Last week I tried to shake things up a bit by review­ing every comic picked up. While it was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment I didn’t quite  get the response I was after, so we’re back to the three book deal this week.

Power Girl #2

It seems a lit­tle too soon to use the sec­ond issue as an expo­si­tion tool and drawn out ori­gin for the bad guy. Sure, it goes against con­ven­tion, but you know what? I didn’t mind it. Because the rest of the issue was devoted to Power Girl tak­ing on an albino gorilla with a super­hu­man brain. I could read that kind of thing forever.

Incog­nito #4

Still good. Still very good in fact. But it feel like the 2 month gap between issues #3 and #4 killed the momen­tum some­what. This issue is pretty much entirely fall­out. Zack is dis­cov­ered, inter­ro­gated by the SOS, a gov­ern­ment agency tasked with tak­ing down rogue super­pow­ers. (Which I guess in a way makes it the CIA of Incog­nito) and put back on the streets sans pow­ers. The improb­a­bly named Ava Destruc­tion throws a wrench into the whole idea of the bad guys com­ing for Zack’s blood. The pulpy ele­ments are still there, but the noirish tones have really started com­ing to the fore.

Mighty Avengers #26

I was all but ready to give this up after last month’s issue. It’s pretty easy to bag the book with it’s slow pac­ing and char­ac­ters don’t do a hell of a lot — except for Her­cules, who may just be the fun­ni­est char­ac­ter in the Mar­vel stable.

But then you get an issue like this  with crazy War­ren Ellis-style Zeno Rooms, sonic screw­drivers and sci­en­tific equa­tions that take phi­los­o­phy  into consideration.

It’s still dan­ger­ously close to being dropped, but if Dan Slott can keep load­ing the book with off the wall sci­ence stuff and improve char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion then it’ll keep it’s spot on the pull list for now.

Com­plete List

Ex Machina #43
Final Cri­sis After­math: Dance #2 (of 6)
Power Girl #2
Cable #15
Incog­nito #4
Mighty Avengers #26
X-Men: Legacy #225
Angel #22

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