Alex Ross' work is hit or miss for me. He's obviously an extremely skilled painter, which in certain comics can be a problem- much of what goes on with superheroes suffers rather than benefits from a high degree of visual realism. I know he favors classic icons like Superman, but for every panel where he evokes heroism, truth, justice and the american way all rendered in glorious oil, there's one where he essentially just highlights the absurdity of a grown man in spandex.

I think he's at his best when he's pushed to experiment, allowed to get inventive rather than simply hearken back to the silver age. Given a work with genuine emotional depth and realism and imagistic challenges worthy of his abilities, Ross can do incredible things.

Uncle Sam is an incredible thing. A strange blend of MTV's the Maxx ("crazy" homeless protagonist interacting with ostensibly fictional figures) and A People's History of the United States, it could very easily have been pedantic, trite, or pointlessly bizarre. Indians, slavery, racism, yadda yadda yadda. What sets Uncle Sam apart are its script, which has great fun with. The blend of Watchmen style visual experimentation and extreme realism of detail and style was probably the only way that this story could have been told, given that it is simultaneously about madness and fantasy and gazing unflinchingly into reality.

Kristen Bell is on Heroes, which for anyone who knows her, is really really good news. She played Veronica Mars, the titular character of the most underappreciated show of the last decade.