Booster Gold #21

This issue of Booster Gold is the first DC books to show­case their new backup story con­cept, or “co-features” as they’ve decided to call them. A way to keep minor, but loy­ally fol­lowed char­ac­ters that can’t sup­port their own book on the shelves.

If this lit­tle 10-page story, about Blue Bee­tle beat­ing up a giant robot called THINKO! for 3 hours, is any indi­ca­tion then the recently can­celled ongo­ing series must’ve been an absolute gem to read.

Flash: Rebirth #3 (of 6)

I’m not sure I under­stand the point of this series. Green Lantern: Rebirth was fairly straight for­ward: “Hal Jor­dan died a vil­lain, so lets bring him back to life in a way that reaf­firms his hero status. ”

But what about Barry Allen? He died a hero, sav­ing the uni­verse from the big bad at the time only to pop up in Final Cri­sis as the universe’s attempt to cure itself of Dark­seid (no, really!)  There had to be an incred­i­bly good rea­son to keep him around after that, past edi­to­r­ial whim.

Even with the patented Geoff John’s vil­lain reveal page at the end of this issue I’m still at a loss as to why this series exists.

Green Lantern Corps #37

When I showed this cover to Ange her imme­di­ate reac­tion was “Oh yuck.” I couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself. It’s a hor­ri­ble draw­ing of Arisia.

Watch­ing the Dax­am­ites freak the hell out when their super­pow­ers kicked in went a ways to mak­ing up for the ter­ri­ble cover.

Uncanny X-Men #511

Look, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Greg Land is ruin­ing Uncanny, but when every char­ac­ter is posed like a model and either smil­ing or laugh­ing or mak­ing a “porn face” regard­less of whats hap­pen­ing around them then the art becomes at best, panel filler or at worst, utterly detri­men­tal to the story.

I’m sure the script for this page went some­thing like:

STORM floats at the win­dow as a gust of wind BLOWS past her EXPLODING the glass into a mil­lion frag­ments that BLAST into the MASTERMIND SISTERS send­ing them reeling.

While Land had done an neat trick by hav­ing the pieces of glass appear out­isde the panel walls, they don’t seems to con­vey any direc­tion of move­ment. Ther are far worse exam­ples of his stilted style, but I’ll do you a favour and spare you the bur­den of look­ing at them.

You can imag­ine how happy I am that next issue doesn’t seem to have been touched by Land at all. I’m even hap­pier that it’s cen­tered around Beast and his X-Club. One of the bet­ter ideas to come out of Fraction’s plan for Uncanny X-Men.

X-Factor #44

Another solid issue from Peter David. It’s been said that X-Factor is the best X-title being put out by Mar­vel at the moment. I couldn’t agree more.

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #25

I’ve men­tioned this back when Jane Espen­son had her turn in the writ­ing seat, but the big prob­lem with bring­ing in ex-writers of the Buffy TV series is that, while they may be pretty damn good at screen­writ­ing, they’re just not that good at putting together a story in comic book format.

Case in point: In the open­ing pages of this book, Doug Petrie writes a con­ver­sa­tion between Xan­der and Buffy that, spo­ken by actors would be incred­i­bly snappy, how­ever on the page it reads more like Yoda with multi-personality dis­or­der. It’s frus­trat­ing to read.

I’m not sure how long they intend Sea­son 8 to run but right now the series just seems to be drag­ging it’s feet. It’s time to start wrap­ping it up, boys and girls.

Power Girl

I really, really like this book. It’s every­thing main­stream super­hero books aren’t right now. It’s fun, whim­si­cal, fea­tures a solo female as the pro­tag­o­nist, has an ape-with-a-human-brain as the antag­o­nist and doesn’t co-star Wolverine.

Amanda Conner’s art helps to raise the book even higher. Char­ac­ters actu­ally show emo­tion (Ed Benes take note) and she does a good job of mov­ing the cam­era around in a way that doesn’t obscure the story (Ed Benes).

I hope DC aren’t hing­ing it’s future on a some incred­i­bly large sales fig­ures. Power Girl is prob­a­bly too much of a niche book to edge into the monthly top 10. To my knowl­edge Ms Mar­vel, Marvel’s equiv­a­lent female super­hero, has never even hit the top 20 and it’s at #38 and quite hap­pily chug­ging along.

New Mutants

This should go with­out say­ing, but when you’re try­ing to hit the reader with the shock return of a long dead bad guy you prob­a­bly shouldn’t fea­ture that char­ac­ter on the wrap-around cover.

Just say­ing.

Com­plete List

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #25
Flash: Rebirth #2 (of 5)
Power Girl #1
Trin­ity #49
Agents of Atlas #4
New Mutants #1

Green Lantern #38

There’s no mess­ing around with the Hal Jordan-as-a-Red Lantern stuff from the end of the last issue. It’s dealt with by the mid­dle of the book, in a way that puts a lot of empha­sis on why the Blue Lanterns exist. Of course there’s a  down­side in that it unfor­tu­nately destroys my the­ory that Hal Jor­dan would con­trol all the rings by the end of the War of Light.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this book. The way it jumped from Ysmault to Earth to Qward to the Vega Sys­tem pro­vid­ing lit­tle hooks into future sto­ry­lines. Like Carol Fer­ris return­ing to the Star Sap­phires (now Vio­let Lanterns) after play­ing a major part in their for­ma­tion way back in The Sins of the Star Sap­phires story arc; Sine­stro escap­ing back to Qward to pre­pare for his incur­sion into the Green Lantern Corps book to face off against Mongul for the lead­er­ship of Sinestro’s epony­mous Corps; and the Con­trollers head­ing to the Vega Sys­tem to remind every­one that the Agent Orange story starts next month.

As the Black­est Night mini-event gets closer both Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps books are pick­ing up a lot of momen­tum, espe­cially this book. I still remem­ber how slowly Secret Ori­gin plod­ded along just to set up Atroc­i­tus as the Red Lantern big bad, so I really shouldn’t com­plain about pac­ing. I got what I wished for.

X-Force #12

Back in New X-Men Kyle and Yost spun some really great tales fea­tur­ing the kids ver­sus long time X-Men foes like Rev­erend Stryker. When they announced the move to X-Force (along with ini­tial char­ac­ter sketches) I was, much like the rest of the inter­net, imme­di­ately skep­ti­cal. A year later I’m happy to say that I was wrong. X-Force is good. Bet­ter than it deserves to be, for sure, But I like it.

Well ‘liked’ might be a bet­ter word. This issue was just very, very underwhelming.

It starts off with the team quickly real­is­ing that they weren’t exactly suc­cess­ful in keep­ing Bas­tion from the get­ting his robot hands on the Legacy Virus (as seen last issue). D-grade mutants start show­ing up in the mid­dle of pro-human rallys, with their pow­ers flar­ing wildly out of con­trol, killing all the protesters.

Apart from that, not a whole lot actu­ally hap­pens this issue. There is an incred­i­bly awk­ward exchange between Rahne, in wolf-humanoid form, and some sort of Asgar­dian wolf-god. But the less said about that the better.

If I was going to choose a shin­ing moment it would be find­ing out, on the recap page of all places, that Domino has a real name.

Just so I don’t end on a downer I thought I’d men­tion the colour­ing. The usual muted grey/brown palette gets a huge kick this issue with the addi­tion bright oranges and pinks of the energy spikes spin­ning off the Legacy Virus-infected.

— —  — –

I’m off on hol­i­day next week, so no reviews for a cou­ple of weeks. Once I’m set­tled in I’ll be chang­ing the reviews up a bit. I’m run­ning low of the spare time needed to prop­erly review a books so I’ll just be review­ing the one book each week. I’m going to ran­domly pick the book out of the weekly pile so it could be the worst or it could be the best.

Com­plete List

Green Lantern #38
Trin­ity #39
Avengers: Ini­tia­tive #22
Mighty Avengers #22
Ms Mar­vel #36
New Avengers #50
Run­aways vol 3 #7
Thun­der­bolts #129
X-Force #12
Wiz­ard Mag­a­zine #210
Angel #18

Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #60

60 issues? Thats it? Man, even the manga ver­sion of Sab­rina the Teenage Witch man­aged to hit 100 issues before it bowed out.

Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four started out with a strong idea. Four teenagers — trans­formed into vaguely ele­men­tal forms through a mishap with an exper­i­men­tal trans­porter — team up to have adven­tures through time and space. It should’ve been fun as hell, and it was for the most part, until Mike Carey came on board and things began to go wrong.

Start­ing with his reg­u­lar run all the technical/scifi stuff (stacked uni­verses, time travel) was pushed to one side — replaced with some ridicu­lously con­vo­luted Space Opera. Really, what the hell was that Seed Nine­teen stuff about anyway?

With Carey gone I’d hoped they’d be able to bring the title back around, make it fun and excit­ing again, but this was not meant to be. As near as I can tell the new writer was brought on solely to pro­vide filler for Jeph Loeb’s Ulti­ma­tum. The remain­ing two main char­ac­ters team up with two ene­mies to head to Atlantis, a place they’ve already been despite what they say, to use a macguf­fin that makes no sense what­so­ever. All this was eas­ily explained when I dis­cov­ered the writer’s main source of income was writ­ing episodes of Heroes, the scifi equiv­a­lent of eat­ing paste.

Because this is just an Ulti­ma­tum book mas­querad­ing as an Ulti­mate FF title it doesn’t even get it’s own finale. There’s a quicky rev­e­la­tion and then a ‘to be con­cluded in Ulti­ma­tum and Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four: Requiem’.

Two books? If this is an indi­ca­tion of how the Ulti­mate uni­verse will work once the line is rebooted after Ulti­ma­tum, with the sto­ries bleed­ing between titles and into one-shots, then count me out. I get enough of that with the real Mar­vel Universe.

X-Factor #40

Like last issue this book starts off with a note from Peter David that we don’t spoil any of the con­tent in this issue. And there’s a lot of impor­tant stuff hap­pen­ing here.

The bulk of this story con­sists of a meet­ing between Jamie Madrox and one of his last inde­pen­dent dupes, Pas­tor John Mad­docks (last seen back in issue #16). While for the most part it’s just two iden­ti­cal talk­ing heads hav­ing a theo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion it’s writ­ten (and drawn) well enough that it’s never bor­ing. Madrox has a lot on his mind after the events of the last issue. Its refresh­ing to see a comic book char­ac­ter work through things in a real­is­tic, human way rather than brush­ing them aside and switch­ing to “punch every­thing” mode.

There’s a series of small reveals that cul­mi­nate in one huge reveal that, if you’ve been fol­low­ing X-Factor from the begin­ning like me, should put a huge grin on your face.

Com­plete List

Adven­ture Comics #0
Trin­ity #38
Dark Avengers #2
Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #60
Uncanny X-Men #506
X-Factor #40
X-Men Legacy #221

Green Lantern Corps #33

Know what I really, really liked about this issue? The inclu­sion of a smack-talking, Steve Buscemi look-alike called ‘Imec­sub’. It was a nice call­back to Geoff Johns cre­ated Isamot (Tomasi back­wards) and a cool way for Tomasi to ‘pass it on’.

The rest of the issue is a period of down­time. Giv­ing the main char­ac­ters a quick breather before plung­ing into more ‘Black­est Night’ fun times. Kyle Raynor and Guy Gard­ner share a beer; Raynor and Natu, a kiss; Sarnek(?) and Vio­let Lantern Miri, words. It’s obvi­ous that Peter Tomasi is hav­ing a lot of fun with this. Espe­cially in the scenes where Raynor and Gar­dener involve the rest of the Corps into help­ing paint a mural on Oa.

There’s no eye­balls rain­ing from the sky, babies being cut out of wombs or other hor­ros. This comic is the dreaded f word. It’s FUN.

The backup Ori­gins and Omens story focuses on Kyle’s recent his­tory and teases that we’ll see a Black Lantern Jade in the upcom­ing Black­est Night. Despite her phys­i­cal body being blown to space dust way back in Infi­nite Crisis.

Incog­nito #2

When I reviewed the first issue I kinda bitched about how the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters weren’t exactly multi-dimensional. Well I take that all back.

I thought it’d be a lot longer — we’re talk­ing issue 4 or 5 — before the Zack’s boss, the Black Death showed up, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. I’m still unsure about what sort of threat he poses to the gen­eral pop­u­lace (apart from tele­path­i­cally talk­ing to peo­ple in black, evil look­ing thought bal­loons). But it’s something.

The story keeps flow­ing from pulp to noir fairly seam­lessly and at a decent clip. Scenes like Zack’s mad sci­en­tist cre­ator lit­er­ally pick­ing the brain of a pre­cog­ni­tive guy awe­somely called Max Gazer shoring up the pulp, almost EC Comics side. While Zack spends some qual­ity night time with a girl with seri­ous damsel-in-distress issues, who barely acknowl­edges him in his day­time civil­ian identity.

What I most like about this issue is that every­body has their own dark agenda. Not just the bad guys, but the “damsel” and even Zack’s new best friend. Zack is try­ing (not very hard) to be the hero, but the world has decided that he’s bad guy. It’ll be fun to see if he can push past that peer pres­sure and be the bet­ter man.

Com­plete List

Hell­boy: The Wild Hunt #3 (of 8)
Booster Gold #17
Green Lantern Corps #33
Trin­ity #37
Incog­nito #2
Angel #17