Give Me Comics Or Give Me Death!

 Bang! is definitely familiar ground for Matt Kindt; a secret agent romp with a heavy slice of weird on the side.  The story opens with tackling the question of how James Bond manages to still be a relatively young all action hero despite first bursting onto the scene in the 60s, and just why does he look like a different person every few years?  We then jump into an almost Morrisoneqsue metatextual team up adventure with variations of John McClane, Miss Marple/Poirot, and an east Asian techno-spy whose homage I'm sure I would be able to explain if only I was a bit better well-read. The plot races to a somewhat rushed and truncated ending that feels more like a set-up for the next chapter in the story of these characters - indeed, the book finishes with 'to be continued'.  The story itself is interesting enough, but the best chapters and the first 4 which focus individually on our cast of characters, where Kindt does a good job of balancing the recognisable aspects of thes

Unlike some I have no particular quibble with taking Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon's seminal comic Watchmen and using those characters to tell new stories.  The original stands on its own merits and always will.  Indeed, the current Rorschach comic and the critically acclaimed Watchmen TV series suggest that sealing the original off from any further works would only deny us some expertly crafted additions to the canon.  Is it snobbish, or perhaps gatekeeping, to expect Watchmen art to be held to a higher standard though?  Is the original held in such holy reverence that to besmirch the Watchmen name is tantamount to heresy?  Or can we put these characters alongside all the other pop culture icons and accept that they are simply tools to be used and that the resulting quality may be good, bad, or indifferent, just as with, say, any Batman or Spider-Man comic, regardless of the origins or high watermarks of the past? I ask these questions because Doomsday Clock , the somewhat controve