Shipping This Week! - 04.11.10

That's the first time I've clicked on one of those links and I know half the people writing there. YAY COMIC GEEKDOM.

Gotham Central
GL: Last Will & Legacy of Hal Jordan
JSA
and maybe Nightwing, since it might be worth a million dollars someday!

Sweet! For me:

-Shulkie trade
-Fables (it seems like so soon after the last one! Bill Willingham et al have their act TOGETHER)
-Bullseye: Greatest Hits #3 (this is really great if you like Silence of the Lambs)
-District X
-Oceans #2 (another Warren Ellis mini-series, but the first issue was very, very good. I'm starting to feel much more warmly toward Warren lately)

All the usual nonsense for Ocean 1 about 'blah blah blah nothing happens feh feh feh blah blah'... followed by 'Oh Mark Millar I hated him before everyone else hated him yadda yadda yadda' everywhere ever. Admittedly Ellis doesn't always escape this accusation unscathed but this time he definitely did. I'll be getting 2.

Lately, the STW threads haven't been so much the focus of ILC chatter as they used to be -- ARE WE NU-ILC ALREADY?

Anyway, the first half of my pickup this morning:

Y -- please don't let the mystical explanation offered by redhead be true.

Astonishing -- I love Fury/SHIELD's counterpart. This is a Whedon addition, isn't it, or is it some obscure (or recent) bit he dredged up? Also love the two-page Logan/Peter splash. Casaday might be my favorite X-artist, if you don't handicap the pre-glossy guys for working with lower-quality printing methods. If I have a complaint, it's that I don't buy Kitty-Peter as the Match Made In Heaven any more than I bought Buffy-Angel as such, and I don't want to be as tired of these two as I was of Whedon's endless handwringing B-A angstfests. There are some really nice, small dialogue moments here, though, all throughout.

Ultimate Spidey -- I loved the Freaky Friday two-parter, don't know if I'll love the Hiding Out two-parter quite as much, but I think mostly it's just jarring to be in small, mild, taking it easy sitcom territory after the rollercoaster of the last year. Even so, I always get a vicarious thrill for Peter when someone praises Spider-Man in front of him.

Thunderbolts -- picked up on a whim; I asked the guy, "What do you know about the new T-Bolts series?" and he said, "I know it's good and you should read it, especially if you like Fabian's run on it." He was right -- this is off to a really nice start for a #1 (especially in contrast to, say, Tomb of Dracula #1, which is a lot of vague hints and lengthy introductions to characters we have no reason to care about yet). Songbird, Mach IV (I still think of him as Beetle, but whatever), Atlas, Captain Marvel, and Blizzard -- Radioactive Man (!!!), Joystick, and Speed Demon are mentioned too but not present yet. It's nice how they're spinning this one off of Avengers Disassembled the way they spun the first volume off of HEroes Go 'Way.

I suspect I'll be sticking with Tbolts, and between that and New Avengers, that means I'm back into the thick of mainstream Marvel for the first time since Maximum Security.

I've only read to the third trade of Y (don't read the floppies), but it seems kinda obvious that the 'plague' isn't a plague at all but some mystical event. There's no rational scientific explanation for it, no discussion of vectors, dispersion, yadda yadda and yadda. I'm not saying that invalidates the story in any way, but every time one of the characters calls it the plague, I wanna just scream until my head explodes.

Oh wait, we're supposed to discuss this week's comics...

Uh, I got Gotham Central, and Plastic Man, the first issue of the Incredibles adaptation (more for academic curiousity than anything else, as the Incredibles does superhero comics better than most comics these days and wanted to see how the adaptation itself worked) and a couple other things. Including Scott Pilgrim's Sweet Little Life (which I'd suspect people either love or hate.)

Yeah, it's harder and harder to ignore the inevitability of the mystic in Y, it's just that so few of the stories that have made me like the title dealt with that aspect, that it feels like it would be a shift in focus -- maybe it's the fairly realistic take on the repercussions of this thing, on both the large and small scales, that makes me feel that way. My favorite parts of The Stand were the road trip parts, and trying to get the power on in Boulder, that stuff -- much more than the mystical conflict, once that got going.

tep otm - best part of the stand: going thru rush hour lincoln tunnel post-plague so of course it's dark and filled with dead people omg wtf

Oh fuck yeah, and the MONSTER SHOUTER!

You Bastards Shut Up About the Identity Crisis:

IDENTITY CRISIS #6: NOT BOUGHT YET SOLD OUT I HATE YOU ALL (even if you're having the goof).

ANGELTOWN #1: Not read yet; looks snazzy.

100 BULLETS #55: Not read yet; will have to read as part of arc; series isn't doing much for me right now (though Eduardo Risso is doing fantastic work).

FABLES #31: NOT BOUGHT YET SOLD OUT I COULD KILL MY SHOP GUY

GOTHAM CENTRAL #25: "Fun" story revolving around dismantling the Bat signal, setting up a Bat / cop schism that should hopefully yield some sexy results.

OCEAN #2: Skimmed; looks cool. I like aliens and smart mouth dialogue.

AVENGERS FINALE: NOT BOUGHT YET SOLD OUT GEEZ DUDE STOCK UP ON SOME ISSUES NEXT TIME WOULD YA?

DISTRICT X #7: Chugging along; the "new" artist disappoints me somewhat; not sure I cotton to the love triangle being plotted; subterranean worm folk, though, are my cup of tea.

MARVEL TEAM-UP #1: Throwback to 80s Marvel throwing back to 60s Marvel (cavalier plot shenanigans forcing heroes to fight each other; winky asides from the writer / editor to the reader; lots of primary colors). Not bad, if you're up for some carefree fun. & don't mind holding off on any Taco Bell Value Menu purchases for 1 day.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #21: Paul Jenkins says buh-bye to Spidey with an awkward story about the Kingpin playing poker. Not as bad as the stuff it directly followed, but sorely lacking. PJ's initial stint on Spidey was what really got me to care about Spider-Man as a character again, and it's a shame to see his run peter out like this.

IRON MAN #1: FANTASTIC! Paul O'Brien nails a number of the reasons why Ellis does such a fine job here. Unlike some of Ellis' recent decompressed works, he seems to have hit on the proper pacing (which melds nicely with Adi Granov's sleek, static painting). IM's origin is retconned so that the grenade shrapnel incident occurred in the Middle East, which might chafe some continuity cops, but is A-OK - I'm warming to the notion of established comic characters being used more as templates for a particular story (& manipulated for the sake of that story) than just being products of a time & place (assuming, of course, that the writer can get a grip on the actual character core that remains once all the circumstantial stuff is excised). If it takes 6 weeks for each issue to come, let it be so. Tony Stark as a morally ambivalent arms dealer-cum-philanthropist & techno-vigilante trying to find himself & his purpose = a step in the right (or, at the very least, an interesting) direction. (X-Files fans should pay no mind to the creation of IM's newest nemesis and any drawable parallels to that black oil stuff, though.)

Fables -- Cool; I'm mostly curious to see where this leads the series in the future.

Avengers Finale -- whole lotta wrap-up. I'm glad I read online stuff or I'd have no idea what anyone's talking about (I'm still only vaguely aware of what went on in Avengers Disassembled -- I know who died, and who was responsible, but not why everyone's pissed at T-Diddy Stark).

Marvel Team-Up -- I thought it was a lot of fun! Nothing earth-shattering. Very 80s style, for sure. Bendis has made Wolverine/Spidey one of my favorite flavor combos, so that was a plus.

Tomb of Dracula -- really don't bother.

Swamp Thing -- definitely back in the horror mold. I was reserving expectations as best I could -- I still think it was an enormous and bewildering misstep to have three writers in less than a year, and if they'd only intended Diggle to clean house they should have done so in a graphic novel or miniseries and spared us the pace-messing-up filler stories. You know they'll skip them in the trades, why fuck over the pull lists? But like I said: it's on the right foot. Bringing back Arcane and going "back to basics" is one of the few things that makes sense for this title, "all new all direction"-wise.