Comics for August 17

[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.
Busy busy time of year at work.  Rants, Capsules can be found on my 
             homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 

First Looks:
     Every so often, I'll have the time (either while waiting for comics to
be sorted on Wednesday, or over the weekend) to pull out my PDA 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.
     If I read the First Looks on Wednesday, I won't include them in the next
week's review.  But if I don't get around to them until the weekend, I'll
include them in the next regular post.

     Okay, last week my shop moved to a different part of their building, as
part of a swap with a campus organization.  They were promised that the
plumbing issue that made the basement of the building smell like an outhouse
would be fixed before they moved in.
     The landlords, predictably, have done nothing about the stench.
Scarily, I'm told it's a lot better than it was last Wednesday...given that
it's still pretty bad.
     Until this problem gets fixed, there's no way I'm going to be able to
spend time hanging around at the comic shop, which means no First Looks.


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.

     City of Heroes v2 #4: Image/Top Cow - Well, it's a really slow week, and
a friend asked me to pick this up and review it, as there's no reviews up
that she (or I) could find.  I'll start by saying that I'm about as far from
the target audience as you can get while still being interested in
superheroes.  I don't play City of Heroes (won't play Massively Multiplayers
in general, can't play CoH in specific because I own a Mac), and while I
can't help but pick up a few things here and there about the setting from
friends who do play, I really have no interest in the setting.  That said,
Hickman does a decent job of setting things up for new readers, although it
takes a bit longer than I'd like (a roll call on page one is ALWAYS a good
idea, and would have been in keeping with the pseudo-Silver Age story and
Neal Adams homage art).  Hickman did a good job of making it feel like a
comic of the game.  Unfortunately, I don't consider that to be a good thing,
although your mileage may vary.  There's also a lot of angsting and stuff
that makes you feel like most of these heroes are just sick and tired of the
whole business and would rather be chartered accountants or something.  In
other words, it reads like dialogue between players who just wanna beat stuff
up and find the whole "mission" and "protect innocents" things to be an
imposition.  There's also some text pieces and fanfic in the back, which
didn't really interest me, and a pseudo-Nodwick strip by Aaron Williams that
was good for a chuckle.  All in all, this isn't going on my pull list.  (And
no, I'm not in a pissy mood and taking it out on this comic, I genuinely
don't like it.)  $2.99/$4.60Cn 
     New Thunderbolts #11: Marvel - Well, Fabian seems to be having fun with
the House of M crossover, although his captionitis is flaring up as he goes
around explaining every bit of divergent timeline.  It *is* interesting to
see how the alliances and allegiances of various characters are shifted
around, and it's not really necessary to know what's going on in the rest of
the crossover to follow this (one positive side of the captionitis).
Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     Livewires #6 (of 6): Marvel - And still more exposition, although that's
kinda been a hallmark of this series.  Plus, naked mecha!  For various values
of naked, none of them Mature Readers Only, mind you.  The climax is a little
hand-wavy (i.e. it's awfully convenient how everything comes out fine, rather
than being even worse than before), but the potential for a sequel is left
open.  Hopefully a sequel could be less heavy on exposition, having gotten it
all out of the way here.  :)  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     I was thinking of reviewing the Xevoz Hyper-Guardian toy here too, but I
see it's out of stock already at HasbroToyShop.com, so I'd just be taunting
you all.  It rocks, though.  Too bad the line died before these made it to
stores. 

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!)

     Current list as of 8/17:

     Transformers Way of the Warrior TPB (which shows as "backordered" on
Diamond's system, meaning they're out).

Awards:

Best Book: None.

"I Aggro Noobs" Award to City of Heroes v2 #4

"A Sane World Is One In Which You Can Be Insane, An Insane World Is One In
     Which You Can't Be Sane" Award to New Thunderbolts #11

"A Real Nailbiter" Award to Livewires #6 (of 6)

   Dave Van Domelen, "Be sad if you were ta die a virgin." - Nano Nick Fury, Livewires #6