Black­est Night #1

In this, the first issue of Black­est Night, Carol Fer­ris shoots a robot in the crotch with the power of love.

Ok, so a lot more hap­pens either side of that one scene. Some good, some bad. But over­all this is a pretty solid start to DC’s 2009 event.

Tales of the Corps #1

I under­stand what they’re try­ing to do with this 3 issue minis­eries. Using it to shine a light on lesser char­ac­ters that don’t get a whole lot of back­story in the reg­u­lar titles. But two out three of the sto­ries here just aren’t that inter­est­ing. First up is an ori­gin for Saint Walker, that doesn’t add that much more to his char­ac­ter. Yes he went through many, many hor­ri­ble events one after the other before finally real­is­ing his des­tiny, but so what. Name one saint that hadn’t endured a long shitty exis­tence before get­ting their halo?

The sec­ond story isn’t all that excit­ing either. It spins a tale of  Mongul’s child­hood dur­ing one mag­i­cal sum­mer where he was the ruler of some aliens who had crash landed on his plant. But who cares because that kid grows up into an ass­hole tyrant who uses a magic ring to con­trol his sev­ered arm and who also ripped another alien’s tongue out just so that alien wouldn’t talk back to him anymore.

Luck­ily, the third and final story shows some merit. Full points for hav­ing the nomadic Indigo Lanterns sound like char­ac­ters from The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Dark Avengers #7

I dis­cov­ered I enjoy read­ing Dark Avengers writ­ten by Matt Frac­tion a lot more than when it’s writ­ten by Brian Michael Bendis.

Com­plete List

Black­est Night #1 (of 8)
Black­est Night Tales of the Corps #1 (of 3)
Wednes­day Comics #2 (of 12)
Agents Of Atlas #8
Dark Avengers #7
Incog­nito #5
Mighty Avengers #27
X-Factor #46

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

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

Green Lantern #37

Orig­i­nally I wasn’t going to review this book, but when the Irre­press­ible Rory Byrne demands you read it,  adding “You will shit bricks” you’re required to at least put a few words down.

So here we go.

At the end of the last issue there was this great expec­ta­tion, from Space Ganesh and the other guy,  that Hal Jor­dan would become the leader of the Blue Lanterns. This issue starts out with him “politely” refus­ing the offer before tear­ing off on the two space hip­pies and head­ing after Sine­stro, who’s been spend­ing his spare time cru­ci­fied on the Red Lantern’s cen­tral bat­tery after being cap­tured dur­ing the Rage of the Red Lanterns one shot.

There’s some clear delin­eation between the three rings: Green are cops, Red are ani­mals and Blue are saints. They later live up to the bible metaphor by part­ing an actual red sea. The true nature of the red spec­trum is explored a bit more. It seems that the rings are lit­tle more then par­a­sites. After purg­ing the host body’s blood they take over motor func­tions and most thought processes. Much like those hor­rific wasps that ride around on cockroaches.

While it’s not the first time Hal Jor­dan has worn mul­ti­ple rings (see here and here) that chap­ter end­ing def­i­nitely rates as one of the coolest moments of this entire Green Lantern vol­ume. Yes, Rory, bricks were shat.

Dark Avengers #1

There’s two ways they could’ve gone in this issue:

• through a series of small inter­con­nected scenes, show “the boss” trav­el­ling around putting the team together through a num­ber of every expand­ing word bal­loons; or
• some­thing interesting.

Guess which road Bendis went down?

I’m prob­a­bly being too harsh here as the book isn’t a total wash. They’ve got Mike Deodato on art  for one thing, con­tin­u­ing the good work he did on Thun­der­bolts. I thought the expres­sions on each of the ex-Thunderbolts, espe­cially Bullseye’s, as they realise all their dreams have come true were great. Deoad­ato on art and most of the Thun­der­bolts star­ring. They couldn’t have made it any more obvi­ous that this is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Thun­der­bolts line.

Hope­fully the new mem­bers aren’t going to take the Sentry’s mopey bull­shit. If I could have one request, please give me one issue where they beat the ever-loving shit out of him for being such a sad case. Do that and I’m in for the long haul.

Mighty Avengers #21

This is a great exam­ple of how to make the Ulti­mate line redun­dant. While over in Ulti­ma­tum They’ve had to deal with a flood sub­merg­ing New York, here in the reg­u­lar old 616, New York has been hit with a del­uge of blood, Canada is choked with flesh eat­ing locusts and some­where else  the New Avengers are being used as fer­tiliser for fast grow­ing sen­tient plants and the entire state of Okla­homa has van­ished. Sud­denly the split sec­ond flash flood­ing in the Ulti­mate uni­verse doesn’t seem that ulti­mate anymore.

The recruit­ing scenes aren’t all that dis­sim­i­lar to those in Dark Avengers, but they’re car­ried off a lot bet­ter. Biblical-level crazy shit is a great moti­va­tor. The book shares a lot of the same beats as Dark Avengers, but the way Slott writes dia­logue makes it a much more enter­tain­ing read. See Amadeus Cho’s con­ver­sa­tions with Pym. Both books also share a sim­i­lar antag­o­nist. Dark Avengers gets Dr Doom’s ex, Mor­gane Le Fay while Mighty Avengers has a pos­sessed Quick­sil­ver and some shirt­less guy who likes writ­ing on himself

Which book you grab depends on how you like your heroes. Do you like the bad guys mas­querad­ing as the world’s heroes, albeit offi­cially? Grab Dark Avengers. Do you like you heroes just doing hero-ey stuff? Grab Mighty Avengers. Do you like your heroes to be the under­dogs, strug­gling to get on in a world where they’re oper­at­ing ille­gally? Grab New Avengers. (reviewed next week, fight fans!)

X-Factor #39

There would be a fairly detailed review here. I say “would be” because at the begin­ning of the book Peter David swears all read­ers to secrecy and asks that we don’t spoil the book. So I’ll hon­our that. What I can say is that the book is well on it’s way back to it’s first year lev­els of awe­some­ness. After flip­ping to the back cover I had to sit alone on the couch for a good five min­utes just to digest what I’d read. It’s been a long time since a comic had that much of an emo­tional impact on me. Bravo, Peter David, bravo. Good to see the art back on track after the mis­step that was the Stro­man period too.

Com­plete List:

Final Cri­sis: Super­man Beyond #2 (of 2)
Green Lantern #37
Trin­ity #34
Aston­ish­ing X-Men #28
Dark Avengers #1
Mighty Avengers #21
Thun­der­bolts #128
Uncanny X-Men Annual #2
X-Factor #39
X-Men: Legacy #220
Angel: After the Fall #16

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