Introducing SHIPianno: July 23, 2008

For me:

AMBUSH BUG YEAR NONE #1--because Keith Giffen will have an opportunity to uncap his fangs
THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #15--goodbye to Waid, probably goodbye to me buying this series
DAREDEVIL #109--I'm curious where this is going
NEW AVENGERS #43--still on the fence about how SI is structured, but I like the Avengers tie-ins
UNCANNY X-MEN #500--okay, you guys, you have one chance to impress me

oh shit, UXM #500

I'd kicked the UXM habit for... 6 years? Please don't make me a junkie all over again...

DMZ #33
X-FILES SPECIAL #0
DAREDEVIL #109
SHE-HULK 2 #31
NEW AVENGERS #43
UNCANNY X-MEN #500
WOLVERINE FIRST CLASS #5
X-MEN LEGACY #214

Trinity (lord help me, I think I'm in it for the long haul)
Possibly Iron Fist, we'll see.
Daredevil
Ambush Bug
Liberty Comics CBLDF Benefit book one-shot (hei gaiz this lukz rillie gud) http://www.cbldf.org/articles/archives/000356.shtml

It's got a "Criminal" story, Criminal buyers!

I couldn't read the last issue of Trinity. So I think I'm done.

She-Hulk plus the last couple months of stuff

I'm only reading She-Hulk this week cause of X-Factor.

Lame week:

Uncanny X-Men, X-Men Legacy, Daredevil, New Avengers.

I've been kinda into the Secret Invasion issues of the Avengers -- even though I generally dislike the storyline as a whole -- but OH MY FUCKING GOD that issue of Mighty last week with Elektra was TERRIBLE. Hopefully this week will be better.

Sigh, anyone hoping to be impressed by the X-Men right now is barking up the wrong tree. Nothing is going to be good again until they reverse "No More Mutants."

Seriously, I can't understand why some of you are looking at Uncanny hoping to be impressed. I mean, Ed Brubaker has been terrible on it for over two years now. It's not gonna change. You might think "Oh, well, Matt Fraction is kinda okay." Well, maybe if he was steering the ship, but he's not. As long as Brubaker is on X-Men, it will be boring and lame.

I saw this as a guy who loves Brubaker on Captain America and likes him on Daredevil. He just is not a match for X-Men, and he has no interest in doing anything than doing lame Claremont pastiche.

Ambush Bug (Yay!)
Madame Xanadu (My reasons are complex and shameful.)
Skrulls! (Maybe. Probably not, if it's just "clip show" garbage.)
Avengers: Initiative
New Avengers
New Warriors
She-Hulk
Thunderbolts (The SI x-over train is now going express. According to the checklist released last week, there are over sixty Secret Invasion-related comics still to be released. Over sixty. That's gotta be double the volume of Secret Wars II, easy. Seriously, Bendis & Co.: ramp it up or you're going to lose out on an easy $200 of schmuck money.)
Uncanny
X-Men: Legacy (I'm feeling strangely positive about the X-Books. I think they may have figured out a fairly effective way to rasa their tabula without, y'know, depowering or killing everyone.)

Seriously, I can't understand why some of you are looking at Uncanny hoping to be impressed. I mean, Ed Brubaker has been terrible on it for over two years now. It's not gonna change.

In X-Geek parlance, Brubaker is the Nicieza to Carey's Lobdell, i.e. the less-inspired half of a not-terribly-inspired-but-serviceable pair. Carey's been turning out some decent stuff, at least (I kind of love the fact that Legacy is more-or-less a Xavier solo book), but it's mostly just mildly entertaining boilerplate across the board.

That said, the current (admittedly, somewhat forced) diasporic state of the X-Universe is a potentially interesting springboard, in lieu of the impending (?) Undecimation. It's totally Bru and Carey's ball to fumble. It'll be interesting to see how they manage to do that. Because, yeah: hoping for much of anything from comics starting with an X is an exercise in frustration.

Also: I have a general sense of Brubaker being a really good and solid writer, but I think that's mostly based on a fairly low percentage of his work that I've liked a lot (Catwoman, Sleeper). On reflection, I could really take or leave most of his stuff.

BATMAN GOTHAM AFTER MIDNITE #3
SUPERMAN #678
TRINITY #8 - Things have moved forward a bit more in the last two issues. I think they just played that one fight scene with Konvict out way too long, which of course will be fine for people who read this one in trade. You have to love Jimmy Olsen showing up in the database of DC Werewolves in the last issue. This book is probably going to end up being a book made for and by DC universe comic geeks.
TWO FACE YEAR ONE #1 (OF 2) - I hope this one is good. It shouldn't be hard to make a good two issue origin story about Harvey Dent.
JOKERS ASYLUM SCARECROW #1 - The Penguin issue of this series was excellent, one of the best Batman related single issues in the past few years. The Joker one was fun and the Poison Ivy was OK. I'm curious to see what they come up with on this one, as the Scarecrow is often times played all over the place.
ROBIN #175 RIP
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #23

WAR HEROES #1- This is a Mark Millar & Tony Harris project about super soldiers. I'm kind of curious about it. I'd probably like to read it, but like Kick Ass I might wait and check it out later.

BEHOLD THE BOOKS I SHALL GET THIS WEEK AND THEN NEVER AGAIN:

Brave & Bold
Superman
Spirit

WILL GET AGAIN (provided it actually is Giffen-Unleashed Bug, and not Co-opted-by-Didio Bug): Ambush Bug

Man I will be upset if neither shop gets shelf copies of Ambush Bug

Would serve you right for two-timing!

??

hopefully I can find that Darwyn Cooke ish of Jonah Hex too.

The problem of Ed Brubaker on the X-Men isn't that he's not a good writer, it's that he obviously doesn't give a fuck about the X-Men. Carey's actual stories aren't very inspired, but they connect because it's so obvious -- even before he dived deep into the murky waters of continuity -- that he got his dream job.

Yeah, I was reading transcripts from some Brubaker convention panel and that was definitely the impression that I got. But if it's just a job, why the fuck is he doing it? Sheer cynicism (reprint rights, etc.)? Waiting for Moon Knight to become available?

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, though. Now that the dust is starting to settle, maybe he'll start focusing a little more on characterization. I think that's been one of his strengths in the past, and it's something that's been sorely lacking from the X-books as a whole for years now.

But if it's just a job, why the fuck is he doing it?

one would venture to imagine that it may be because he receives money for it, which he can exchange for food and clothing?

I'm saying: Marvel only puts out 892 titles a month. He couldn't pay his rent writing Angarr The Screamer instead of sleepwalking through Uncanny?

I'd wager that Uncanny, being higher profile than say, an ongoing Stilt Man saga, pays better? Anybody know how Marvel structures their writer payments?

Dudes why talk about that when you could be looking at HULK FINN???

That is a funny thing.

Isn't Brubaker a Marvel exclusive? Doesn't that mean that he gets a regular paycheck every month despite what he writes?.

That's not really how the exclusive contracts work!

Uncanny X-Men sells very well, regardless of who is writing or drawing it. It's a desirable and lucrative assignment. Ed Brubaker writes or co-writes four books for Marvel, and that's his best-selling project. It makes sense that he'd have no desire to abandon that gravy train.

There's not going to be characterization in the X-Men. It's just going to be pointless plot that goes nowhere. That's just how it's going to be until the regime changes.

Is it that Ed Brubaker is just not that good on a superhero team book? There are some comic writers that are perfectly fine on other things seem to be pretty bad on a team title. It seems like something such as X-men is outside the wheelhouse of what kind of book Brubaker is pretty good at doing, which is more crime or espionage type stories.

I've never read Ed Brubakers issues of The Authority, are they any good?

Ambush Bug, CBLDF anthology book and Joker's Asylum: Scarecrow for me this week. I haven't been too impressed by the Joker's Asylum books so far- Penguin was damn good, but Poison Ivy was sort of blah and while the Joker issue had a neat angle on the character, playing off the modern stabkilldeath portrayal Joker against the old Clown Prince of Crime stuff, the actual story left a lot to be desired. Television executives are concerned only with ratings? You don't say! Was going to stop picking them up until I saw the <a href="http://comics.ign.com/articles/892/892764p1.html";>preview</a> at IGN. Love that almost advertising-art style, even if the story turns out to be nothing more than a Wes Craven riff.

...BBCode, you are the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. Jeepers Christ.

I feel like Uncanny X-Men would be a good book IF Ed Brubaker wrote it more in his comfort zone, but instead, he insists on doing a bad tribute to the worst of old school Chris Claremont.

What, you don't think dressing Kulan Gath in hippie drag was a groovy story idea, man?

So you guys all dissing on X-books recognize that X-Factor is awesomer than something very very awesome, yes?

Aw, I'm not dissing too hardcore. And, yes: X-Factor is definitely top of the heap.

Ha, X-Factor *was* great, and now it's saddled with a barely competent artist in the name of 90s nostalgia. So yeah.

X-Factor was great until they truncated the story with The Isolationist in order to match up with the plan for the Messiah Complex. Since then he doesn't seem to give a crap - just going through the motions the editor wants so mutant A can be in location B for event C.

I wish it could have been treated like Astonishing and left to tell good stories. Crossovers suck.

Oh, I don't know how exclusive contracts work, my hypothesis was just something someone once told me :)

Ambush Bug was ok, I thought, not so funny as I had expected, but it had its moments. And Giffen still draws great. But where is the nine panel grid!?

Bug wasn't always a nine-panel grid.

For some reason the Go-Go Chex/"Wonder Chick!" thing cracks me up. Looking at it dispassionately I can see it's not all that clever, but for some godforsaken reason it works.

Also: the Stephanie Brown Li'l Dickens Power Tool Playset.

Wonder Chick is marvelous! Also: "Bats isn't around. I lower his swivel chair by six inches, as usual".

I know it wasn't always a nine panel grid, it's just that that is the thing I always warmly remember from Giffen's art.

Hey! My thought balloons are white and fluffy again!

Oh, yikes, Uncanny. Some decent bits of dialogue that were clearly written by Fraction, but the plot was terrible, and oh god, do I even need to go into why Greg Land is an awful "artist"?

This is something I and all the other X-fans brought upon ourselves. We are so loyal that we will buy the book no matter what, and so we are made to suffer. The company has no respect for the franchise or the fans because no matter what they do, the money keeps rolling in.

If you ("you" Perp, or "you" general) are complaining about Bru & Frac & Carey & Land, and you actually paid cash money for the Austen / Tan years, then you are standing on some very thin ice.

haha

I didn't actually get a chance to pick this up because my shop is in the process of preparing to move to another store, ergo new releases were not anywhere to be found when I went yesterday.

xxp

I dunno, I like 45-year-old, overweight and gone to seed Cyclops! And I appreciate that Land has started tracing pictures of Alan Cumming so that Nightcrawler finally looks the way he's supposed to look!

All other issues aside (and there are several), the Magneto thing was so out of left field, pointless, redundant, boring, stupid, lame, insulting, and ultimately infuriating that I don't really know if I can continue to support this endeavor.

Austen's run is among the very small number of X-comics that I've never read. I must admit that I'm perversely tempted, though.

Paul O'Brien's decimation (oh ho!) of the "peak" issues of CA's run is all you really need. It's actually best to start reading PO'B @ the start of CA's run, when it wasn't all that clear he was going to screw the pooch so royally -- allows the descent to build up some momentum.

I've always gotten the impression that Ausetn was actively bad. The problem with Brubaker isn't that he's bad on Uncanny, just boring and uninspired. As far as I'm concerned, boring and uninspired is worse by far.

I bought some of the early Austen issues, but quit because it was far too bad. It's hard to imagine things getting worse than that, but you know what? A lot of X-Men comics are almost as bad. I think the Austen run was what it took for Marvel to fully realize how much X-Men readers don't care about the quality, because the sales were not dramatically different from those of Grant Morrison. They've been fucking with us ever since, and putting all the energy in the company towards building up the Avengers.

Maybe Austen would have been better if he'd spelled his name Ausetn.

And Deric's right -- anyone who is writing the X-Men and is bored is a fucking asshole. At least Austen cared enough to be totally demented!

Sigh, I don't know why I really expect them to be able to tell any sort of decent X-Men stories when the company deliberately destroyed the franchise with House Of M so that Avengers could thrive.

Endlessly restating half-cocked conspiracy theories like they're The Truth doesn't make them true!

Sigh, I don't know why I really expect them to be able to tell any sort of decent X-Men stories when the company deliberately destroyed the franchise with House Of M so that Avengers could thrive.

I kinda think that's a copout, assuming anyone currently writing the X-books is operating with that mindset. Was Decimation a bad idea (at least assuming that they didn't set up a logical "out" when they put it in place)? Sure. Does it limit some of the stories that can be told? Absolutely. But if you're writing corporate comics, you're always operating under certain editorial restrictions. It's inherent to the form. Anyone who can't find an angle to tell interesting stories with these characters, regardless of whatever shitty editorial mandate they have to work under, shouldn't be writing an X-book, period.

Characterization is key at the moment. The mutant world got ripped the fuck up. So how about putting the brakes on the constant forward momentum and show these characters dealing with the ramifications of what's happened? Or, alternately, let's defy logic again and throw all of the remaining mutants together like we did two years ago, except in San Francisco this time!

Brubaker should use fewer cherry bombs so he doesn't totally ruin this playset like he did the last one. Watching him play with all of his X-Men action figures in a cardboard box wouldn't be nearly as thrilling.

FRANCHISE NOW SAVED FOR 00S AND BEYOND

Hahahahahaha characterization? That's not gonna happen any time soon. We're talking about Ed Brubaker, the guy who turned back the clock on all of Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon's work on making Cyclops an interesting, relatable character! From now until someone finally decides to take pity on the franchise and let it have ITS CENTRAL PREMISE BACK, we're just stuck with generic superhero stories that go nowhere, and cardboard character writing.

Having not read Brutant X, I have no opinion about that, but his ability to create vivid, believable characters in Criminal, Daredevil, and Captain America is beyond reproach.

x-post

Yeah, it's not like I actually expect any of them to focus much on characterization. I just thought I'd take the unprecedented step of noting, on an internet message board, my opinion about how a work of mass entertainment should be written. It's a novel enough approach that I'm sure Ed Brubaker has happened upon it by now and is taking notes.

Just wanna chime in that there were so many things wrong with Uncanny #500, but definitely the most wrong thing? That they mentioned how amazing the view of the bay was from the new mansion TWICE and didn't bother showing the reader the view ONCE. It was the most frustrated I've ever been by a comic book.

Also, parts obviously written by Fraction: Kingo Sunen Prologue, the first half of Chapter 2 (with all the mutant costumes), and Epilogue 3.

Ambush Bug: so-so, not quite as manic as I was hoping for, but Giff-Art is Giff-Art
CapAm: SNORRRRRRRRE, I feel like I've read the same issue, what, 9 times now?
Superman: Holy fucking shit! This comic is awful! Between the snoozerific Batman saga and this, I am OFF James Robinson.
Brave & Bold: Not into Kollins, but otherwise very decent. Is this end of Waid? Who's next? Wolfman? JMS? Thanks, but no thanks. It's been fun.
FC: Rogues' Revenge: BAH! Kollins again? Not my week.

Giff-Art is Giff-Art

apart from all the times it's munoz-art.

Can't agree with you about Cap, Superman PhD. The pieces are moving into place with deliberate speed, true, but I'm catching glimpses of the big picture and big move that is coming.

apart from all the times it's munoz-art.

Buuuuuuuuurrrrrn.