A sizeable but not unmangable week, and we have two of Marvel's hottest books out, each about a month later than originally solicted. Plus, the comic that is "probably the best superhero comic in the whole universe" comes out, and that's not false advertising!
As always, my posts are spoiler-licious.
DREAD'S BOUGHT/THOUGHT for 11/15/06:
52 WEEK #28: Another solid issue; nothing earth-shattering, but none of the subplots were too boring, although I do feel the main plot, if there is one, is meandering a bit. Red Tornado, reconstructed by some Austrailian natives who don't want to get off ancient lands, is used against their movers as a weapon, forever muttering "52!", since we are now past the halfway point and still don't know the relivance, it feels like an Ambush Bug joke; it's like how if someone says, "save the cheerleader, save the world!" I just chuckle, even though I do like HEROES and watch it faithfully. Red-Tornado's new body is smashed to bits and the native arrested, but he's naturally still alive. He's like the Incredible Crash Dummy now; he exists merely to be smashed to pieces and reassembled over and over and over again, and whatever else the character is or was has ceased to be. He's just Mr. Destructable Hero now. A blind person playing MEGA MAN gets destroyed less often. Anyway, Montoya and now-dying Question track down Batwoman in Gotham and prevent her from being sacrificed by Intergang prophecy, at least this week. I'm not sure I'm still keen on DC's insistance to replace yet another mainstay with a "new person in the suit", who, in Montoya, is like the ultimate PC character; Hispanic, female, and homosexual. All she needs is an abusive father and a medically dependant mother, and a single child because her husband's a bastard, and a sickly pet, and gets gender discriminated against by every person she encounters in the force, and she's PC-Woman. I'm all for inclusion, but it seems DC is doing this a lot and it can get just as predictable as making every hero a white blond male, just currently is more pretentious. But I'll see how it goes. The action & art are nice. And it turns out from the Lost In Space crew that the "alien" whose eye Lobo tore out to appease his fish-gods is actually a Green Lantern, and due to the loss of the eye, the space-paracites are heading towards Earth. Against a deadly wave of space vermin, several rag-tag B listers stand alone to defend space and Earth...yeah, they're officially ripping off ANNIHILATION now. Or vice versa, but it just brings up the comparison, which is bad because 52's inferior. And Cat-Man gets his origin, from an artist who should have been doing interiors on SECRET SIX.
INVINCIBLE #36: No, not an illusion. As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I finally did get around to reading both INVINCIBLE hardcovers as well as trade vol.'s 6 & 7, which officially got me up to #35. It stunned me that was also the last issue of INVINCIBLE that shipped monthly, back in September. Kirkman's delays on this book worked in my favor here, as INVINCIBLE is just an incredibly enjoyable franchise. It's as much a love letter to the superhero franchise as it is an addition to it. Kirkman has homages, fun new characters, new twists on old cliches, and even an embracing of old cliches just because we enjoy them in superheroes. It's a series that doesn't take itself TOO seriously, but still has fine dramatic moments and dark twists. Whatever hype you've heard about this title, it's true and buy it. It has everything you want in a superhero book, but with creative control so the status quo could shift at any moment (although Kirkman also doesn't thrive on "shock value" here and allows things to move at a steady pace). This issue brings the "Reanimen" bit to the forefront after about 30 issues of sub-plot build-up. Mark & William finally get their chance to track down their missing friend, who has been turned into a Reaniman by their mad-scientist fellow college student. Turns out he has an army of them and when William poses as a bum to "get abducted", Invincible is ambushed by Reanimen, who are innocent people hacked up and made into Deathlok-Lite esque cyborgs. Meanwhile, the Global Guardians take care of some villians and Immortal & Dupli-Kate are engaged, but this may make Immortal more overprotective. And Shapesmith joins the team. Their earth-moving villian and his lava-men were explored in THE PACT #4, which was reprinted at the end of trade #7. Anyway, I haven't enjoyed a franchise this much since I was maybe in first grade and started thumbing through my mother's ASM back issues for the first time. There's no excuse for liking superheroes and not giving it a try. Buy the first hardcover. It'll then sell itself.
Sadly, as an Image comic lost in the shuffle, it sells under 14,000 copies, which is a damned shame. Least they can count one more for the monthlies as of now.
ASTONISHING X-MEN #18: After proclaiming that this title would be "monthly from now on", this title sneaks in at over a month late and a week shy of hitting the 2 month marker. Does this mean it's back to bimonthly or on Marvel's "we honestly have no clue when it'll be out but we'll be optimistic at first and then mention reality when it smacks us in the face". Considering Cassaday apparently has enough time for covers for HUNTER/KILLER and PLANETARY interiors, I have less patience; was that cover for H/K really required? How many hours or days did it delay your actual books? It's stuff like this that makes good artists look like primadonnas. When people believe they're irreplaceable for something, they tend to work less, not more. This is simply human nature and as Marvel nurtures this in all their A-list talent, it's no wonder that even Whedon's not on his A-game anymore. Anyway, this was a story that at 6 issues felt padded out, and has taken 9 months to reach this point (issue #13 hit stores the end of Feburary). And unlike JUSTICE, whose bi-monthly status was honest from the onset, far less happens in each issue. This one has the climax, but alas it also makes painfully obvious that this entire story served little purpose but to fill time until the NEXT arc, which starts at #19. Anime series are notorious for this and I always hate it. Heck, even Whedon's TV shows are apparently notorious for this. Apparently, yes, Emma Frost was just making illusions the whole time, but it wasn't her fault, she had a silver of Cassandra Nova inside her, corrupting her and feeding on her self doubts. Cassaday looked a little rushed in some panels, and with good reason. Cyclops, rendered powerless, is now somehow able to "see clearer" despite being physically weaker in those sort of "Zen Philosophy" that makes no sense in reality. Kind of like that bit with Jax in MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION: "Those cyborg arms increase your strength by 10 to 1! So if you remove them, you're sure to become a better fighter!" If this was the case, then wrestlers, baseball players, and other sports stars would just meditate instead of juicing themselves silly with every steroid, hormone implant or vitamin they can legally get away with. And it's also the first time I've ever heard of a man being able to disrupt mental illusions by shooting them with a handgun. Techno-illusions, I could MAYBE buy, but psychic ones? Right. I mean, I like seeing Cyclops be efficient and kick arse, but when it's done via baloney, it loses it's effect. It's like if someone wanted to make Speedball top dog by having him beat Galactus in a fistfight. Great to amp up Speedy, but it's total crap. On the plus side, it was good seeing Cyke use Blindfold for psychic defense, and Wolverine & Hisako's fight against Ord & Danger was pretty cool. Although if Ord could beat Cyke, Kitty, Emma, Beast, AND Logan alone back in issue #2 or so, why is Logan a challenge now? One could go, "Oh, maybe it's because he lacks armor & weapons", and I'll buy it...slightly. However, in the end, it's Beast who saves the day, after being freed by a "ball of string" from issue #3, just one filled with "standard super-genius bulls**** technology" that wakes him from his feral state. Much cooler and amusing than "Logan acting like a poof for 3 issues and getting freed by a beer can". Scott narrows down that this may have been an exercise to have them face their fears, which in that case, half of them lost. Kitty & Piotr were out on the floor, Logan only freed by chance, and Beast only due to prep-time. Still, it's a perfectly readable, enjoyable issue. It ends with everyone literally getting beamed to the next storyline, which made me go, "then what was the damned point of stretching this one too long!" Methinks Whedon's problem is he still paces too much like a TV man. Comics and TV are not interchangeable. 11 minutes of TV footage, which is a 4th of an average episode of an hour show, is maybe 2-3 entire comics depending on how you pace it. Some fat really needed to be trimmed from this story and it needed to come out more frequently for it to have felt like it mattered as anything other than filler. Considering this is the X-line's Top selling ongoing, it really should be better. Hopefully, Whedon lowers the boom on the finale. I'm actually optimistic that he will, with the filler done with.
I'm not looking foward to this snail-like pacing once he takes over on RUNAWAYS in Feb. 2007, though. Could he write a 3 issue story that felt complete to save his life? And will it actually come out at a rate faster than 6 issues in 9 months? He's argueably the best A-List writer for the task of writing Runaways, I simply don't want that book to suffer the same fate of ASTONISHING; structurally good, but crippled by slow shipping, and decompressed pacing.
Next post -- CIVIL WAR #5, GHOST RIDER #5, NEW AVENGERS #25, MOON KNIGHT #6, & X-MEN: FIRST CLASS #3
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