She-Hulk

Sensational was a disappointing reread, yeah. The comedy's about as subtle as Mad magazine, and I'm not saying subtlety is the essence or requisite of comedy, but ... ungh.

Yah, seeing that stuff in the back of the book was what tipped my hand toward not buying the thing after all.

Jumping next to Dan Slott's ("The happiest man in comics" according to Quesada) titles - She-Hulk and The Thing, the writer said that issue #8 will be the Civil War crossover in She-Hulk, with a status quo change, and will add Paul Smith as the series regular artist.

Also it means that I can point young whippersnappers at it and say "This! This is what Peter David was like when he was great!"

Yes!

Best spiderman--really captures the camp, jokey part (opposite of spiderman movies), especially in the court room scenes and him walking on the walls at home. Visually, it's a really accurate Spiderman, as you really get the sense of someone physically smaller than everyone else, the sort of opposite of Frank Miller's hulking mass of a Batman. Spiderman practically looks like a kid wearing a spiderman suit.

There's also a sort of genre humanism here. Slott does a great job resurrecting B-list marvel characters, like old Spidey villains and the New Warriors. (Night Thrasher in She-Hulk is like career-low John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.) GM in 7 soldiers talks about creating new characters for the franchise, but Slott seems like someone who'd be great to see the value in all these disposable characters and find ways to flesh them out and make them feel not just interesting, but chummy.

The phrase I used on another thread was that he seemed to treat continuity as a toolbox, and wanted to leave the tools in better shape than he found them. You'll see more at the end of the second volume of his thinking on this.

SHE-HULK: Made out of a super-strong carbonadium alloy!

PUG: You people just MAKE UP words, don't you?

seems kinda ehh to me? and i don't really know enough marvel trivia for the in-jokes to work?

Ha - I think Slott love is turning into one of those Like It Or Lump It ILC things.

or is that even MORE in-jokey?

But beyond the humor in Shulk, there are some great IDEAS he comes up with! The second trade has this great setup that I won't give away: even though it might have to do with Marvel minutiae that I'm not caught up on, Slott handles it in such a graceful way that I never feel like I'm missing out on the fun(ny) and by the end, I wanted to stand up and applaud.

i really really liked that many of the stories in the volume were one-issue wonders! i guess i've gotten used to extremely drawn-out plot arcs at this point (viz daredevil again... which is like the slowest arc ever... although i dig that too) so there's something really refreshing about it. i've always been on the fence in terms of narrative compression (largely because grant morrison is always getting props for it & i tend to think that despite his other skillz he's not very good at it) but it really works here. or maybe this isn't "compression" at all but just old-school comix storytelling.

also: funny!

also: i love the art! guess i better not get used to it huh