Comics, comics, COMICS!

I'll confess something. The whole reviewing what you read thing? Not new to me. I belong to a coouple of comic book message boards, and one thing we love to do is post what we thought about what we bought every week. With three months plus of backlog to work through, I thought it might be neat to post my catch-up efforts. Enjoy.

As you may know, I’ve been out of the country for the past few months away from my precious comics. My even more precious comic shop held my regular issues for me until I got back, which happened last week. I’ve had a lot of thoughts after all of my boughts, and now it’s sharing time!

Nextwave 8-10: It’s better to burn out than to fade away, so I suppose it’s a good thing these issues have so much fire in them. This book looks like it’d be the best book ever to work on.

Astonishing X-Men 17-18: It’s weird, I really did not care for Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men while it was going on, and looking back I still don’t like it. Here’s Whedon bringing back all these elements from that run I don’t like and I’m loving what he’s doing with it. It’s flashy and tense but it does all this by getting into the main players, which I never got from Morrison. Also, Cassaday is a living legend.

Ultimate X-Men 75: Last issue I’ll get of this. I love Robert Kirkman, but I’m just not feeling it here. It’s just really dry, like he’s afraid to do what he does with these characters.

Invincible 35-37: Now here, Kirkman has fun. He does stuff he wants to see and it works great. I wonder if he might be more comfortable in the 616 Marvel U. He can work with long-arcing continuity and turn it into something new and interesting and fun – he does that best when it’s his long-arcing continuity but he can do it well when it’s not. He’s alternatively vilified heroes and redeemed villains in this arc, sometimes going back and forth in the same issue. It’s wild, it’s fast, and it’s fun to read. Invincible Universe A-K is a neat little appendix, it’s one more thing that makes the book seem much bigger in scope than it really is.

Ultimates v2 12: It’s like interrogating red-hot heroin into your eyes made of action comics.

PS 238 18-19: The Comic Code hindered comics in a lot of ways, but it also made some genius moves possible; this is a book that would have shone in that environment. It’s primary audience is younger readers, but it’s written so smart that just about anyone could enjoy it. Every story about young superhumans in school would do well to try emulating this. The big story arc is about the school bully discovering he’s also a teleporter.

Birds of Prey 98-99: The band breaks up and a new Batgirl quits. Issue 100 coming up means something big’s on its way, it’s looking like it’ll be a big start versus a big death.

Ex Machina 24-25: Wraps up the Smoke story and a one-shot about Bradbury, both heavy. This isn’t a book for the casual reader, it’s not a fun book. It’s like the New Yorker of comics, kind of. It feels a bit pretentious writing that out, but yeah, that’s how it feels. I like it.

New Avengers 24-26: Sentry’s got some confidence issues, Tony Stark has major personal interaction issues, and Hawkeye… I don’t think they’ve got names for the stuff going on in his head. I love Bendis’ philosophy on artists through all this, each gives as much characterization into the lead people as he does with the stories. I liked how in the Sentry story one of the recurring lines was “Black Bolt has spoken” – that seemed so odd and poignant to me.

Daredevil 89-90: “Please… no… your French, it is poison to my ears… no more…” Brilliance. Pure brilliance.

Queen & Country 31: I’m thinking Chase is going to go psycho. I don’t think I’ll be picking this up any more, at least not until I read the novels. It’s one thing to have story in an annual issue you might not read in a subscription, but story in a whole other medium’s asking a lot of your readers, IMHO.

She-Hulk 12-14: Thanos’ contribution to the trial was amazing, I loved it. I realize this is She-Hulk’s book, but I’m going to miss everyone from the firm – they’re as much a fixture of the book as she is at this point.

True Story Swear to God 1-2: Beautiful work on all fronts. It’s so surreal reading about how he doesn’t want to print his first book; we know he eventually does but it seems that outcome is so far away. It’s great stuff.

Walking Dead 31-33: Most people say it’s decompression when you see every single moment of a sequence that doesn’t necessarily need it all. So many times in stories past we’ve seen the angry victim in a room with the torturer and the next bit you see the torturer is ripped apart, so we’re almost programmed to think that we’re not entitled to seeing the torturer’s comeuppance. I wouldn’t call Issue 33 decompression.

Fables 54-56: Three issues, three stories, three different doses of awesome.

Runaways 20-22: End of an era begins here. Mike Norton did a great art job for his run, but nothing has the feel that Alphona brings to the book. I loved Molly’s reaction to caffeine, and her talk with Xavin isn’t done by a long shot I hope.

Ultimate Spider-Man 100-103: I really don’t know how I feel about what Peter’s gone through. Doc Ock has done a great job of completely trashing his life, and while I know so long as either Spider-Man or Peter exists they both do, part of what makes Spider-Man great is that he has Peter’s more mundane life to fall back on as an anchor. Without that, I don’t see the book having the same charm it’s had. I hope I’m proven wrong eventually, but there we are. I’m going to hold out on my views regarding Doc Ock’s revised powerset until I see more of it – I don’t want Peter’s nemesis to be a poor man’s Magneto.

Y the Mast Man 50-52: Holy effing Christ! At first I was freaking that Yorick wasn’t the last man anymore, but then Yorick goes into his soliloquy on how the mad scientist hasn’t been a real man his whole life basically. Shows how much he’s changed, if you ask me. Paris is going to be fun from the looks of things, depending on how many of Yorick’s ladies find each other in the same room.

Eternals 4-5: The thing that stands out to me in these two issues is the range. On the one hand, you’ve got a mountain-sized intergalactic god-figure coming out of the earth with a Cthulu-style wake-up call that will plunge humanity into a never-ending darkness, and on the other hand you’ve got a little boy trying to go to the bathroom in a strange woman’s house. I don’t know how they made the transition between the two work so well so fast, but they did it.

Powers 20-21: Is it ironic that the big hero in this arc so far is Steve Jobs, or is that just me? I like seeing Deena being what we thought she was (a good cop) and not what she’s in danger of becoming (a sociopath) even though this isn’t going to be resolved any time soon I bet.

How many reading days 'til Xmas??

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, but unlike before this is reading I can't really enjoy, on any scale really. I've been pouring over various government forms to get more money.

One set of forms is a loan application that really, REALLY should have been over and done with by now. For one, I already did them with the help of my dad. It should be cut and dry, except they changed the procedure so that when you're a grad student, you have to fill them out yourself. I can understand the logic behind this - if you're old and smart enough to get into grad school, you don't need your parents to fill out your forms, and they want to hear it from the guy or gal they're actually giving the money to. Fine. My understanding wavers, though, when they make you fill out the same forms as the undergrads, so in every section there's a spot for parent and a spot for student; the difference between undergrad and postgrad applications is pretty much you have to fill out the forms as if you were your own parent. People, I am not the product of incest, but apparently Sallie Mae won't give me any more money unless I put on the overalls, stick that blade of hay in my pseudo-redneck teeth, and proclaim to the lords of beaurocracy that I am my own father. If they didn't say their offices were in Florida, I'd swear they were Kentucky folk getting their red-taped vengeance.

The other set of forms was a customs rebate form. When my laptop was shipped over, Customs charged 200 pounds in VAT. This is bullshit, but since that argument won't holdup in court I have to fill out forms. I don't mean to alarm anyone but I don't think these have ever been actually read before by human eyes. It asks you to fill in EPO numbers but doesn't tell you what an EPO number is, where you might find yours, who could tell you any of this information, or on what mountain this Form Guru sits. It asks for your name and your representative's name with no indiction of who should represent you - does the man who represents himself for Customs have a fool for an importer? I spent about half an hour online trying to track down all of these terms and abbreviations and it's contributed to my exhaustion right now (it's 2:30pm, I should not be this tired).

I realize I've been a bit casual in my tone with this entry into my reading blog, and maybe this isn't the place for such rants. I say that the purpose of this blog is to document our comprehension of text, and these forms may have been the most difficult pieces of text to comprehend I've ever encountered. Did I succeed in understanding the beaurocrats' message? Was I able tomake my ideas clear to them in a way they, in turn, will understand? I'll let you know when the checks clear.