Before I get into the res­o­lu­tions for next year I think it’s best to do a final tally of the 2008 ones.

1. Start home brew­ing beer
2. Learn to bake bread and bread related products
3. Learn how to make my own sausages.
4. Increase exer­cise to coun­ter­act the effects of a beer/sausage/bread diet
5. Fin­ish writ­ing my novel
6. Get at least two short sto­ries published
7. Learn more Italian

I wrote up an update around Sep­tem­ber for my post a day and not much has changed since then.

I made beer and started learn­ing Ital­ian. Most impor­tantly I put a lot of effort towards increas­ing my daily exercise.

Way back at the begin­ning of the year I was given a free ses­sion card for the gym located in the same build­ing as I work. Given the heavy fees most gyms charge find­ing that lit­tle card was like find­ing a golden ticket to health­i­ness. It was only 10 ses­sions, and I only man­aged to use 9 of them, but for 30 min­utes I worked myself like a dog.

I also hit a sep­a­rate gym close by the house for a cou­ple of spin classes. If you’ve never been, spin class is hell. 45 min­utes of con­stant leg mov­ing, inter­sected with peri­ods of stand­ing, sit­ting and high ten­sion leg break­ing. After all that you get to nap, wait a week and do it all over again. Fun with a cap­i­tal F.

So thats 1, 4, half of 6 and part of 7. Although you could argue that 7 was vague enough that it would never ever be ‘com­pleted’. In fact all of those res­o­lu­tions weren’t as fleshed as they could’ve been. Three and a bit res­o­lu­tions out of seven com­pleted. Ter­ri­ble, just terrible.

I’m ram­bling again, so I’d bet­ter get to the list for 2009. I’ve tried to make it a lot more detailed so there’s actual goals to reach:

1. Learn how to make bread. Be able to make sour­dough and whole­meal high tin loaf.
2. Go on a mush­room pick­ing tour.
3. Con­vince the Ital­ian com­mu­nity to let me get involved in mak­ing sausages.
4. Sub­mit fic­tion to at least two short story competitions.
5. Fin­ish a 100 page script for Script Frenzy in April.
6. Par­tic­i­pate in Dry July.
7. Loose 10 kilograms.

So that’s seven mod­er­ately easy res­o­lu­tions. Same num­ber as last year. Now I just need to keep them.

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #20

Read­ers of this site and fol­low­ers of my Twit­ter account may know of my utter dis­ap­point­ment with any­thing that comes from Jeph Loeb’s hand. So it was with utmost trep­i­da­tion that I sat down and started in on this book.

Just a note of warn­ing: this is a book for the hard­core fans only. Unless you’ve been watch­ing the show since episode one you will be lost.

The meat of this book is a flack­back to sea­son 2 of the TV show in the style of the ani­mated series that was pro­posed way­back when.

There’s a cou­ple of decent enough moments in the book, Like Buffy think­ing back to Angel’s words of advice and get­ting them mixed up. But the major­ity of it is just incred­i­bly bad. Like the “real-life” scenes that book­end the car­toony mid­dle. The char­ac­ters are writ­ten so over the top that they bor­der on par­ody. They get worse once the car­toon sequence begins.

And Loeb? Points off for using the same lame Wiz­ard of Oz ref­er­ence that you used in the sea­son finale of Heroes. It wasn’t good then and it’s not good in this book.

Thank the var­i­ous gods that this is just a one shot. I don’t think I could han­dle another Loeb issue.

Mighty Avengers #20

When Secret Inva­sion started way back at the start of the year both the Mighty and New Avengers books were hijacked to pro­vide for filler material.

You could eas­ily class this book as more filler, but the writ­ing, by Bendis, is just so much bet­ter than the main Secret Inva­sion book. I won­der how much bet­ter SI would’ve been had Bendis stuck to the small character-focused arcs, rather than resort­ing to scenes where the Skrulls break out the big guns.

Prob­a­bly my favourite part was the silent mon­tage of Ms Mar­vel fill­ing in Hank Pym on the Mar­vel Uni­verse hap­pen­ings since he’s been gone. Can’t wait for the inevitable pho­to­shops where Cap­tain America’s death is replaced with pic­tures of Sarah Palin. If it hasn’t hap­pened already that is.

There’s three artists listed in the cred­its: Lee Weeks, Jim Che­ung and Carlo Pag­u­layan. I don’t know why they needed three dif­fer­ent artists to fin­ish off this book as it’s just a stan­dard 22 pager. No upsiz­ing at all. Which is strange as this is Bendis’ last issue of Mighty Avengers. Dan Slott takes over next month ad for the fore­see­able future (hopefully).

Com­plete List:

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #20
Ex Machina #40
Trin­ity #29
Avengers: Ini­tia­tive #19
Dark Reign New Nation
Mighty Avengers #20
Thor: God-Size Spe­cial #1
Thun­der­bolts #127
Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #59
Uncanny X-Men #505
X-Factor #38
X-Men: Legacy #219

Booster Gold

This is the first issue writ­ten by Dan Jur­gens, cre­ator of Booster Gold and drawer of said char­ac­ter since issue one of this par­tic­u­lar ongo­ing. This issue is a  lot more light-hearted than the pre­vi­ous issues writ­ten by Rick Remender. While adven­ter­ous, his issues were com­pletely lack­ing in charm. But enough about ol’ Rick. How does Booster Gold stand up now?

Bet­ter. Much, much bet­ter. It’s not quite Geoff Johns level, but this Booster has just the right amount of self-indulgent goofi­ness and Skeets has the right amount of know-it-all side­kick­i­ness going for him.

I would’ve pre­ferred this to be a done-in-one issue, but it looks like we get another mul­ti­part story, spin­ning out of the sto­ry­line Remender fol­lowed. Is this Jur­gens’ way of ignor­ing Remender I wonder?

After a cute open­ing scene with Booster and Gold­star in 16th cen­tury Italy look­ing for food and fame, the story quickly becomes a search for Rip Hunter and their head­quar­ters that seems to have van­ished from the timestream. There’s a fun sib­ling fight then Skeets informs the two that all evi­dence points to time trav­el­ing knife, mis­placed dur­ing the Killer Moth mis­sion, being the cause and not Goldstar’s pos­ing for a por­trait with Leonardo da Vinci as Booster sug­gested. Booster meets up with future fel­low Jus­tice League Inter­na­tional team­ster Elon­gated Man, in a scene that would mean a lot more had I grown up read­ing JLI. Then Booster is flung through time to some­where next month’s solicit reveals to be World War 1.

This book sits fairly low on the month-by-month sales chart. Lower than Blue Bee­tle and Birds of Prey. I hope that doesn’t mean that this book is up for can­cel­la­tion. Though I wouldn’t be too sur­prised, given DC’s cancel-happy atti­tude these last few weeks.

Green Lantern Corps #31

Con­fes­sion time. Kryb scares the every lov­ing shit out of me. This is Kryb:

Seri­ously, it took all of my willpower just to post that picture.

Not only is she a super­pow­ered baby-stealing alien that runs on fear. Her “milk” also acts as a DNA-specific mind-controlling agent if it gets on your skin. Jesus H. Christ. The only way Kryb could be more creepy is if “she” was a “he”.

Despite the recent ick fac­tor Green Lantern Corps has been great to read. Expand­ing on the emo­tional spec­trum where the stand­alone GL book has become more tightly focused.

Yes, we know that the Love Lantern is going to defeat Kryb and break the hold over the other lanterns. Well at least I hope that’s what hap­pens. Before Kryb cuts the baby out of Amnee’s body, thanks. The third law of Oa, “no rela­tion­ships between Green Lanterns”, is only going to end in dis­as­ter. But if the Guardians actu­ally thought things through instead of just react­ing to every­thing then we wouldn’t have the Man­hunters or the Alpha Lanterns.

Yes, this book is creepy, but it’s creepy in a “look through your fin­gers” kind of way. And I love it for that.

Com­plete Pull List:

Booster Gold #15
Final Cri­sis #5 (of 7)
Green Lantern Corps #31
Jus­tice Soci­ety of Amer­ica HC Vol 03 Thy King­dom Come Part 2
Jus­tice League of Amer­ica #27
Secret Six #4
Trin­ity #28
Aston­ish­ing X-Men: Ghost Boxes #2 (of 2)
Secret Inva­sion Dark Reign
Wiz­ard Mag 2009 Platinum

Secret Inva­sion #8 (of 8) 

Firstly, just a few things about this issue I found to be incred­i­bly dumb:

1. Janet Pym (found­ing mem­ber of the Avengers)‘s death is por­trayed ter­ri­bly. Shes paral­ysed by  mas­sive amounts of pain, until Thor gen­er­ates a cyclone as tall as her that appears to engulf half her body. Then she dies.
2. SHIELD is a UN-based agency, so the US Pres­i­dent can’t do shit about it. Unless of course the Pres­i­dent is Bendis himself.
3. All the heroes that were replaced by Skrulls weren’t killed, instead the aliens kept them locked in a ship float­ing above the earth ready for some wan­der­ing hero to come across them. Which they do.

Now on to the review proper.

It’s hard to review this book with­out touch­ing on the seven issues pre­ced­ing it. So for­give me if I seem to jump back and forth.

I came into Secret Inva­sion with mid­dling expec­ta­tions at best. After House of M, Civil War and World War Hulk  I was tired. Very, very tired. The whole series was roughly 4 issues too long. I can only guess that it’s as long as it is because Bendis wanted it to match up with DC’s 80’s “secret inva­sion” series Mil­len­nium.

As far as finales to crossover heavy events goes it doesn’t com­pletely suck. The fram­ing device (a debrief­ing) works well and is a nice change from seven long months of peo­ple scream­ing and fir­ing bul­lets at each other.

Nor­man Osbourne kills the Skrull Queen and in doing so sets him­self up as the new defacto ruler of the super­hero com­mu­nity. Whats inter­est­ing is that if he’d pulled the trig­ger a frac­tion later we’d be look­ing at a year of “King Wolver­ine rules the world”. Although with the amount of Wover­ine titles cur­rently put out by Mar­vel you’d thing that was the cur­rent sta­tus quo anyway.

The book fin­ishes up with the oblig­a­tory Mar­vel brand non-ending that sets up the much darker uni­verse and the var­i­ous Dark Reign tie-ins for the next year or so. (At one point Nick Fury lit­er­ally dis­ap­pears off the page. No doubt reap­pear­ing in the upcom­ing Secret War­riors title).

Based on the solic­its I don’t see myself buy­ing any of the new books Secret War­riors included. I’m just burnt out. As a mar­ket­ing exer­cise to get peo­ple to invest in yet another new line of books Secret Inva­sion has failed. As far as the story goes it gets a pass­ing grade. But only just.

Com­plete Pull List:

Hell­boy: The Wild Hunt #1 (of 8)
Trin­ity #27
Invin­ci­ble Iron Man: The Five Night­mares HC
New Avengers #47
Secret Inva­sion #8 (of 8)
Secret Inva­sion Front Line #5 (of 5)