Comics for July 8

[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.
Ninety dollar day at the shop, woot.  Rants, Capsules can be found on my 
             homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 

     Go check out http://www.whiterose.org/HowlingCurmudgeons/ when you're
done here. 

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.

     Alpha Flight v3 #5: Marvel - There's some flimsy leaps of logic and
misused jargon ("Geometric" energy?  Ummmm, maybe "Geothermal" was intended),
but it's a reasonably amusing fight-heavy issue.  Mildly recommended.
$2.99/$4.25Cn 
     eXiles #49: Marvel - No great shakes, storywise, but amusing and a good
lull before whatever Bedard has planned for the Big Number Fifty.  And hey, a
nice Zippy the Pinhead reference, too.  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     Fantastic Four #515: Marvel - Medina's art is slowly growing on my, but
is still kinda ehhh in a lot of ways.  The story's not too bad, and does
clearly show that the main villain of the piece is missing a few valence
electrons, if you know what I mean.  Mildly recommended.  $2.25/$3.25Cn
     Captain America and Falcon #5: Marvel - Priest has commented that he
wasn't feeling at the top of his game when writing this (i.e. after my review
of #4 he emailed me and said I could tell people this), but Bennett's art
does a great job of making this a good read.  It's like being able to breathe
again after spending four months in a smelly lockerroom...it may not be the
purest of air, but damn it's still sweet.  And Jack Jadson's inks make it
even better...the roughness of Bennett's art turned off some people when he
was on The Crew, but Jadson's polished inks work well with the faceless
computer coloring, striking a happy medium between the overly detailed "scale
mail and leather" Captain America that's been popular lately and the more
stylized "fishscale and spandex" classic look.  The brief Kirby homage works
perfectly, and if the Anti-Cap had been drawn like this from the start, it'd
have been a whole different ball game.  Yes, I'm spending a lot of time
gushing about the art, but after four issues of holding my nose and tryign to
find the places where the art didn't BITE, it's an understandable
overreaction, yes?  Anyway, the story...it's a transition.  After the hoo-hah
of fighting in a hurricane last issue, it's time to settle down for a moment,
catch the breath, establish that while the hurricane is gone the wind is
still blowing pretty hard.  Political wind, that is.  If this is Priest,
Bennett and Jadson when Priest is off his game, I can't wait for next issue,
which Priest wrote after seeing the art on this one.  :)  Strongly
recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     Supreme Power #11: Marvel MAX - Another issue not really to be read in
public, what with lots and lots of naked Zarda.  So, of course, I read it
while sitting in the comic shop and drinking soda.  Heh.  Actually, the
Mark/Zarda sequence, while kinda Dragonball-y in story, was only about a
third of the issue.  We also get some more fun with Doc Spectrum, and the
best part of the issue focuses on Nighthawk and (probably not using that
codename soon) the Whizzer.  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn
     The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Avengers 2004: Marvel -
It's a bad omen when the first entry, Ant Man, doesn't even mention that he
can shrink.  The writeups are generally better than that, though, and I was
glad to see that Priest's Black Panther stuff forms the bulk of BP's entry
(although listing "the Client" among his aliases shows, I think, either a bit
of snark or a misunderstanding of what an alias is).  The art is all taken
from other sources (and once in a while you can see jagged borders where it
was inexpertly lasso'ed out of the source file), but is generally good
choices.  The format is decent, and superior to the original OHOTMU (if only
by a little).  At the end there's maps of the Avengers Mansion, diagrams of a
Quinjet, a roster of every Avenger (I'll leave it to others to see if there's
any gaps in this) and a bibliography of significant appearances for the
characters featured here.  Recommended.  $3.99/$5.75Cn
     Justice League Adventures #33: DC - A decent story focused on a
character who doesn't generally show up in the Justice League cartoon, but it
suffers from the trap of making a Batman villain so buff he can fight off the
entire JL.  Mildly recommended.  $2.25/$3.50Cn
     Tom Strong #27: DC/ABC - The visuals of the "villain" this issue are
neat (at least, I thought so when I designed a very similar character 15
years ago or so...ain't no original ideas, remember that), and the story is
fairly good.  It has a little too much nodding and winking and weirdness for
its own sake, but it was worth the time it took to read.  Recommended.
$2.95/$4.50Cn 
     Transformers: Micromasters #1 (of 4): Dreamwave - I have three main
reactions to this issue.  One: nice of the writer to credit himself as James
"Brad Mick" McDonough.  Two: cool to see Big Daddy and the Deluxe Insecticons
in comic form.  Three: Rob Ruffolo can't tell a story.  Seriously...it took
repeated references after the fact by various characters to the events of the
opening scene for me to figure out what happened.  I mean, at one point I was
wondering if one of the Micromasters was unleashing the power of the Matrix!
At the time, I also couldn't figure out which Micromaster it WAS.  Sure, it
was all revealed by the end of the issue, but it should have been clear at
the BEGINNING.  As for the writing, McD is clearly expecting a LOT more out
of Ruffolo in terms of carrying the story, as it's written so minimally in
places that one can only presume Ruffolo was supposed to make something
patently obvious.  I did appreciate that Dreamwave is one of the few "larger"
publishers to still use footnotes (connecting events here to G1v3#5), but
this comic was otherwise an excellent example of a really interesting concept
turned to hash by bad storytelling.  Very mildly recommended.  $2.95 for any
of the three regular covers, didn't look at the special ones.
     Transformers G1 v3 #6: Dreamwave - On the other hand, Figueroa is at
least a competent visual storyteller, and does some good work with McD's
story here.  The colorists have gotten the hang of things as well, and the
colors are only oversaturated in the scenes where it's appropriate
(i.e. every scene with Sunstorm).  McD and Patyk are juggling several
plotlines here, but they do seem to be getting the hang of that too...there's
some "huh?" stuff here and there, but it mostly seems to be intentional, for
the sake of maintaining a mystery.  Recommended.  $2.95
     Transformers Energon #25: Dreamwave - Interesting choice of cover stock,
almost like thin sheet plastic, more reflective where it's left white.  The
paper stock inside is also different, slightly less shiny than the usual
Dreamwave paper.  As for the story, it's pretty standard stock itself.  Cocky
young heroes find that they need to use their heads, not just their powers,
and defeat a relatively minor threat who thrashed them initially because they
thought with their blasters.  The art by Joe Ng is pretty good, and the
coloring very good.  Recommended.  $2.95
     Transformers Energon Cinemanga: The Ultimate Betrayal: TokyoPop - I
think this got accidentally ordered for me, but what the heck.  It adapts two
episodes: "Scorpinok" (their misspelling) and "Megatron's Sword".  They do a
little more with the "cel comic" format than during Armada, violating panel
borders and using borderless stuff more often.  However, it's still not all
that good, and leaves out bits here and there.  Very mildly recommended.
$7.99.
     DNAgents vol 1: About Comics - Black and white reproductions of the
first six issues of the original DNAgents comic.  And while at one point I
had a pretty impressive collection of DNAgents (before the Great Purge of
2000), these are all issues I'd never read.  These are pretty solid 80s
superhero stories, although the art is pretty 'teasecake' to coin a term.
But, as the starting point of one of Mark Evanier's biggest projects, it's
certainly worth checking out.  Recommended.  $9.95
     Marshal Law: The Day of the Dead: Titan Books - This is actually an
illustrated novella (to use the term from an old Firestorm Annual), a text
story with accompanying splash page art (and excerpts from the splash pages
in the chapter headers).  It's also a sideways book, as if it were a comic
strip compilation.  Now, given the large amount of text and the height of my
stack this week already, I have only skimmed this so far.  I have to say,
Mills's prose is pretty turgid in places, and I kinda wonder if the art was
done first, then Mills figured out a story to stitch it together.  Only
recommended for Marshal Law completists.  $16.95/#10.99UK
     (In case anyone's been adding up numbers to see where the ninety dollars
mentioned went, I also got Aberrant D20 and have a 20% discount.  And yay,
I'm still in the credits for the D20 version!  I wrote the second column of
page 18...hey, a credit is a credit.)

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!)

     None for this week's stuff. 

Awards:

Best Book: Captain America and Falcon #5

"Awfully Perceptive Nanites" Award to Alpha Flight v3 #5

"Ar Ar Ar!  Earth Humor!" Award to eXiles #49

"Okay, He Could Have...And He Used MACHINES To...LOOOOOOOSER!" Award to 
     Fantastic Four #515

"I Really Hope Jessica Is Partially Invulnerable" Award to Captain America
     and Falcon #5

"I Think Those Teaching Machines Had A Bug In 'Em" Award to Supreme Power #11

"Wait, When Did He Call Himself Myrmidon?" Award to Official Handbook of the
     Marvel Universe: Avengers 2004

"Dude, BULLOCK Defeated That Guy Once.  Sorta." Award to Justice League
     Adventures #33

"A Blossoming Relationship" Award to Tom Strong #27

"It's The Little Things That Matter" Award to Transformers: Micromasters
     #1 (of 4)

"An All-Consuming Passion" Award to Transformers G1 v3 #6

"eXiles Meets Transformers?" Award to Transformers Energon #25

"Just Love Transferring Those Energon Stars, Eh?" Award to Transformers
     Energon CineManga: The Ultimate Betrayal

"Excuse Me While I Take A Shower" Award to DNAgents vol 1

"Loose Zips Sink Ships" Award to Marshal Law: The Day of the Dead

   "Omoro -- are the chains really necessary?" "The boy has the strength of 10 men and a penchant for destroying fine antiques. That would be a 'yes.'" - Captain America, Omoro, in CA&F #5

Comments

CA&F Award

[zqadams.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, the lovely and dangerous Jessica is in fact quite tough. :) I know you aren't exactly a Bendisoid, but since you enjoy Pulse the Alias hardcovers are strongly recommended. (Heck, if the first half of Avengers 500 is any indication, by the end of Disassembled *I* may no longer be a Bendisoid. For some reason their appearance in the OHTTMU has gotten me frightened that Quasar and Quicksilver may meet grisly fates, given that the X-Men edition only listed characters important to the first couple issues of Reload)

Addendum

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Read the Marshal Law book. The pacing is awful and the prose is at the low end of what I see on rec.arts.comics.creative. Mills should definitely stick to comicbook scripting.