What You Should Have Read #45

Last Week’s Comic Book Awesomeness

Action Comics #2 – This is my Superman. I don’t care if it takes place “five years ago,” this is a Superman I can like. Cocky, smart, not God-like in power. He can be taken down and bound, at least for a bit. He can’t fly yet, but he can leap tall buildings in a single bound. I think I’m really going to enjoy watching him grow in this series. We’ve also got Steel and Metallo and a Lex Luthor who doesn’t quite know everything yet. This is also the Grant Morrison that I like. His writing is smart, but it’s not weird like all his other stuff lately. This is just a good book.

Fear Itself: Uncanny X-Force #3 – Wade’s little rant to Jonathan Standish was the basic plot of a joke: “A religious man is on top of a roof during a great flood. A man comes by in a boat and says ‘Get in, get in!’ The religious man replies, ‘No I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’ Later the water is up to his waist and another boat comes by and the guy tells him to get in again. He responds that he has faith in god and god will give him a miracle. With the water at about chest high, another boat comes to rescue him, but he turns down the offer again because God will grant him a miracle. With the water at chin high, a helicopter throws down a ladder and they tell him to get in, mumbling with the water in his mouth, he again turns down the request for help for the faith of God. He arrives at the gates of heaven with broken faith and says to Peter, ‘I thought God would grand me a miracle and I have been let down.’ St. Peter chuckles and responds, ‘I don't know what you're complaining about, we sent you three boats and a helicopter.’” I’m viewing Standish as a stand-in for a certain conservative religious zealot whose name I don’t even like saying.  It’s not that he’s got a Voldemorty, ominous name, it’s just that it makes me nauseous. This book ended up being tangential to Fear Itself, not necessary at all to the main mini, but it was a good story with some beautiful (if not a little dark) art.

Swamp Thing #2 – Scott Snyder has really become a writer to watch. Between this, Batman and American Vampire (I’ve got Severed but haven’t read it yet), the guy has some great stories under his belt. But while I enjoyed the explanation of Alec Holland’s place in this new DCU, it’s not what I liked most about this issue. Wrightson Diner. Bissette Motors. Totleben’s Motel. Three artists who are almost synonymous with Swamp Thing, immortalized and honored in this issue for their past contributions. I like it artists do things like that. Makes me smile.

X-Men: Schism #5 – Well, this is the start of a new era for the X-Men. We’re finally getting the Wolverine vs. Cyclops battle we never really wanted, with each character heading up a new team of X-Men on opposite sides of the country. I tend to like shake-ups like this in the beginning, as with Spider-Man’s “Brand New Day” event. I hope, as with BND, I end up enjoying these new mutant stories once the shine has worn off. I enjoyed this mini for the most part. I liked watching the divide between Logan and Scott grow, especially after Idie’s actions. My biggest problem had to do with the action. Those bratty, super-smart kids are just random, interchangeable villains…and I hate them. It’s not that they’re not good villains, I just don’t like bratty, super-smart kids as uber baddies. It just doesn’t click for me. The briefcase Sentinel was never really portrayed as a scary threat. It was talk up a lot, but almost all of the action against it was off panel. I thought the most effective use of action in this mini was Quentin Quire’s scheme in the first issue.

Probably for the rest of the month I’m going to whore myself out with an impassioned plea: click on the ads. PLEASE click on the ads. I don’t care if you exit it out of it immediately or actually look around. This isn’t some professional blog where I believe in the products I’m shilling. These are automatic ads placed by Google. But my experiment this weekend proved to me that I actually AM making a spot of cash whenever the ads are clicked. So I’m going to put this little disclaimer on the bottom of all my posts for the next month or so, and I hope you’ll take an extra 10 seconds after reading my blog to click on an ad. Thanks so much!

What You Should Have Read #38

Last Week’s Comic Book Awesomeness

I don’t like Victoria Hand. Nobody likes Victoria Hand, and nobody trusts Victoria Hand. I like Maria Hill’s take on her, calling her a glorified accountant. And then Hand goes and gets pissed off and shoots some Nazis in the head. I’m starting to like Victoria Hand a little more. Also, “You can never go wrong with bombing the hell out of people first.”

Calling somebody a fucktard is probably my most favoritest insult, so it gave me large buckets of joy to read the word in this month’s issue of Fables. I really like how Willingham makes seemingly unimportant side characters so important and heroic. Flycatcher, Boy Blue, Bufkin, and now probably Ambrose. This comic book is such a treat to read every month.

 

Speedball was my favorite out of all the New Warriors. I had no knowledge of him before picking up the first issue of the first New Warriors series, but I immediately took to him. I loved his attitude, and I loved that nobody took him seriously. I stopped reading New Warriors after issue #50. It just wasn’t fun anymore. So I really had no contact with Robbie Baldwin until Civil War happened. I hated where he was taken after that, but he ended becoming a somewhat important character, and we then got to watch him fight his way back to becoming a little bit closer to the hero that he was. I’ve been enjoying his feature in Fear Itself: The Home Front, and this issue sent out a pretty powerful and positive message (well, at least in the fictional Marvel universe).

To Hel with Thor, I can get my Asgardian fix from Journey into Mystery. I like witty books. Thor is not witty, it’s grand. JiM, on the other hand, is very witty…and intricate…and well-illustrated…and just a damn good book. I like Loki as a child. I like that his speech is more Earthly than Asgardian. And I LOVE the look of shock and surprise on the dwarf’s face as Loki emerges from the stone casket.

Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine is surprising me by how much I’m enjoying it. The first one, vs. Punisher, was the same way. It reminds me of the Marvel Zombie craze before it started getting watered down. I like how it’s crossing over with the previous mini, and I’ll be interested in seeing where it goes after this mini.

Holy crap, how long has Jeff Parker been waiting for the perfect moment to make that Man-Thing joke? That and Satana’s dark elation at everything that’s going on really made this issue for me.

The Aunt May bits in Ultimate Fallout were perfect epilogues to Peter Parker’s story. Also, having her and Gwen move to France will allow the writers to fully focus on the new Spider-Man without worrying about his most important supporting characters. Although, I did notice that Mary Jane is still around.

Namor has some great one-liners in this week’s issue of X-Men: Schism, but this one might be the best. And really, who DOESN’T want to hit these kids? I’d also like to say that I’m horribly disappointed in Carlos Pacheco’s art for this series…well, the two issues he’s done so far. Issue three of a mini and he was replaced. This guy used to be one of my favorite artists, and the work he did on the first two issues of the series was just not acceptable.