Plastic Man (Spring 2004)

This'll sound like heresy to comics scholars, but artist-writer Kyle Baker (''King David'') has taken Jack Cole's deservedly revered elastic super-hero and pulled off a brilliant reinvention of the character. Baker bends, distends, and abstracts Plas' body into riotous sight gags; the dialogue, steeped in a profound knowledge of Cole's '40s and '50s work, succeeds both as pure yuks and as a deft parody of comics culture.