By ANDREW A. SMITH, Scripps Howard News Service

Forget turning lemons into lemonade. I'm beginning to think writer Geoff Johns can turn lemons into fine wine.

Johns has gained a reputation for fixing characters that have become radioactive because various revamps have made their histories too convoluted. He did it with Hawkman, he did it with the 1960s Green Lantern and Flash, and now he's doing it with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Most of us have never wanted to go to Turkmenistan, nor could we find it on a map. But the graphic novel "Joe and Azat" ($10.95, NBM/ComicsLit) depicts it as an awfully interesting place.

One word: Breathtaking.

That's the best description for "Sandman: The Dream Hunters" (DC/Vertigo, $24.99), a hardback collection of the recent miniseries written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by P. Craig Russell.

Rabbi David Kahn was a well-respected spiritual and community leader when he died. That's when his wife, three children and synagogue found out he wasn't a rabbi. And he wasn't Jewish. Heck, he wasn't even David Kahn.

He was a con man named Donnie Dobbs, a cheap grifter who fell in love with a Jewish girl and transformed into the good man she thought he was.

Rabbi David Kahn was a well-respected spiritual and community leader when he died. That's when his wife, three children and synagogue found out he wasn't a rabbi. And he wasn't Jewish. Heck, he wasn't even David Kahn.

He was a con man named Donnie Dobbs, a cheap grifter who fell in love with a Jewish girl and transformed into the good man she thought he was.

As practice for Twitter -- which apparently is going to take over the world -- I'm going to pretend I'm tweeting and do all of my reviews this week in 140 characters or less. While that necessarily means shallow content, it does have the benefit of blazing through a tremendous amount of reviews at one whack.

Can I do it? Is this a stupid idea not worth doing? Let's find out:

Mother Nature is the scariest killer of them all. That's what I took away from "Whiteout," the 1998 miniseries from Oni Press that was collected as a graphic novel in 2001, and is now a movie, premiering Sept. 11.

It's not that Mama Nature kills any more savagely or brutally or frequently than human beings. We're actually pretty good at that.

Yes, it's true: Disney bought Marvel Comics for $4 billion.

Let's get the jokes out of our system right away: The House of Mouse buys the House of Ideas, Spider-Mouse and Duckdevil, Fantasia Four (Billion).

But what does it mean? Obviously, Disney isn't going to blab about its plans, but we do know some things and can guess some others. Here are the questions I hear the most:

I love Vikings. And the existence of "Northlanders," a series from DC's mature-reader Vertigo line, tells me I'm not alone.

"Northlanders" doesn't have a continuing story line or characters. It's just a series of disparate stories set during the Viking era, all written by Brian Wood ("DMZ") and each drawn by a different artist.

Occasionally I recommend a book without pictures, and such is the case with Brian Cronin's "Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed!" (Plume, $14).