Green Lantern Corps #38

This issue got me think­ing about how much Count­down failed Kyle Rayner as a char­ac­ter. In Count­down he was lit­tle more than trans­port for the other char­ac­ters. Using the most pow­er­ful weapon in the uni­verse as directed through his artist’s mind to cre­ate bub­bles and flat boards for them to ride on.

The Kyle we see in this issue is con­fi­dent and most impor­tantly proac­tive. The back half of this book has a great con­fronta­tion between Kyle, Guy Gard­ner the Alpha Lanterns. Peter Tomasi should be really proud of how well he’s fleshed Kyle out. This isn’t the same char­ac­ter from the ION series (that I dropped halfway through due to over­whelm­ing meh-ness). In link­ing him to Guy and Sorinik Natu Tomasi has given Kyle both pur­pose and passion.

Art by Patrick Glea­son is good. Very good in fact. It must take a lot of work to draw this book. What with 99% being aliens of dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes. Then hav­ing those aliens appears con­sis­tently across every page. It’s really impres­sive work. I don’t know why Glea­son isn’t doing more in the indus­try. He’s def­i­nitely one to follow.

Uncanny X-Men #513

I’m still not 100% sold on this book.

I get what they’re try­ing to say with the sto­ry­line. Propo­si­tion X is a par­tial alle­gory of California’s Propo­si­tion 8. And if the story was a med­i­ta­tion on how Propo­si­tion X (pro­posed ster­il­i­sa­tion of all mutants) it could’ve been incred­i­bly inter­est­ing. But this is a Mar­vel Uni­verse under Nor­man Osbourne’s Dark Reign. So he has to pop up to reit­er­ate what a giant ass­hole he is. Again.

And there’s the lit­tle things that didn’t need an extra layer of comic book­i­ness added. Like Simon Trask, the man repon­si­ble for organ­is­ing the march that starts this whole thing, being revealed as some sort of cyborg or Sen­tinel of some kind. Wasn’t it enough that he was this hor­ri­bly blink­ered bigot? Did he really have to have the electro/mind con­trol thing going on too?

Now that I’ve reread that, it seems weird to be com­plain­ing that a comic book is too much of a comic book. But there you go.

On the plus side the character’s voices are spot on.VBut then Frac­tion was always good at that.

The art work by Terry Dod­son is top notch as always. Some won’t like the thick out­line around each char­ac­ter, but I’m a fan.

Com­plete List

Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer #26
Witchfinder In The Ser­vice Of Angels #1 (of 5)
Bat­man and Robin #2
Green Lantern Corps #38
Secret Six #11
Agents of Atlas #7
Uncanny X-Men #513
Angel #23

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

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.

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