Books of the Week: Top Ten of March 1


It was a huge week for comics Wednesday, and it didn’t feel right choosing only one Book of the Week when I bought over two dozen. So here’s my top ten of the week, in no particular order.

Ultimates 2 10Ultimates 2 #10: Damn, I had forgotten that the Ultimates were so badass! Obviously, that was intentional on Mark Millar’s part. The Ultimates didn’t do a whole lot of fighting in their second “season,” except for amongst themselves of course. They paid for it last issue when a group of Super-Terrorist stole America. I can’t remember a “just when you thought they were beat” issue quite as good as this one was. Tony Stark has a gun to his head and manages to take out Black Widow via the nanobots he implanted into her so she could control the Iron Maiden suit (and a nicely placed bottle champagne). Hawkeye is strapped to a chair and takes out everyone in the room with his fingernails (!), then takes out a dozen gaurds with automatic rifles pointed at his head when he’s not even holding a gun yet. I don’t think there’s anyone that didn’t see the “I released Cap from that machine five minutes ago” moment from a mile away, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a chill up my spine reading the last page. However, the question remains: how are Hawkeye, Iron Man, Captain America and the Wasp going to take out the Ultimate Masters of Evil?

Green Lantern Corps: Recharge #5: Guy Gardner leading the entire Corps in the Green Lantern oath, in a two-page spread no less, is more than enough to justify this book being in the top ten.

Marvel Zombies # 4: Only Robert Kirkman could make me think “Awesome! It’s Forge!”

Infinite Crisis 5Infinite Crisis #5: Not as good as issue 4, but what can you expect? The Supermen fight, particularly the Action Comics #1 homage, was very cool. The idea that the fate of the DC Universe rests in the hands of Nightwing and Superboy, the “offspring” of Batman, Superman and Lex Luthor, has me very excited.

Adventures of Superman #649: The “This Is Your Life” arc helped the Kal-L/Kal-El battle in Infinite Crisis #5 quite a bit. A fight that epic deserves to take up a lot of pages, and IC just couldn’t provide them with so much going on. I like that the battle was just as much mental as it was physical, and both Supermen coming to the realization that they were helpless to change what had happened in both Crises was a better ending than either one of them winning.

X-Factor 4X-Factor #4: Peter David’s writing, especially his dialogue, is great. Of the three issues he wrote this week (this, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Fallen Angel), X-Factor was the best. Peter David manages to even make a character that was nothing more than a plot device in House of M (Layla Miller) into an intriguing member of the cast. Series regular artist Ryan Sook is great, but for whatever reason he hasn’t been able to complete a full issue since #1. My favorite monet of the book, and possibly the week, is when Siryn gets in an argument with a police officer. She tells hit to leave, and he asks “And if we refuse? Then what?” Siryn’s response? “I’ll scream.” The next page, on the right, speaks for itself.

Nextwave #2: It’s still to soon to tell if the humor in Nextwave is going to flourish like it did with She-Hulk or fall flat like it did with Defenders, but this issue was a hoot. It’s essentially the Formely Known As… formula (C-list heroes team up and trade witty banter) with two notable differences: 1) the characters have no history together, and 2) they’re actually capable as superheroes. The latter is the reason I think Defenders didn’t work very well. Hopefully the same doesn’t happen with Nextwave.

MTU 18Marvel Team-Up #18: The standard “go to the future to stop the time-travelling villain before he can travel back in time” story with a very cool twists ending. The Legion of Losers manages to stop the bad guy, but if they go back to their normal time they’ll either end up in the world they traveled from (where the bad guy killed nearly every hero and took over the Earth) or an Earth where they already exist (because they were able to prevent the bad guy from going back in time in the first place). So they saved the world, but they’re stuck in the dystopian future they travelled to because of it.

Outsiders #34: The best of the One Year Later batch. The majority of the book is Thunder undercover inside the inner circle of a violent dictatorship in Mali. Thunder blows her cover and forces the rest of the Outsiders out of hiding: Nightwing (yes, it’s Dick), Grace, Katana, Metamorpho (not Shift, mind you), and Captain Boomerang. And to top it all off, we learn that the world thinks they’re all dead. More than any other OYL book, Outsiders really gave the impression that some major stuff went down that year we missed.

Now if you were counting along, you may have noticed that was just nine books. The tenth will come a little later, in it’s own Book of the Week spotlight.