Comics for November 10

[dvandom]

                    Dave's Unspoilt Capsules and Awards
         The Week's Picks and Pans, plus Awards of Dubious Merit

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups.  Recommendation does
not factor in price.  Not all books will have arrived in your area this week.
Yay Paranoia XP Traitor's Manual!  Rants, Capsules can be found on my 
             homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 


First Looks:
     Every so often, I will take my PDA and its folding keyboard down to the
comic shop on the weekend and type up reviews of the stuff I read out of the
First Looks pile.  Books I end up buying will be moved down to the Capsules
section on Wednesdays.  If I don't give it a recommendation, I'm probably not
buying it. 

     No new First looks since last week.

Capsules:
     Short, relatively spoiler-free reviews of books I actually bring home
(as opposed to reading in preview form in the shop or online).  If I get a
book late due to distributor foulups or whatever, I'll put it in the Missing
section.

     Finder #35: Lightspeed Press - I guess I'll hold on for the rest of this
arc in single issues, but I'm probably going to stick to trades afterward.
This time out, while the plot-related elements are still rather slow, there's
good character development scenes that make it worth reading even if you
don't know what's going on overall.  Mildly recommended.  $2.95
     Bugtown #1 (of 6): Aeon - Finally, something of Howarth makes it out of
Diamond's warehouses and into my hands.  While the exposition is a little
rough at times, this is a good introduction to the setting via the time-
tested device of following a newcomer around.  Although the device usually
doesn't involve the newcomer being in his underwear.  Not all of the regulars
are introduced to a new reader, but that would be kinda clunky (Howarth gets
away with one or two breakings of the fourth wall in service of introducing
characters, but can't push it TOO far).  And the major players get their time
to strut, which is all that's important.  There's some nudity and graphic
violence, a point I only mention for the benefit of any newcomers who might
be interested in using this as their jumping on point...the regulars already
know to expect that sort of thing.  Recommended.  $2.95/$4.25Cn
     Transformers Micromasters #4 (of 4): Dreamwave - McDonough, Patyk and
Ruffolo turn in a semi-coherent ending to the tale, even the garish coloring
doesn't help much in keeping track of who's saying what.  While there were a
few fun moments, it felt like the story was only wrapping up because it had
been solicited as a four issue series.  Very mildly recommended.  $2.95
     Transformers G1 v3 #9: Dreamwave - It would have helped if the scene
following up from #8 had been first, not near the end.  Especially with the
tie-ins to War Within, the Summer Special and other stuff that may or may not
have come out yet...I kept having to check the cover to make sure I was
reading G1 and not some other title.  Mind you, inter-title continuity is
generally a Good Thing, but Mc and Patyk get in over their heads trying to
tell a readable story with it.  (Aside: the randomly transparent speech
bubbles persist this issue, sigh.)  Sometimes there's stories that are good
enough to be worth the work required to follow all the twists and turns, but
this isn't one of them.  Very mildly recommended.  $2.95
     GIJoe vs Transformers II #3 (of 4): Devil's Due Productions - I got the
alternate cover (cover A) with what looks to be a Decepticon rebuild of
Metroplex on it (not Metrotitan colors).  Jolley seems to be playing the role
of Simon Furman crossed with Chris Claremont in this issue.  A decent story,
although with a "Hey, what?  That's pointless!" sort of ending.  Granted,
it's an Act III sort of thing, and stuff is supposed to be at its bleakest
here, but the switch from "we seem to be getting a handle on things" to
"darkest hour" is almost perfunctorily abrupt.  Mildly recommended.  $2.95
     Green Arrow #44: DC - Yes, this is the big Issue issue, the one that's
been getting news coverage as the first to have an HIV-positive character
(not that this is true, even with the Big Two).  But while some may complain
that this is just Winick doing the same thing he always does, he does it
because he's *good* at it.  The reactions of the characters may not be how
you would react, but they're realistic reactions.  Recommended.
$2.50/$3.85Cn 
     JSA #67: DC - Identity Crisis tie-in, the prospect of which filled me
with dread, despite the Gibbons art.  But, except for the teasy ending (and I
just grabbed IC#6 off the shelf and read the relevant followup for), Johns
does a pretty good job of getting story mileage out of the Stupid Crossover
Event.  And there's also an epilogue that gives us at least a little of the
continuing storyline.  Recommended.  $2.50/$3.85Cn
     Iron Man #1 (no volume number): Marvel - Warren Ellis and Adi Granov.
The previews worried me enough that I did not pre-order this book.  I find
Granov's art to be wooden, and the scenes we got had very slow pacing.
However, while the pacing is still pretty slow, there's some scenes of
emotional intensity that made the overall story flow much more satisfyingly.
The fault/responsibility balance is better than I've come to expect from
Ellis of late.  On the down side, the retcon train is rolling again, once
again updating Iron Man's origin and contradicting the last retelling and its
fallout.  The art is still a little stiff, although Granov has a decent
layout sensibility, switching between widescreen panels for more cinematic
moments and nine panel grid for the close up war of words.  As an aside, it
looks like Granov is a PC user, but letterer Randy Gentile is a Mac user.  I
say this because on unnumbered page 8, a character is using a beige box PC,
but the captions of what he's typing use the OSX-style red/yellow/green
corner buttons for window control.  :)  Provisionally recommended.
$3.50/$5.00Cn 
     Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Book of the Dead 2004: Marvel -
This is a really weird grab bag.  Some entries are characters who are clearly
not staying dead for long, some are influential deceased folks (like Uncle
Ben or Baron Zemo 1), some are people who don't let being dead stop them
(Ancient One, Destiny II, Swordsman, etc)...and then there's people I imagine
are only in here because they were in the original early 80s Book of the
Dead.  I mean really...Omega the "Unkown" (their typo)?  He had no more than
a dozen issues of his own title in the 70s and then died in Defenders.  Is
there actually a plan to revive him or something?  Because I can't really see
any other reason to dig up his grave for this.  Same with Effigy, who seems
to be the token representative of the hecatomb Byrne built and called Marvel:
the Lost Generation.  Some characters get two pages, but it doesn't seem to
make a lot of sense who does...why does Thor only get one page when Ulysses
Bloodstone gets two?  All of the art seems to be recycled, some of it from
the original OHOTMU (albeit cleaned up in Photoshop or the like and
recolored).  The last page and inside front cover are annotations of
important appearances, which is useful.  I suppose if you've been out of
X-books for a while and are curious which mutants have been killed off in the
past five years or so, this is a useful book.  But like the DC Encyclopedia,
it feels like the writers were sent off without guidance and the book was put
together from whatever the writers decided they were interested in (i.e. the
assignments were "You do this year's deaths, you cover x-deaths, you dredge
the old OHOTMU for interesting stuff...").  Mildly recommended.
$3.95/$5.75Cn 
     New Thunderbolts #1: Marvel - Nicieza and Grummett.  It's a good
restart, and it keeps to the various themes important to the Thunderbolts:
redemption, family squabbles, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (or
vice versa) and Dark Secrets.  I *totally* feel where Josten is coming from,
by the way.  Been there.  Didn't do exactly what he did, but that might be
difficult.  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     Spider-Man & Wolverine: MTU #1: Marvel - Kirkman and Kolins.  The Kolins
art was okay.  The Kirkman writing was comedy gold.  The first page was
TERRIFIC, and he continued to bring the funny almost all issue (one might
argue the last page wasn't supposed to be funny).  I was a little thrown by
Wolverine having adamantium back, clearly I missed the memo (but I did go
check the X-shelf to make sure Wolvie did have the metal back).  Strongly
recommended.  $2.25/$3.25Cn

Gone Missing:
     Stuff that came out some places this week and that I wanted to buy, but
couldn't find for whatever reason, so people don't have to email me asking
"Why didn't you review X?"  (If it's neither here nor in the section above,
though, feel free to ask, I might have forgotten about it!)

     Savage Henry Puppet Trap didn't show up, but I'm not sure I even ordered
it.  Same deal on Gold Digger Perfect Memory #4 and the Little Endless
Storybook.  Still waiting on Blue Monday and Amelia Rules.
     No change this week, in other words.

Awards:

Best Book: Spider-Man and Wolverine MTU #1

"In Search Of Pirated Booties" Award to Finder #35

"Boche Spice" Award to Bugtown #1 (of 6)

"Don't Lose Your Head" Award to Transformers Micromasters #4 (of 4)

"Really Not Shockwave's Week" Award to Transformers G1 v3 #9

"Well, It's Not ALL Bad For Him" Award to GIJoe vs Transformers II #3 (of 4)

"Suddenly, Superheroing Doesn't Look So Dangerous" Award to Green Arrow #44

"Through A Mirror, Darkly" Award to JSA #67

"Hope And Madness Are Sometimes Hard To Tell Apart" Award to Iron Man v4 #1

"Wait, He's/She's Dead AGAIN?" Award to OHOTMU Book Of The Dead 2004

"The Power Cos-Mack" Award to The New Thunderbolts #1

"It's Not As Bad As It Looks, Honest" Award to Spider-Man & Wolverine MTU #1

   Dave Van Domelen, "Now I've got to find them again. Shouldn't be too hard with Spider-Man involved. I'll just follow the scent of bad jokes." - Wolverine (in a CAPTION, in ALL CAPS...ah, the good old formatting days are back).

Comments

[liabrown]

As far as I know, Eric did all or most of the X-characters in the Book of the Dead, which makes sense. I don't know any of the other people involved.

That's not the pic I would have chosen for Pyro. I would have given them or suggested a better pic had they asked ;) Also, I'd prepared a nice big list of his important issues (in addition to the corrections I made in his bio and issue list), but Eric said they only wanted 5. Nor did I see those power stats until today, and I think two of his are off. So the pic and the stats are what I would have also changed had I been able. Destiny's are all fine. And as far as I can tell, they used most if not all of the corrections I made (but I'd have to go over what I wrote, cuz that was back in July).

It does seem kind of weird that people like Stryfe and Psylocke are missing from the book, although certainly there have been rumours for a while that she's about to return, so that would explain it.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

My tentative theory is that the more "obscure" characters are being spread out among the BotD's. So 2005 will feature the victims of that year's lame events, some more long-dead important folks, and some more obscure ones (Omega just got drawn from a hat first).

[liabrown]

I guess it's possible there will be more BotDs, but I've not heard anything.

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

I looked at the book of the dead at the store...So how did Thor die?

You really need to read Gotham Central

You didn't know Wolverine had the metal back..he's had it back for like 5 years or something...I think at least since the movie came out, no?

My Muppets Sweetums arrived today..not a comic but YAY!!!

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Thor apparently died in the final issue of his comic, destroying Those Who Sit Above In Shadow. Asgard has also been destroyed.

And it goes to show how little interest I've had in X-books in the past decade, yes?