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Post by Anders on Jan 24, 2009 12:53:08 GMT -8
Invincible #58: The best issue in quite a while, but not great. It convinced me not to drop the book quite yet, but it's on probation.
B.P.R.D. The Black Goddess #1: Anything with Lobster Johnson is good, so I like.
I'm also rereading some Doonesbury collections from late the 1990s, early 2000s. Not as good as the earlier stuff, and it's a bit depressing considering the past eight years.
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Post by K-Box on Jan 24, 2009 13:01:40 GMT -8
Thank you for starting this thread, if only to counteract my negativity.  |
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Post by paulpogue on Jan 24, 2009 13:08:26 GMT -8
I'm trying to focus on mainstream comics that are actually good, in order to focus on positivity rather than how much Spidey sucks these days. (About the only Spidey I read now is the sales figures and whatever shows up on Scans Daily.)
Catching up on Fraction's X-Men stuff. He's had some of the more fun takes on Dark Reign, and to be honest, no writer since Morrison has really made any serious efforts to get into Emma Frost's head, and Fraction really gets her. Uncanny Annual #2 was a really nice take on the kinkiness that pervades pretty much everything Emma does. Cyclops probably gave up the "dressing up as Jean Gray" games long ago and convinced her to start playing "Evil lingerie-clad White Queen has the leader of the X-Men at her mercy in the torture chamber" in the bedroom. If he's got any sense at all, that is.
Oddly, I'm finding Warren Ellis' Astonishing X-Men run quite boring and I'm probably going to give it up if the next issue doesn't really grab me.
Green Lantern: Johns is doing a really good job with his not-quite-redemption of Sinestro. He's basically been writing Sinestro exactly the way Tony Stark was written the last couple of years, as an ends-justifies-the-means futurist, except with the clear understanding that choosing that route makes you the BAD GUY, even if you're serving the greater good. Honestly, Geoff Johns is kicking butt all over the place lately, which is surprising given how much I disliked "Infinite Crisis." He even rocked on his Smallville episode.
Dark Avengers #1: The "Dark Reign" status quo intrigues me enough I had to check this out. Probably not going to follow it very long. It's full of Bendisisms through and through and little actual storytelling. Bringing me to ...
Mighty Avengers 21: Sometimes I think there are two Dan Slotts and one of them was brainwashed to write Spidey, because I thought this was really good. As with Dark Avengers, there's a lot of setup and not a lot of action, but it just draws me in a little better. At least everyone doesn't talk in the exact same voice. And Mighty Avengers, at its core, is about fucking HEROISM and GETTING PAST THE BS, which is a hell of a lot better than a series that seems to want to glorify giving Dick Cheney his own Iron Man armor.
Plus, Amadeus Cho. Gotta love him, especially when he of the Boy Ego convincingly talks Hank Pym out of his own ego slump. Slott just might "get" Pym in a way a lot of other writers never quite did. He's still always going to be defined by a not-very-well-thought-out Jim Shooter story from 1981, but the Slott take on him looks to be somewhat healthier than any writer has approached Hank with since Roy Thomas' West Coast Avengers.
X-Force: This isn't a "this week" sort of thing so much as a "I haven't gotten around to mentioning it online yet" sort of thing, but I have to love how the harrrdkore grim-n-gritty X-book, so pleased with its own violence that it specializes in blood-soaked alternate covers, is actually turning into Old Home Week. Hell, "Legacy" is the official Old Home book, and it STILL doesn't revel in the old continuity half as much as X-Force does. Cameron Hodge? The Right, complete with smiley-face armor? The Magus? Donald Pierce? HRIMHARI THE WOLF LORD? Seriously, is there ANY supporting character in this book that was introduced post-1995? So naturally, I'm loving it.
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Post by jessebaker on Jan 24, 2009 13:42:37 GMT -8
Uncanny X-Men Annual #2 was pure, unrepentant garbage. Serious garbage, with so many BLATANT continuity errors, it was worthless.
Let's count the ways Matt Fraction fucked up:
Selene, the Black Queen being written like she was Tessa/Sage, Sebastian Shaw's subserviant Jane Hathaway-esque telepathic personal assistant.
A timeline that proclaims that Norman Osborn, when he was supposed to be dead, was running around at Hellfire Club parties alongside Tony fucking Stark, and starting fights that ended with him being telepathically forced to leave because he accidentally bumped into Norman?
Let alone the whole notion that now we are supposed to think Emma never, EVER knew that the Hellfire Club had their own army of pet Sentinels, even though she herself used them when she embarked on her "let's swap bodies with Storm" scheme a couple of decades back?
Also, I'm kind of pissed that Fraction's not having Emma respond to Scott's new "blood and gore, fuck yeah!" attitude of failed leadership by moving towards more traditional super-hero leadership standards. Or alternatively, having Emma take the velvet glove approach to villain while Scott's inanely is sending X-Force to kill anyone who was ever mean to him via cutting a deal with Sebastian to get him to help her undermine Norman/help the X-Men build up their defenses for the inevitable day Norman goes after them. If they are going the route of Emma and Scott not trusting each other, they might as well go all out and make Emma the good guy in the situation complete with positioning her into the role of "voice of reason and morals" of the pair.
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Post by Anders on Jan 24, 2009 14:45:30 GMT -8
Thank you for starting this thread, if only to counteract my negativity. I try. |
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jan 24, 2009 17:23:05 GMT -8
Haven't had much time to read recently, but...welll....  Thank you, and good night. Michael |
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Post by paulpogue on Jan 24, 2009 17:28:41 GMT -8
Uncanny X-Men Annual #2 was pure, unrepentant garbage. Serious garbage, with so many BLATANT continuity errors, it was worthless. Let's count the ways Matt Fraction fucked up: Selene, the Black Queen being written like she was Tessa/Sage, Sebastian Shaw's subserviant Jane Hathaway-esque telepathic personal assistant. A timeline that proclaims that Norman Osborn, when he was supposed to be dead, was running around at Hellfire Club parties alongside Tony fucking Stark, and starting fights that ended with him being telepathically forced to leave because he accidentally bumped into Norman? Let alone the whole notion that now we are supposed to think Emma never, EVER knew that the Hellfire Club had their own army of pet Sentinels, even though she herself used them when she embarked on her "let's swap bodies with Storm" scheme a couple of decades back? I don't think the timeline is as screwed up as you think. The only definite time marker in the entire thing is that it takes place sometime after Shaw's assumption of power with no Black King, and the only thing we know about that is it happened "some period of time prior to X-Men 129." Given the Marvel sliding timeline, probably only a matter of months -- a couple of years, tops -- passed between the death of the Green Goblin and the Dark Phoenix Saga. And when the Hellfire Club first appeared, it was pretty clear that Shaw and company had been at this for some time. Classic X-Men messes this up a little bit by backengineering Stephen Lang's Sentinels into the Hellfire Club origin, and they first appeared in 1975, but it still presents, at best, a minor glitch, and one that can still be explained by the sliding timeline. It's not like X-Men and Spider-Man continuity were being closely matched up at the time. Selene acting like a doormat can be explained by two things: Firstly, she always tended to hold back and play "silent and haughty" unless it suited her, and secondly, this story isn't ABOUT her. The only reason she appears at all is because it would be odd for the Sebastian Shaw of that era to be appearing at a public Hellfire ball with Emma on one arm and Selene not on the other. Plus, this story is set well before any original on-panel Emma Frost story, so the fact that she's surprised by the Sentinels isn't out of character. Even if she came to using them later, this is her first encounter with Shaw's Sentinels. Recall that Shaw didn't let ANYONE in on the fact that he was engineering the attack on the Hellfire Club with Stephen Lang -- as far as Emma knows, these are the same robots that tried to kill her and all her comrades earlier. |
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Post by jessebaker on Jan 24, 2009 22:00:49 GMT -8
Your defense only serves to further prove my point about the issue being shit because of the MASSIVE continuity errors.
One, unless Claremont has it set in stone that NO ONE can touch or even REFERENCE Tessa in an X-Man story unless he's writing it, there is no fucking excuse for Fraction passing off Selene as Tessa. Especially given the fact that Selene didn't even fucking JOIN the Hellfire Club until 1984 real-time. Also, Selene was a HUGE egotist in her own right and was such a huge fucking pain in Sebastian Shaw's hide as far as being uppity and throwing her weight and Omega-Level mutant power around, that Shaw was constantly bowing to whatever crazy ass scheme she was coming up with, just to keep up the pretense of being on her side, since Shaw was TERRIFIED of Selene and the threat she was representing to his powerbase (which is why Shaw and Emma tried to get Firestar to kill Selene also).
If he couldn't use Tessa, he should have created a new telepath or rewritten the story so that Emma did the telepathic manipulation that the character did for Shaw.
And yeah, the timeline thing too can't be rationalized: the A-N, A-D X-Men and Spidey had met MULTIPLE times after Norman was "killed" (most notably Nightcrawler teaming up with Punisher and Spidey in Jigsaw's first appearance and several team-ups in Marvel Team-Ups) and that's not including Secret War.
(And that's not even counting Donald Pierce still being a good-standing member of the Hellfire Club. Pierce was expelled in the New Mutants Graphic Novel, which means that the story takes place BEFORE Selene was even a MEMBER of the Hellfire Club! Or the fact that the story has to take place AFTER Days of Future Past to match the plot point of Shaw having Sentinel Technology via his government contracts, which means that it's AFTER Phoenix did a tap dance in Emma's head, which puts it in between UXM #143-150, which only futher shoves us a lengthy period after Norman's "death" in terms of slidign timelines. And that not even also touching the issue of WHEN the story takes with regards to Iron Man except that it has to take place before his massive war with Stane started, meaning once again it's at the very least no laer than 1983 realtime/marveltime )
It's a shit story and FILLED with continuity errors. If Fraction wanted to do the two things he apparently wanted to do (make Shaw a prisoner of the X-Men and explain the Emma Frost/Namor connection) he could have made Namor and Emma's meeting be one that happened after the events of Emma's ongoing series (meaning they met before she joined the Hellfire Club) and based the plot of Emma capturing Shaw all by herself around Emma taking the initiative of capturing Shaw after the events of "Original Sin", as far as Xavier telling Emma about Shaw's alliance with Mr Sinister/attempt to take control over Wolverine's son and capture Shaw because of that.
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jan 25, 2009 7:28:05 GMT -8
Your defense only serves to further prove my point about the issue being shit because of the MASSIVE continuity errors. One, unless Claremont has it set in stone that NO ONE can touch or even REFERENCE Tessa in an X-Man story unless he's writing it, there is no fucking excuse for Fraction passing off Selene as Tessa. Sorry Jesse, can I just ask you one quick question? You're fucking kidding, right? You expect Marvel, MARVEL COMICS, to respect anything akin to creators rights? No, seriously, at this point I actually have to ask if you, or anyone who thinks like you, has been paying any attention to how Marvel has behaved EVER. If Marvel figured that they could tell a "kewl"* story that would sell**, that say, Fat Cobra from the Brubaker/Fraction Iron Fist title being a necrophiliac cannibal, do you think that Brubaker or Fraction could do a damn thing about it? No, they'd be told to shut up and collect the paycheck. Marvel does not give a shit what any writer/creator would think about it, no matter how hard they protest. In fact, that might be the one silver lining about the consistency of Marvel, because when the current regime is cut to ribbons, the next group might just decide to completely crap on the current "cool crowd". We might see the Sentry thrown into a woodchipper, or Jessica Jones become a meth-head, and then listen to those creators have to cry about it. Well, not that there are many writers dumb enough to make "new characters" for Marvel anymore. Most people with an IQ above room temperature have realized what a loser game that is. But please, don't ever complain about Marvel (or DC for that matter) crapping on a character or not writing them the way the person who created them would. That falls on fucking deaf ears. *By the standards of whoever is running Marvel Editorial at the time **By the pathetic standards of the "direct market" which matters less and less with each passing week. |
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jan 25, 2009 7:40:52 GMT -8
OK, to make up for my previous negative post, because Anders is trying to do something I agree with.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time, so I'm just going to do a few bullets on some comics I've been reading that are good:
1) Zorro - Wagner has just finished what amounts to "Zorro Begins" with probably the most detailed origin ever (now, granted, a good chunk was borrowed from the recent Zorro novel, but hey, there are worse places to go from). It's a good solid classic adventure story, and each individual chapter adds a little not only to the Zorro legend, but is a fun adventure in its own right (Secret Societies! Native American Spirit Walks! PIRATES!). It's good pulpy fun.
2) Farscape - It doesn't quite have the punch and immediacy it does on screen, and O'Bannon hasn't quite mastered comic scripting vs. TV scripting, but the plot is a worthy one for Farscape and does a good job of continuing the story Post-"Peacekeeper Wars". And well, you saw the poster above, right?
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jan 25, 2009 8:17:43 GMT -8
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Post by jensaltmann on Jan 25, 2009 8:56:51 GMT -8
One, unless Claremont has it set in stone that NO ONE can touch or even REFERENCE Tessa in an X-Man story unless he's writing it, there is no fucking excuse for Fraction passing off Selene as Tessa. Sorry Jesse, can I just ask you one quick question? You're fucking kidding, right? You expect Marvel, MARVEL COMICS, to respect anything akin to creators rights? Actually, you might want to ask Tony Lee about his pitch for a Sage series at Marvel. Everyone except for Jesse knows about Marvel and DC's record in regards to creator rights, but... as I said, ask Tony. |
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Post by michaelpaciocco on Jan 25, 2009 9:21:45 GMT -8
Sorry Jesse, can I just ask you one quick question? You're fucking kidding, right? You expect Marvel, MARVEL COMICS, to respect anything akin to creators rights? Actually, you might want to ask Tony Lee about his pitch for a Sage series at Marvel. Everyone except for Jesse knows about Marvel and DC's record in regards to creator rights, but... as I said, ask Tony. You'll have to fill me in on this one. I can't keep up with 9th-tier X-characters, or what creators have wanted with them. Edited to Add: On second thought, I'm not sure I care, and it's taking away from time better spent dealing with comics that are good and enjoyable. So, you know, don't worry about it. |
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Post by lostphrack on Jan 27, 2009 1:59:01 GMT -8
Ruins!
That was it, unless you want to inclued Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vol. 7.
Ruins was great fun though, shame I missed it the first time around, and shame that the original art team got divorced forcing a not as good art team to take over halfway through the second half. Still, good fun. Well, maybe not good fun. It was pitch black humor, but it made me laugh so hey.
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Post by Anders on Feb 2, 2009 10:24:00 GMT -8
Angel: After the Fall #16: It's been an okay series, but no better than that. The art has ranged from decent to atrocious - I've been unable to identify many of the characters until someone used their name - and the dialogue has for the most part been so-so. But it's been an interesting read.
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