The Comic You Should Be Reading This Week: ‘Extermination’ #3

We’ve talked about Extermination before. In fact, I loved the first issue. And it’s been growing on me like a fungus ever since.

What makes Simon Spurrier’s irreverent take on superheroes and supervillains after the end work is that he earns his irreverence, unlike Mark Millar, who seems to write books on the premise that everybody hates superheroes and only bastards would want to be them. He actually bothers to justify the behavior of Nox and the Red Reaper is that the former has a backstory that’s revealing he had some pretty serious problems even before aliens showed up and killed most of humanity, and the former makes no apologies whatsoever for being utterly ruthless.

That’s really the thing: they’re both horrible in their own way, but both equally sympathetic. Reaper is getting used to the realities of kill or be killed a lot faster than Nox, but he’s smart enough to realize that makes Nox much, much more dangerous than he could ever be. At the same time, Reaper is also the comic relief; it’s a hard balance to strike and it works well.

Some Others I Liked This Week:

Wonder Woman #12: You need to buy this issue if for no other reason than it ends on a killer cliffhanger. We finally see what Azzarello’s really been up to this last year and it’s a doozy.

Before Watchmen: Rorschach #1: Before Watchmen has been a mixed to negative bag for me with Minutemen being the only bright spot. But this book has a solid launch establishing that Rorschach is not an unbeatable badass… yet. That said most of the other books had a great first issue too, so we’ll see with issue #2. But I’m willing to give it a second issue.

What about you? What were some of your favorites this week?