Secret Invasion #1: Pretty good. I've talked about it far more in the SI thread, so I'm not going to go over it all again here. Suffice it to say that Bendis has set up some interesting ideas and I'm looking forward to seeing how they turn out, Yu's art was great, and Bendis' dialogue still sucks, but it sucks a little less than I remember.
Young Avengers Presents: Wiccan & Speed: Kind of boring. Nice nods to Avengers West Coast continuity and all, but after I finished reading I was left wondering what the point was. Billy and Tommy's search for their mom was one part of the Young Avengers plot that I was really interested in seeing come to fruition, but instead we just get the two of them running around to various places, meeting Pandemonium, and then deciding they don't really need to find their mom after all. Talk about a weak payoff. Oh well, Urusov's art was good, although I think it was better in her Loners story in the Christmas special. It looked a little rushed here.
Angel: After the Fall #6
I was getting kind of bored toward the end of the first arc, truth be told, so I was looking forward to these "First Night" flashbacks. But after the team came back together and we got a startling revelation about Fred last issue, I'm now anxious to get through "First Night" and back into the real story. Oh, Whedon and Lynch, how you tug me to and fro! Anyway, onto the stories.
Betta George, the telepathic fish dude--whom I know virtually nothing about because Lynch hasn't seen fit to actually tell any of us who didn't read his earlier Spike stories anything about him--starts and ends the issue, which makes you think he'd be something of a framing device... but no. He basically just laments his situation for a page at the beginning and then gets threatened by the thug Gunn's got watching him at the end. Not much framing going on there.
Format aside, these little vignettes about the characters' literal first night in Hell-A were fun. I particularly liked Connor's story. Unlike Angel's own narration, which often feels out of place or boring because we never got it in the show and because, quite frankly, Angel's kind of a boring guy, Connor's narration does a great job of giving us some insight into his state of mind, which I certainly wondered about after he regained the memories of his past life in Angel season 5. It seems like they're all sort of mixing around in there, but his new memories still seem to trump his old ones. We know he fights like a badass again, but it seems that's mostly muscle memory. His mind is still very much the mind of a normal teenager caught up in very abnormal circumstances. I'm glad for that, since angry badass Connor was... well, let's face it, he was a *****ebag. In a particularly funny panel, Connor also comes to realize how twisted the way he lost his virginity was, which we, of course, already knew because it was one of the worst moments of season 4 and led to a whole series of other terrible moments in season 4. But I digress. What I took away from the Connor story is essentially that he wanted to help Angel but he wasn't quite mentally prepared for the task until the reality of the situation pretty much grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and forced him into the fight. I hope we get to see more of Connor, as I really like his new, less *****ey incarnation. Also, Mooney's art is excellent and sets the mood better than any of the other artists in this issue. I'd love to see more from him.
Spike's story is good, even though I'm sick of Spike. He's the classic reluctant anti-hero. He so wants to not care about the people around him, but he can't help himself. That creates a nice inner conflict that expresses itself in some funny dialogue and internal monologues. The narrative monologue is again used to better effect here than with Angel himself, as it gives us a much better context for how Spike ultimately ends up as the hedonistic "pet" of Illyria that he was when we first saw him. The art by Messina is decent, but he's always had a problem with character likenesses. I couldn't tell the brunette was supposed to be Fred until Spike called her name, and even then I couldn't distinguish between her and that innocent civilian brunette who appeared on the next page. His layouts are good and everything feels very solid and consistent, though. I would've honestly preferred him as the regular penciler over Urru.
Lorne's story was kind of hammy, which I guess fits with Lorne himself. His return to form feels a little too pat and easy, though. He left the show on such a great, dystopic note--the lightest and happiest of the bunch reduced to a dark, lifeless husk of his former self. They could've easily gotten a really awesome, noirish tale of personal redemption out of that, but instead we get... limericks and a lucky break. Such a waste of potential. Byrne's art was pretty much run-of-the-mill Byrne art. It is what it is, either you like it or you don't. He tells the story effectively, but he lacks all of the care and pizzazz he used to inject into his pre-'90s work, as far as I'm concerned.
So overall "First Night" looks like it's going to be pretty good. I'm already dreading the Gunn story, since I think his becoming a villain to the Angel crew is a stupid idea from start to finish, but the rest of the characters' stories should be fun. The letter page had an interesting tidbit, too: there'll be a new art team on the regular After the Fall story once "Final Night" concludes because Urru is moving over to a Spike mini-series. Yay!
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