It is the comic boogaloo!

Comic book roundup!

SO yeah. There are a fuck ton of comics out there. I know I see them, with my own eyes even! I love them very deeply. Well some of them. Some of them are pure crap, and some of them are good for a read or two then to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. See the nice thing about comic books is that you can read them in about an hour, maybe 2, sometimes longer if you are reading something dense like Watchmen. They are fun though. So I decided awhile ago that despite my love for comics I can’t buy all of them, nor would I want to even if I could. With that in mind I would start reading things in the store. Something I ordinarly detest doing but hey it is amazing what you can get over when you realize you can read something cover to cover and not have to buy it, which is good cause it isn’t worth the money I would have to spend on it.

So here is what I read in the past couple of days.

Scott Pilgrim book 1- Or well most of it. This is a series of books that came to my atension through Time Magazine. Time is good for things like that, even though the beliver was better. I am so resubbing to that for my birthday or maybe after I move. I would make a nice housewarming present that is for sure. Anyway it is a book about a 23 year old guy who is in a go nowhere band, who is jobless, mooches off his room mate, and who is dating a 17 year old girl. This guy is a looser. He also has dreams of this girl who turns out to be real, real hot, fairly interested in our looser main character, and who can use door ways in reality to jump from one place to another. She also has a river of crazy ex-boyfreinds. I wanted to like the book. I really appoched it with a super open mind but the main character just turned me off so hard that I couldn’t stay interested. I didn’t want him to get the girl, either of them. I wanted him to get kicked in the nuts and to have it revealed to him just how much of a fraud he really is. He cheats on his 17 year old and it really bothered me. He seems like the sort of person who I have cleaned up after one to many times. Also when I made a similar mistake I changed my outlook on life radically. He just shouted radical and kept going. There are 5 of these books or so, and they are alright I guess if you can stomach the liquid asshole that is the main character. Oh yeah the art is also ass ugly. So have fun with that. Dunno glad I didn’t buy it.

Secret Invasion- It is a sad fact. The dc universe is more about high concepts and experimental ideas. The secret invasion ran along roughly the same time DC’s Final Crisis did. Final Crisis is about a god who has discovered the anti life equations, the mathematical proof that life is meaningless, and he unleashes it on earth prime. This sends a shockwave through the multiverse which threatens the entire universe, which is sentient by the way. By the end he is sitting in the center of a singularity and the big bad gets shot by batman who is using a bullet that fires backwards through time. Reading final crisis is like kissing an ocean it is impossible for me to fully fathom. There is an army of supermen, ground level invasions, sentient universes, the death of bat man, and just simply mind blowing stuff. By contrast Secret Invasion is about a race of shape shifting aliens who invade earth. The super heros can’t tell who is an alien and who isn’t, chaos happens. The Secret Invasion is interesting for a couple of reasons. One it brings a moral conclusion to the Civil War. When the dust settles everyone realizes that the superhero registration thing was a stupid idea. At the end of the day though it is a just a bunch of super heros pointing fingers at each other, punching each other, then punching aliens. They all get together save the day, and The Green Goblin gets put in charge of all of the earth’s security. Yep even though he is bat shit crazy. It could have been good. It could have been great in fact, but the skrulls weren’t developed enough to be interesting, and the heros spent way to much time being confused about everything,. All in all it was a really LONG really lame event. Oh well. It did usher in the Dark Reign a time with Normal in control and that, that my friends is something I find intensly interesting.

Dark Reign Fantastic 4: I picked this up because I want to like the Fantastic 4 but I don’t know where to start reading them. They are reffered to as Marvel’s first family and for very good reason. They have been around for almost as long as Marvel has and they bring a lot of history with them. Like I said I am really interested but I am unsure where to begin. This book was a good choice though. Written by Jonnathan Hickman of Nightly News fame, Mr. Hickman’s run picks up right after Norman takes power, and the first thing he tries to do is to bring the FF to heel. It is reminiscent of right after the civil war when Tony tried to bring people in line. It really delineated between the marvel have and have nots, There are pleanty of people who just simply can’t match Tony in power. Then there are people like Thor who threw Tony across a city when Tony tried to bully him. This is the same thing only Norman is a bastard.
The thing about the FF though is that they aren’t really super heros. Not in the traditional sense. They are more exploreres than anything else. If you had to take all the concepts of star trek and boil them down in to a comic starring 4 charecters it would be the FF. So while Norman Osborn is trying to threaten them with legal action they are lost in compressed space time as a result of Reed Richards building a machine that lets him see alternate realities. He blames himself for the skrull invasion. Granted it is partly his fault so some blame is warrented. So by looking into alternate realities he tries to see if he can find a sequence of decisions that would of ended peacefully. There weren’t many, and in all of the good ones he acted alone, without consulting anyone. Of course sometimes when he acted alone he came up with some terrifying results, like killing several of his friends, or taking away all super powers from everyone, or giving super powers to everyone. The point being he acted alone. While he is looking into this the rest of his family is lost in alternate compressed space time realities, I am litterally dazzled by how cool some of the alternate realities were. Everything had a cool steam punk like aethetic to it and it went from knights, to pirates, to the wild west, to ww2, and it was pretty fricking awesome. The sheer wild creativity displayed means this is a book that I definatly want to keep up and I more than certainly want the rest of the run. Oh yeah and in an amazing couple of moments Reed’s kids totally fuck with Norman Osborn it is pretty epicly cool and well worth buying/reading.

Iron Man: World’s Most Wanted- Yeah I read this too. This is another Dark Reign book. Post Civil war Iron Man was in charge of everything, right in time for his movie to come out too. Now he has fallen from grace and is literally the most wanted man in the world. You’d think it would be more interesting to read about, but it wasn’t. Basicly it was just Tony running and gunning, whining about how his technology is behind the curve, and he destroys his brain. The whole technology thing, man that really started to get tiresome after awhile. As soon as someone popped up you would hear first about hot Tony’s designs are better, how he isn’t using his snazzy designs, so he has to use crap weaponry or something like that. It happens 3 times, all one right after the other and it started to drive me a little nuts after awhile. The core idea is cool, a super genius, with the world’s most valuable database trapped in his skull, on the run from literally everyone. It could be all sorts of cool manuvers where he outsmarts people at the last second running from secret base to secret base, doing all sorts of cool things. See that happens, but instead of him oursmarting anyone he is on the ropes constantly and he is relentlessly complaining the whole time about his shitty technology. Christ. Not a good book. It is especially not good when Norman steals the stage from he title character. I found myself far more interested in his movements and actions than any of Tony’s. After awhile I was reading more to see what Norman would do, and I didn’t really care what Tony did.
This is mostly because I knew what he would do. Complain, fight for a bit, then run. Norman however? Now that man is crazy, unpredictable, and when written correctly he is downright scary. Good stuff.

Okay I am tired of doing this, but Dark Avengers is worth buying cause it is awesome. Ultimatum is all the crap that people made it out to be, read at your own risk, Hulk Red/Green is surprisingly not shitty. It isn’t great but it isn’t bad.

Okay I am done.