New comics

Fables 159

Still a lot of setup, but Tinkerbell flexing her power (against her will) spices things up a bit.

Love Everlasting 9

This arc is lasting a lot longer than I would have imagined.  Joan’s been trapped in this life for a number of issues now, and I’m just waiting for something new to happen.  

Fantastic Four 9

Ryan North tries to make Alicia Masters useful in a combat situation, and it doesn’t really work, despite a valiant effort.  Last month I said this would be the last issue if it wasn’t good.  I’ll probably flip through the next issue in the store and decide from there.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold 2

Geez, the Tom King Joker story.  It’s amazing, what a difference inserting morbid jokes into the flow makes in ratcheting up the dark tension of the whole thing.  This is an amazingly gripping tale.  All the other stories are meh.

Captain Marvel 45-50

So I know I quit with issue 44, but when I heard that 50 was the last one, the completionist in me was compelled to finish out the run.  That was…kind of a mistake.  The Revenge of the Brood arc is really a weak note for Kelly Thompson to end on, and she’s really not helped by Sergio Davila’s art.  (If only fill in artist Javier Pina were the regular one.)  Thompson makes Binary’s death to be this massively traumatic event, but she failed to make Binary a compelling enough character to sell the tragedy.  (See her work with Natasha’s son in Black Widow for a successful example.)  As a result, it’s hard to take Carol’s crisis of confidence that seriously.

Still, this was overall an impressive 50-issue run by Thompson.  Kudos to her and the rest of the creative team.