Comic book roundup round whatever

This was going to be short because I had to go back to work from lunch but now I am home, my tummy and head hurts, and I feel like doing this. So now all of that is happening. Awesome!

Things read!

DMZ book 7 - This book is good! Really good! Let's put it this way, the book used to be on the instant buy ZOMG so good list. However, book 4 was kinda lack luster, book 5 wasn't very good at all, and 6 reverted to I'm 16 and mad at my mother. Seven though the series recaptures its stride and it seems to be back on track. It had a fantastic little two part story, and a decent 4 part story that advanced the main plot, and a one shot that had the medic girl running around. So first of all it made for quite a meaty read. So I guess ts back to that series for me.

One of the things that really makes this volume stand out from the other two is that Brian Wood really spreads out and gives himself space to let his fantastic prose style run rampant. Prose in comic books is a strange beast, and it is amazing how much information people can pack into a word bubble or a tiny box. Brian Wood is paticularly good at doing this, but for whatever reason he hasn't been doing it recently. Glad to see he is back at it again though. He brilliantly captures the desperate beauty of the warzone and desprite the fact that how hard life is there people make do with the best they can. Still, it is the little side things that make this series sing, I really wish the main story would just go away or something, I dunno. I'm picking this one and the next one up though that is for sure.

Secret Warriors- Its good but it requires more space than I have here really to effectivly talk about it. I mean the man who wrote this book is basicly writting the entire marvel universe, by himself. It seems like as he goes on he is writing more and more. People give him murderous amounts of flack for some of the changes he's been making and for the first time I understand why. He moves around the marvel universe like a kid with hammer. He smashes whatever he wants to and rebuilds from there. Now he is the man directly responciple for me caring about what goes on in the marvel universe again so I cut him mucho slack. But man...MAN I am starting to see where lots of people are coming from. More on that later though.

Road to The Siege- This book is good if you haven't been paying atension to anything that has been happening in the marvel universe at all since the Secret Invasion. Otherwise just grab, Dark Avengers (great read) and The List (I'll get to it next week) and you will know everything you need to. Disapointing. Sometimes these books are really good, like the Road to the Civil War or Road to War of the Kings. They do a great job of catching the reader up on the current events. However, the lead up to the Siege and the events surrounding the Siege are compact enough so that you don't really need a lead in book. The same thing happened with the Accept Change Trade where they introduce the Dark Reign. Strange, in fact I think both trades share a number of stories. I dunno not even worth writing about.

Authority: World's End- After Millar left the Authority it went rocketing down hill at the speed of light. It then crashed into rock bottom, bounced a few times and came skidding to a halt right next to the world's end. Well okay after the world's end. From what I can gather, the carrier crashed into the planet and brought an alternate reality with it. Bad shit y0. I picked it up because Dan Abbet and Andy Landing wrote it and they did a brilliant job with the marvel space stuff. Let me say that again because it is worth emphasizing, they did a fucking brilliant job with the marvel space stuff bringing it from hokey and stupid to some of the most amazing hero comics put out by either Marvel or DC. Seriously, their work is amazing. Then again their work on the Punisher was ultra average so...

Fortunatly, they manage to make the Authority interesting again. A lot has happened to them apparently. The Doctor is no where to be found, and Jenny Quantum is also conspicuously vanished. Still both of these charecters were of only minor concern to me. As is how the world managed to get itself ended. From the looks of things it was the Authority that actually did it so I am down with that. MOVING RIGHT ALONG, what drew me into the story is that it is, for all intentents and purposes, a post apocalyptic story. Apollo and Midnighter are separated, Apollo has to stay up near the sun because of a cloud that is covering the earth and Midnighter? Well you know he can't survive in space, or fly and stuff. So their contact is limited. I always cringe when I see the two of them hit the page, they are comic's premire gay duo and I am always terrified that some writer will not be able to handle it, or fucking it up somehow. Ellis for example largely ignored their homosexuality. Okay ignored is the wrong word. Rather the two of them were gay, but nothing special was really ever done about it. Suprisingly enough it was Mark Millar who took their relationship and made it special. I really like that. I mean the two of them share some really wonderful moments throughout Millar's run and it genuinely makes me happy to see them together.

Abett and Landing really manage to knock it out of the park though. Holy crap the moments they spend together, while brief is just so amazingly sweet that it is worth the ticket price just for those couple of pages alone. When he wants to talk the Midnighter sends up a balloon. You really just have to see it, it just so stupidly tender and they really get the idea of love pulling through the apocalypse. Its a good statement.

I am greatly looking forward to the next volume which comes out in March. As a result I began poking around the Authority trades to see if there was anything else worth reading. Apparently Brubaker did a run! YAY and it looks solid so I'll be getting that because he is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers.

So I'll be looking into that pronto. Poking around it looks as if the Authority runs haven't been as dire as I thought, moar investigation is in order.

Comic Book Roundup!

This is becoming a rather pleasant tradition of mine. On Fridays I got to books a million prowl the shelves and find things I want to read and then enjoy them. Lots of things I am curious about but not really curious enough to buy.

So without any further ado.

Red Hulk/Green Hulk books 1&2- Loeb is a superstar writer, or so I am told. I read the Ultimatum book by him though. Utter shit. Utter utter shit, and what the fuck is with all the cannibalism? Jesus christ it is just gets distasteful after awhile. Anyway who cares. This is about the hulk books. The Hulk is a charecter that has always interested me. I really like the idea of it, a brilliant scientist turned into a hulking green moron whenever he gets angry. It deals with all sorts of ideas like interalization, repression, anger, and there is a beautiful sort of exerstential horror to it all. The hulk is less of a hero, or a villian but more of a charecter, a living force of nature who can potentially destroy the planet just as easily as he can save it. Its an amazing concept. Even more interesting is that there is a whole family of gamma irridated people who run around, some of them look out for each other other times they fight. Together though they are all cursed with this debilitating thing that keeps everyone on the run or ostracized. Unfortunatly it is bungled by just about every writer. Loeb being no exception. There is hardly any interplay between Banner and the hulk, and when there is it is always hightly overwrought. Like handwringing cyclopse shit. Ugh. The rest of the marvel universe also gets treated exceptionally poorly throughout the book. Thor for example. No one can pick up Thor's hammer. So Red Hulk instead just sort of jumps with it into space so he can throw it there, since you know there is no gravity. See that is just stupid. Thor is a god, son of both Odin and Gaia. He doesn't need to bend to rules like that. Like the way he flies, it doesn't really make sense. So all the sudden making his hammer vulnerable to gravity is, well it is hulk fan service.

Oh well. Despite all the bitching I just did I read both books cover to cover and enjoyed myself. They are mindless and involve a lot of people hitting each other and blah blah blah. Also the identity of the red hulk actually forms a decenently compelling mystery, along with the question of Doc Samson's true motives. The fight scenes are fun and I dunno I enjoyed it. Its just that it could be so much better. It could have real depth and horror to it. Instead it is exactly the opposite. Oh well.

In other news...The Deadpool/Thunderbolts crossover? What the fuck! Andy Diggle should be perfect for the thunderbolts, but he isn't. It is crap. I don't understand why so many people love Deadpool so much. I guess it is the whole "we are 12" sort of thing. I don't know I read the whole thing but it was PAINFUL.

I didn't get a chance to read The Secret Warriors though which made me upset because it looks exciting. Oh well next time then.

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.