New comics

New comics!

Rare Flavours 2

A really slow first half for the issue, but things pick up in the tail end.  Not sure where this is going, but I’m still in.

Nightwing 108

Good clean adventuring from Tom Taylor.  Is Bruno Redondo never coming back?

Batman: Off-World 1

Picked this up because Jason Aaron’s usually worth a try.  This is off to an awesome start.  An early-in-his-career Batman goes into space so that he can train to be a better fighter by getting the crap kicked out of him by slaver aliens.  This doesn’t work without stellar execution, and Aaron pulls it off flawlessly with Doug Mahnke.  Goes on the pull list.

Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong 1-2

The concept is too bonkers to not try out.  Brian Buccellato grounds it by setting this crazy showdown right before Clark’s proposal to Lois.  Dude can’t catch a break.  

Animal Pound 0

Tom King attempts to equal George Orwell’s masterpiece with an adaptation updated for today’s political climate.  He literally says that he’s shooting for “masterpiece” here.  A tall order and a little pretentious, but I wouldn’t put it past him.  

Fantastic Four 13

Human Doctor Doom and T-Rex Doctor Doom team up to rule the world.  They would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for their inevitable betrayal of each other.  Super obvious, but still super fun.

Superman 8

That’s it for me, I’m done with this title.  The Chained is a stupendously boring villain, and even the prospect of Bruno Redondo coming on as artist isn’t enough for me.  Maybe I’ll check it out on the shelf.  

Penguin 3

Having recruited The Help, Penguin moves on to finding a goon squad, focusing his attention on the former member of the Force of July.  I’ve never heard of them, but I assume they’re a C-list team from the past.  It’s a nice standalone issue.  Tom King’s doing the slow burn thing again, and he’s doing it nicely.

Marvels

Marvels

I hate how my expectations and excitement for a new Marvel movie have been so drastically reduced in the last couple of years.  In any case, Marvels was fine, definitely middle tier.  Let’s break it down:

What I liked:

• Iman Vellani.  She nailed it in Ms Marvel, she nails it here.  Her enthusiasm and love for the role shines through in her performance, and she makes Kamala Khan someone I want to keep seeing more of in the MCU.

• Kamala’s family.  Love seeing Mohan Kapur, Zenobia Shroff, and Saagar Shaikh as the dad, mom, and brother.  They ground the whole film in a loving, hilarious way.

• Kate Bishop is back!  Can’t wait to see them together in a film.  

• Amusing use of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• The musical scene.  I’m not sure if I liked it, but I love that director Nia DaCosta went for it.  Same with the cat escape scene.  It didn’t completely work for me, but I appreciate the effort to do something different.

• The training montage and camaraderie between the three protagonists was nicely done.

• The body switching made for some fun fight scenes.  

• Always good to see Tessa Thompson.  I’m entirely convinced that Valkyrie and Carol Danvers have hooked up in the past.  

What I didn’t like:

• Dar-Benn is the next in a long line of lame, forgettable MCU villains.  Zawe Ashton doesn’t help with a flat, nuance-less performance.  And it’s not a good sign when the whole plot of using the jump gates to suck up planetary resources is a straight up copy of Mega Maid from Spaceballs.  

• Plot holes left and right.  Why couldn’t Dar-Benn use both bangles, while Kamala had no problem?  Why wasn’t Kamala wearing both bangles in the epilogue?  Many more, but I don’t care enough to list them out.

• Brie Larson isn’t bad as Carol Danvers, but my comments from the first movie still stand.

• I would have loved the X-Men stinger if it didn’t feel like the payoff isn’t at least five years away.  

Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as Quantumania.  

Regret watching: No

Would watch again: Yes

Would buy on DVD: No

Rating: Nice

1. Avengers: Endgame

2. Captain America: Civil War

3. Captain America: Winter Soldier

4. Spider-Man: No Way Home

5. Avengers: Infinity War

6. Shang-Chi

7. Ant Man/Wasp

8. Avengers

9. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

10. Captain America: First Avenger

11. Spider-Man: Homecoming

12. Avengers: Age of Ultron

13. Thor: Love and Thunder

14. Black Panther

15. Thor: Ragnarok

16. Iron Man 2

17. Iron Man 1

18. Ant-Man

19. Marvels

20. Captain Marvel

21. Black Widow

22. Iron Man 3

23. Doctor Strange

24. Spider-Man: Far From Home

25. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

26. Guardians 3

27. Guardians 1

28. Guardians 2

29. Eternals

30. Thor

31. Thor 2

32. Hulk

33. Ant-Man/Wasp: Quantumania

New comics

I’ve noticed a definite decrease in my enthusiasm for reading comics in the last few months.  It might be because I’m reading them far less frequently; for the last five years, I’ve been reading them every day.  Before that, I’d read new comics at least once a week for about fifteen years. 

Now, I’m not able to get to the LCS on a regular basis, so I’m not feeding the habit nearly as frequently anymore.  It makes me sad, and I’m wondering if I should do something about it.

Anyway, new comics!

March 1-3

The many-award winning graphic novel by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell.  I couldn’t turn down the six dollar price tag at the library book sale.

There’s really nothing new here that I didn’t know before, but I applaud the endeavor to share this vital part of American history in one of my favorite mediums.  It’s not a fun read by any estimation, but it’s a worthy one.  

Avengers 6-7

This title is definitely running out of steam after a rousing start.  The fights are fine, but this is far from the most interesting of Avengers lineups, and the villains are way too cookie cutter to keep me engaged.  This might get another arc to prove itself.

Transformers 2

Daniel Warren Johnson’s art continues to be wonderful; His depiction of Starscream versus some fighter jets is excellent in its brutal one-sidedness.  I’ll probably stick around for as long as Johnson does.  

Birds of Prey 3

Kelly Thompson continues to impress with this girl group.  She nails Harley’s voice.  The battle between Green Arrow and Wonder Woman is super fun.  The art and colors by Leonardo Romero and Jordie Bellaire are super evocative of a past age of comics. 

Superman 7

I run so hot and cold on this title.  Things are definitely cold right now.  This new villain (The Chained) interests me zero.  It doesn’t help that Jamal Campbell didn’t draw this issue.  (It’s a jam session because this is issue 850 with legacy numbering.)  Once again, this is on probation for me.  A couple of months at best to convince me not to drop it.

Nightwing 107

Dick Grayson goes full pirate (read: open shirt, revealing plenty of chest).  I’m so in, this is hilariously awesome.  

Who can blame her?

Fables 160

Sigh.  I wished I cared about this title as much as I used to.  Just playing out the string.

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees 1

An iFanboy recommendation.  Elevator pitch: There’s a community of anthropomorphic animals.  One of them is a serial killer, living amongst them in secret.  What happens when another serial killer shows up?  

I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out.  Patrick Horvath kills it with an excellent first issue.

House of M 1-8

Got this cheap at a sale.  It’s not the best or worst of Elseworlds stories.  (Brian Michael Bendis has really done a bunch of these over his career…)  The highlight, of course, is the infamous, “No more mutants.”  Overlooked, I think, is the emotional fallout of having your deepest wishes fulfilled and then cruelly ripped away.  Spidey’s reaction is completely human, and I would have like to see some followup on it.  It’s like when Buffy died, went to heaven, and was then pulled back to the hell that is Earth.  How do you go on after something like that?

WW 2.2, Roaming

WW 2.2 1-7

I randomly found these issues online, translated from their original French.  Ideated by writer David Chauvel, these comics posit a reality where Hitler is assassinated in 1939, right at the beginning of WW2, before Paris falls to the German blitzkrieg.  It makes for a great counterfactual, and it leads to some intriguing scenarios: Germany allies with the Russians, and the Japanese join forces with the Americans.  The new Axis successfully invades the UK and drops an atomic bomb on Paris.  Lots of interesting stuff.

Unfortunately, I find the straightforward facts a lot more interesting than the person-level tales that the creative teams tell here.  I’d like a history book telling all of the events, rather than the slice-of-war stories that I get here.  It’s the same thing as Chuck Dixon’s Storming Paradise.

Roaming

The other Mariko Tamaki graphic novel I borrowed from the library.  Am I just ruined for high school/college romances?  I can’t remember the last one I really moved by.  And I want to be emotionally touched by them.  It also is looking more and more like Tamaki peaked with Supergirl: Being Super, at least for me.

Library comics

Stuff I borrowed from the library

Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier

Word for word.

Hidden Systems

Dan Nott does an amazing job describing various infrastructure systems that I’ve never thought about - water, electricity, and the internet.  He breaks them down in just the right amount of detail, and I learned a bunch.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me

I was in the mood to read some more Mariko Tamaki after thinking about her work on Supergirl: Being Super.  This was available at the library, and it won three Eisners in 2019.  

It’s not bad, but it’s the latest in a line of “relationship comics that I probably would have loved if I were younger and more depressed about the state of my love life.”