Fred Van Lente is hitting out of the park on everything he writes these days.  Between his current work on Spider-Man and his ongoing efforts on Hercules, he is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers at Marvel and maybe even in comics as a whole.  And what he and Greg Pak turn out with #133 is just excellent.  It’s always a tricky task to go back over previous content, which is what this issue does in catching readers up on the known background of Amadeus Cho; it’s necessary to do every so often, but to do it in an original way is very rare.  It was a stroke of genius to review Cho’s story in the context of the myth booklet and tie the review to a discussion of heroic archetypes.  Not only does it allow the reader to either re-visit Amaedeus’ origin or see it for the first time, but it also acts as a meta-commentary on the writing process.  Every step of the hero journey, Pak and Van Lente have a reference point from a previous issue going all the way back to Cho’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy; whether they’re consciously trying to hit each point like a checklist or it’s happening naturally, they’ve covered all the necessary bases of the classic hero’s path.  Some might argue that such writing is un-original, and to a point that’s true.  But there’s a reason why this kind of story has lasted since ancient times- it resonates with us.  We get it.

And the truly best part of this issue is that this is only half the book!  The other half is a very creepy, Twilight Zone style story of a seemingly abandoned town where nothing is exactly as it seems, and the story behind the floating brains on the cover is really interesting.  The situation also provides a new challenge to Amadeus, because certain fundamental rules of existence that he understands and has mastered don’t apply here.  While I’m not familiar with the characters of Excllo and Dupree, the setup of this town makes me really interested in wanting to learn how they’re tied into it, and I’m excited to pick up this story a month from now.

On the art side, I don’t if I’ve seen the name Rodney Buchemi prior to now, but it’s a name I hope we get to see more often.  In concert with colorist Emily Warren, he creates beautiful backgrounds that call to mind the American Southwest immediately, with mesas and sand drenched in browns and yellows and going on forever.  The ads for Excello Soap were also striking, as Buchemi and Moeller convey a strong sense of age and use the ads to help with the overall mood of the town (and I really liked the lettering by Simon Bowland on them too).  His female figures bring to mind Terry Dodson and Frank Cho, but without seeming like fan service art.  And I’m really in love with his Hercules; Buchemi knows how to get across the classical image of the character with muscle tone and unkempt hair. 

Fans of Hercules are getting the best of two worlds right now.  Once a month you get a story of high fantasy, and two weeks later you have a horror/sci-fi book, all under the same title.  It will be interesting to see if this all ties together at some point, but until then the creative team is taking us to that end in wonderful style.