There’s just far too many comics to review all of them this week. 14 of them, thanks to Marvel’s poor/genius sched­ul­ing. Instead you get one book from each of the Big Two.

Detec­tive Comics #854

My only brush with Greg Rucka came through his work on 52. Where he put a lot of work into the entwined sto­ries of  Bat­woman and The Ques­tion. So I guess it’s only fit­ting that I get reac­quainted with his work through a book that stars those two char­ac­ters. Yes I’m aware they had their own post-52 minis­eries, but I didn’t read that as, to me , that par­tic­u­lar story seemed to have been played out in the pages of 52 already.

At first glance the Kate Kane in this book seems vastly dif­fer­ent than that one who appeared in 52. She’s less a socialite and more of an army brat. She’s got tat­toos and it’s implied she sleeps (or slept) around. Yes, she’s still a les­bian, and yes it comes up but only in a way to flesh out her “com­mit­ted to the mis­sion” mindset.

Before this book, id you’d asked me to point out art by JH Williams I woul’dve had no chance. Would not know him from a bar of soap. After read­ing this book I have every panel burnt out to my brian. In a good way of course. And the panel lay­out. Wow. There’s one two page sequence depict­ing that I loved. A series of light­ning bolt pan­els depicts Bat­woman talk­ing to Bat­man then head­ing back to base and chang­ing back into civil­lian clothes, under­scored by a shot of Bat­woman, on her motor­cy­cle, shoot­ing across the page.

There’s this incred­i­ble amount of energy that crack­les off every page.

Mean­while over in the Ques­tion backup…sorry “co-feature”, Renee Mon­toya seems to have become DC’s answer to the Heroes for Hire. Using an email account and/or web­site to solicit inves­tiga­tive work. Her first case pit­ting her against human traffickers.

It reads like it was orig­i­nally pitched as a full length story that’s been slimmed down through pre­cise cuts. Noth­ing is miss­ing really, but there’s no great expla­na­tion of the bad guy pos­si­ble motives, just that he’s the damn bad guy.

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia #1

After the let­down of an event that was Brian Michael Bendis’ Secret Inva­sion I har­boured a feel­ing that, given half a chance, Matt Frac­tion could easy write the next Mar­vel event. And here it is.

I’m glad it’s not a company-wide thing as I really couldn’t han­dle another one of those from Mar­vel. But it does carry the Dark Reign tag, which I cna’t really get enthused about. Even though most of the Mar­vel side of my pull list involves Dark Reign in some way.

The story seems organic enough. At the end of Secret Inva­sion, when Nor­man Osbourne was given the job of…well what­ever the hell it is he actu­ally does, he put all mutants on notice. Telling Emma Frost that if they couldn’t con­trol them­selves then he would. Or words to that effect.

In this first issue of the inde­ter­mi­nately long minis­eries (there’s no “#1 of #3″ on the cover, just “Chap­ter One”) Simon Trask organ­ises a march on San Fran­sisco in sup­port of a new law to ster­ilise all mutants, which of course leads to all hell break­ing loose. Really, nobody watched the first 10 min­utes of Die Hard 3?

With half of San Fran­sisco on fire Nor­man Osbourne makes good on his promise and sends in the Dark Avengers to con­trol things. Which of course they don’t because they’re all psy­chopaths. Then Nor­man takes Emma Frost aside reit­ter­ates whats he first told her and then pro­motes her to Leader of All Mutants. Charles Xavier shows up to talk down Cyclops, but it’s revealed to the  reader that the real Charles Xavier is lying in a prison cell with his brain leak­ing down his shirt. None of which makes a whole lot of a sense.

But, this is only the first issue, and I’ve got enough faith that Frac­tion will spin out a few inter­est­ing con­cepts before bring­ing every­thing to a decent conclusion.

Of  course Mar­vel get full praise for keep­ing Greg Land as far from this story as pos­si­ble. Marc Sil­vestri han­dles the art in a pass­able fash­ion. It’s a lot more basic than his linework from back when Grant Mor­ri­son wrote the book, with most of the humans look­ing like scare­crows. And a small but sig­nif­i­cant draw­ing of a continuity-breaking, male Loki.

Com­plete List

Detec­tive Comics #854
Green Lantern #42
Aston­ish­ing X-Men #30
Avengers: Ini­tia­tive #25
Dark Avengers #6
Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia #1
Immor­tal Iron Fist TP Vol 04 Mor­tal Iron Fist
Ms Mar­vel #40
New Avengers #54
Run­aways 3 #11
Secret War­riors #5
Thun­der­bolts #133
Uncanny X-Men #512
X-Factor #45
X-Force #16
Wiz­ard Mag­a­zine #214

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

Well I promised to start review­ing comics start­ing with last week’s haul. I guess run­ning 6 days late counts as a failure.

But not to worry. I’m going to push on regard­less. I promised reviews and reviews I shall deliver.

Thun­der­bolts #126

The first post-Secret inva­sion comic released by Mar­vel is also one the the best comics they’ve released in months. The issue doesn’t give much of the SI sto­ry­line away. It reads much like one of the “down­time” issues from the 90’s era X-Men. Except instead of play­ing base­ball, Song­bird and Swords­man are mop­ing around and burn­ing their dead, the really evil char­ac­ters are busy being evil and Nor­man Osbourne faces up to a gov­ern­ment com­mit­tee hear­ing on his role dur­ing the Skrull invasion.

This issue marks a new cre­ative team: Andy Dig­gle on words and Roberto De La Torre on pen­cils. I’d never read any of their pre­vi­ous work so I came in sans pre­con­cep­tions. It’s a credit to this team that I didn’t actu­ally notice the change in ros­ter until well after I’d fin­ished read­ing the book. Pro­vided they keep to a reg­u­lar sched­ule (some­thing War­ren Ellis wasn’t able to do) then this should become a top 20 book.

Uncanny X-Men #504

I’ll say one thing about Matt Frac­tion. Dude has cre­ated some of the best “ohmy­god” moments I’ve read in comic form this year. Nikola Telsa fight­ing a demonic JP Mor­gan, Iron Fist explod­ing a train with one punch, and, with this issue, rein­tro­duc­ing the eccen­tric Dr Neme­sis to the Mar­vel Uni­verse. He of the guns that fire science!

Half the issue con­sists of Beast and Angel try­ing to con­vince Dr Neme­sis to join the X-Men, in between fight­ing off tube-grown super­nazis. The rest of the issue has Emma Frost tak­ing a psy­chic stroll through Cylops’…well, I guess you’d call it his spank bank. A hotel full of X-Women, both past and present. Psy­locke; Rogue and two Storms, both clas­sic and mohawked. But strangely no red-heads.

The art, by Terry Dod­son, moves along at a crack­ing pace. Had the issue being “drawn” by Greg Land (the other pen­ciller in the Uncanny X-Men sta­ble, then a lot of the great kinetic inter­ac­tion between Beast, Angel and Dr Neme­sis would’ve been lost.

Com­plete pull list:

Angel: After the Fall #14
Ex Machina #39
The Flash #246
Trin­ity #25
Thun­der­bolts #126
Ulti­mate Fan­tas­tic Four #58
Uncanny X-Men #504
X-Factor #37
X-Men: Legacy #218