So, What comics did you buy this week?

[vynsane]

i was actually more into it for the art, mainly because of ottley. the guy's a master. i will buy anything he puts out. ESPECIALLY the next one-shot he's coming out with: "sea bear and grizzly shark: they got mixed up!".

i wanted to see how it would look with breakdowns being done by capullo, ottley doing finished pencils and then mcfarlane doing inks on top of that. that said, the first issue was a MESS - my twitter review of it was "Kirkman jumps right in, lessons learned from past slow starts, McFarlane muddles the fine linework of Ottley. 3 yrs of hype = C+" but the second issue was much better. the writing isn't up to kirkman's regular creator-owned fare, but i have a feeling a lot of the plot was dictated by mcfarlane, it has his brand of over-dramatas all over it.

that said, i bet i'll drop the book after ottley's last issue.

[anarky]

The premise for Stealth sounds much more solid. I think, from what I've read about the line, the entire Pilot Season is a clusterfuck, though, and it kinda goes against its premise to have the EIC of Image writing all the new books.

DB, it looks like your completist ways might soon have you a complete run of Legacy. It's being canceled in a couple of months.

[Diabolical]

DB, it looks like your completist ways might soon have you a complete run of Legacy. It's being canceled in a couple of months.

Good, because if it didn't get better in the next year or two I was really going to drop it.

[vynsane]

The premise for Stealth sounds much more solid. I think, from what I've read about the line, the entire Pilot Season is a clusterfuck, though, and it kinda goes against its premise to have the EIC of Image writing all the new books.

image comics has no EIC - the main guy is simply known as 'publisher'. eric stephenson is currently the publisher, having taken over after erik larsen. is stephenson writing the pilot season stuff? i don't know too much about top cow books, but if you mean kirkman, he's not EIC, he's the first non-founder to be made an image partner.

[anarky]

Ah, I must've misread something when he became a pardnah.

[vynsane]

no prob

here's what i got this week:

BPRD: King of Fear 4
Fables 94
Savage Dragon 159
Daredevil 506
Atomic Robo and the Revenge of the Vampire Dimension 2
Project Superpowers Chapter 2 #8

i forgot to pick up 'superpowers' #8 last week, which i usually take as a hint to drop it, but picked it up this week. i'm going to stick with it through the end of this mini, but i don't know if i'll continue with the next one.

[anarky]

Apology accepted, Captain Vynsane.

[vynsane]

Amazing Spider-man 628
Siege: Spider-man 1
Ultimate Comics Avengers 6
Powers 4
Amazing Spider-man Presents: Jackpot 2
Amazing Spider-man Presents: Jackpot 3

light week this week, so i picked up some stuff i left on the shelf for a while. unfortunately the ASMP: jackpot #2 was in the back-issue bin, so they had marked it up and i paid tax on it to boot. that was stupid.

[anarky]

I just ordered GIJoe: Cobra Vol II. The first series was awesome; I personally think it was a tad overrated by most critics, who think the rest of IDW's Joe output is shit and this is the only keeper. It's excellent stuff, no doubt, but it doesn't so far bypass the other two series (GIJoe and GIJoe Origins, both of which are quite good and get a bad rap because they're A-not a regurgitation of the original that people want, and B-not totally devoid of science fiction elements). I'm pretty antsy to see how "loser" characters like Croc Master, Serpentor, and Crystal Ball were reinterpreted.

Last week, ordered X-Men Forever Volume 1. I want to wait until it arrives before deciding whether to go further. I know Claremont's not at the top of his game anymore, but the idea of him working on the classic X-Men, free from any editorial interference, still sounds potentially entertaining.

[Diabolical]

There was nothing for me this week. Happens every once in a while.

Last week:
Star Wars Purge
Daredevil 506
Batman & Robin 11
The Boys 41
Punisher Max 6

[anarky]

So, Amazon decided to send out the order with X-Men Forever Volume 1 piecemeal. I never understand what makes them do this with some orders and not others. I mean, I pick the cheapest shipping option (free), and order it with something coming out in November; they say it will all ship in November, which I'm fine with, then suddenly drop part of it in the mail. Doesn't that cost them more? Ah well. In any case, I got the book yesterday, some six months earlier than expected.

The verdict? Not bad. I don't for a minute buy that this was what Claremont had in mind almost 20 years ago. For one thing, there are some characters--like Forge, Jubilee, and Psylocke--who he had a definite fondness for at that time, and are completely missing. It picks up at some ambiguous point after X-Men #3; it's not like it's the next day, since the X-Men are essentially under SHIELD control, Kitty and Nightcrawler are back with the team, and the aforementioned characters are totally absent. (Not even a reference to the kid who was practically Wolvie's adopted daughter. Sure, she was probably always intended to be a fill-in for Kitty, and Kitty's back, so she's not necessary in that regard, but you'd still think it'd warrant at least a sentence. She ain't old enough at this point to be on a solo mission.)

Claremont's by no means back in his prime, but this is light years better than anything else I've read by him since he was canned back in the day. It's wordy and full of thought balloons, and Claremont's style has never been a good fit with the "written for trade paperback" model Marvel seems to mostly follow now. (The covers also show all sorts of stuff, mostly costumes, that have no connection to the contents. The costumes worn on the back cover appear nowhere in the book. And Jean inexplicably changes from her classic costume to the new one in the middle of a major battle.) But it's well-written if you can get past the throwback style, and it doesn't hurt that we have absolutely no clue where this is going. Editorial wants Wolverine to be a major character? Too bad here; he dies in the very first issue. No shit. I know he's not completely free of editorial restraints (I since read he wanted to build up to that over a year, and wanted a bigger team), but the unexpected can, and does, happen.

The only real minus for me is that he seems at times a bit too unrestricted. Within this first five-issue volume, Nick Fury takes over, Wolverine is killed, another X-Man is revealed as a traitor working for a new anti-mutant organization, SHIELD is revealed to have traitors within, Sabretooth is maimed and appears to join the X-Men, Jean's having an affair with Wolvie (possibly in her mind--even Xavier doesn't know for sure), a likely new X-Man is introduced, the dark secret Xavier discovered about mutants is revealed, and Kitty's powers change. That's an awful lot at one time, especially from the dude known for stories that took several years to unravel.

I can't say it's great, but I do think it's better than what I've read of most of Marvel's current output in that it actually feels like a Marvel comic. I think I'll look for subsequent volumes in the half-price bin at Comic Con if I make it there. Then again, I might just go ahead and order them.

[Rollo Tomassi]

[That guy's] crap has grown so heinous over the years, I've actually stopped referring to him by name. I was posting on the WizardBoards for awhile and someone referred to him as "Jackbooted Thug" and it stuck. So now he is just JBT.

By the way, was the traitor Storm? Because I vaguely remember him trying to work some kind of angle when she came back as a ten year old that was going to pay off in the long run. Now I could give a shit because the man clearly has pictures of Joe Quesada and Stan Lee buttfucking children and is blackmailing them into giving him work regardless of how shitty it is month after month after month.

[anarky]

I've got to give him credit, though--X-Men Forever is billions of times better than any of his X-Treme X-Men or other post-1991 X-stuff.

Truth be told, the single thing that bugged me most is that SHIELD agents can't make a positive ID of Wolvie's corpse, since all the biological matter is burned away and it's just the adamantium skeleton, but Tom Grummett draws fucking hair stuck to the skull's head!

And, yeah, it was Storm. The "possible new X-Man" appears to be the child Storm from earlier, but no clue yet which is the real Storm.

Maybe it's because it's been so fucking long since I've read a comic from Marvel, set in the Marvel Universe (or a very close analogue of it), that didn't suck, and I'm not reading much else, so I'll check out at least another volume or two.

[Rollo Tomassi]

I'm a big fan of Grummett's work, but sadly, he's been coerced by the devil into drawing the Forever books..well, forever. A book that does so dismally shitty in the sales dept, they keep having to reboot it and resolicit it to get attention.

I HATE how JBT fucking torpedoed Exiles (one of my fave books), then rebooted it and loaded with characters that only HE finds interesting, so that it fucking tanked again. And by the time somebody cool came along to try and rectify it (Jeff Parker) the property was so tainted by fucktard's raping of it, that the new series only lasted six fucking issues.

Also, the X-Factor Forever series by Mrs. Simonson has now been retconned into a limited series due to pisspoor preorders.

However, I would be delighted if JBT was given free reign in the Ultimate Universe. As far as I'm concerned he, and Jeph Loeb and Mark Millar can fuck that one up all they want, as long as they leave the regular 616 Universe alone, since Loeb already diahrea'd all over it with his Ultimatum fanboy wankfest.

[Rollo Tomassi]

What did I get 5/5/10

Batman & Robin 12. Oberon Sexton is NOT Bruce Wayne. Even better, he's...
Brightest Day 1. Aquaman just had his one and only cool moment upon returning from death. Now he can slip back into obscurity.
Secret Six 21. So BOTH Cheshire's kids have been killed of within weeks of each other?
Batgirl 8. Eh. I try new things every once in awhile.
GIJoe: Origins 15. Snowjob. This book isn't as special anymore.
Amazing Spidey 630. Lizard returns. Yawn. But Spidey and Black Cat flirt thanks to Zeb Wells. That was fun.
Moon Knight 8. *sigh* Deadpool guest stars. When does Jerome Opena come back?
Official Index to the M.U. 1. Avengers, Thor, and Cap in all their glorious continuity minutiae.
Uncanny X-Men 526. Kurt's funeral feels rushed and falls flat.
X-Men: Hellbound 1. A superfluous team is put together for a superfluous mini series. Sadly the most interesting characters will probably get killed off (I'm looking at you Anole) and the least interesting will continue to stagnate the X-franchise (I'm looking at you Gambit and Dazzler)