, and only a couple acts of violence. But there is action and conflict and Sentinels and the Hellfire Club.

Emma Frost and Namor are most interesting because they are complex, multi-shaded characters with lots of moral ambiguity. They almost seem to deserve each other.