I didn’t buy anything last week, but there was a good haul this week!

Speaking of hauling things, that leads me to Avengers #17, where Shadow Colonel has been carrying a junior version of Man-Thing on his back (and I just noticed it this issue).

I have been enjoying—but souring—on this arc as the weeks have gone by, but I am going to change my attitude. I have been feeling nostalgic for the comics arcs of my youth, when not everything was leading to or participating in some company-wide crossover. I was reminiscing just this morning actually about the Avengers stories back in the 300s or so, which are mostly forgettable and inconsequential, and really seem to only be existing for the sake of existing, and finding that incredibly charming.

Here I was, getting tired of this silly vampire story with this silly vampire characters, appearing to not really lead anywhere except for putting a new Avenger on the team, when right before my eyes, there was exactly the type of story I’d been nostalgic for!

Remember when it was such a huge deal when a cover would be teasing a new member of the team? That was such a great gimmick! I’ve been appreciating Jason Aaron’s run so far as a fun, mostly lightweight throwback—and boy is he ever hitting the bullseye. (more…)

Let’s kick this off with Uncanny X-Men #13.

I mentioned last issue that the tone here was reminding me of the Australia era, and here we find out that the X-Men are squatting in the back of a bar! This totally is the return of the Australia era!

Except they almost literally brought back the Jim Lee era, when Wolverine digs up some old uniforms from the basement that align with the Savage Land / Shadow King / X-Men #1 period. I’m not sure if this is intended to just be fun fan service or something more significant, but it felt a little cheap to me.

Other things that made me roll my eyes a bit:
Yet another discovery of a Madrox clone.
Yet another psychic shield.
Dark Beast.

There was also a misalignment in the dialogue that left me confused. Early in the issue, Cyclops presents a list of threats to identify what will be left if the X-Men cease to exist. Wolverine says “it’s a kill list,” to which Cyclops says “No, it’s not. We aren’t solving things that way. Not anymore”—a clear distancing from who he was before he died.

Then later in the issue, Cyclops and Havok are talking about what to do with their Dark Beast prisoner. Alex says “We can’t be taking prisoners anymore,” and follows up with “the way you were [referring to Cyclops], what you made the X-Men at the end. We can’t go back to that. I won’t let you.”

So I’m a little bit confused, but not like “Where is this story going?” but more like “Is there a writing or editing mistake?” (more…)

It was a pretty small pile this week, but at least enough to call for some segues.

Speaking of things flowing into each other, that leads me to Heroes in Crisis #6, where the blood from all the murdered heroes created a big ol’ mess.

When I was a kid, my dad would get claustrophobic on airplanes, so we took nearly every family vacation by car. I visited all 48 contiguous states by car by my early teens. And I tell you, when you’re driving around 20 hours or so en route to Disney World, it doesn’t matter how much fun Disney World is going to be; those hours in the middle are really boring.

And so I have no doubt that the ending to Heroes in Crisis will be delightful, but I’m getting really tired of these middle issues where nothing happens. I don’t dispute their purpose—we’re getting a lot more character moments that are filling in some of the gaps. But this issue, we get a poetic monologue from a caveman. (more…)

Now it may seem as if the streak ended, and technically it did, but I only bought one comic the week before this last one, and considering the entire gimmick of this review column is the ragged segue from one issue to another, you can’t exactly have a segue when there’s only one thing to talk about. So I saved last week’s issue for this week.

So we’ll start with last week’s lone issue, The Batman Who Laughs #3, the mini-series spin-off from Dark Knights: Metal. I have two things I really like about this series and one thing I don’t.

Good thing 1: This series is essentially Batman vs. Batman, and even though there have been a number of iterations of that over the years, I don’t really get tired of them—provided the premise is around the challenge of catching up with someone who is always one (or more) steps ahead, simply by virtue of being the same guy with all the same strengths and usually freed from some of the constraints that our Bruce imposes upon himself.

Good thing 2: Scott Snyder’s skills with setting the horror mood are perfectly suited to a story like this. Nice Batman can’t keep up, can’t keep from falling further behind, and now can’t stop himself from slipping further into the Joker’s seemingly inescapable trap. That’s bad! Scott Snyder is made for that stuff.

But the thing I don’t care for is how Snyder has turned the Joker into this weird invincible metahuman. (more…)

Let’s kick off this week’s reviews with Avengers #14, which resumes the vampire storyline that was randomly dropped in favor of the Iron Fist origin story last issue.

There’s apparently a vampire civil war going on, with a bunch of anti-Dracula vampires attacking Dracula’s castle, and Blade is in the middle of it trying to stop the anti-Dracula vampires, led by a guy called Shadow Colonel. In a scene that is basically just the “Joker gets arrested on purpose” scene from The Dark Knight, the Shadow Colonel is deliberately taken into custody by the Avengers so that he and his evil buddies can be on the inside and start causing problems with folks like Blade and Ghost Rider.

“He’s far too confident,” Black Panther says. “It would appear the Shadow Colonel wanted to be here.”

There’s something really kind of stupid about all of this, yet I find myself being uncharacteristically patient. (more…)

Starting off this week’s reviews is Heroes in Crisis #5, and we are now at the section of the mystery where you slosh through the dull middle-part, hoping something is going to happen soon. I for one was getting tired of the formula of “See-saw between Crazy Booster and Crazy Harley with testimonials from now-dead heroes littered throughout.”

While I enjoyed this issue more than I didn’t, there were a number of characterization choices that kind of caught me off-guard.

I don’t find Harley Quinn sexy, because she is a cartoon character and I’m not someone who turns to drawings of tightly clad women in comic books to satisfy my adolescent lust, and so prurient splash pages designed to show off the shape of her hips and breasts just feels beneath the level of storytelling that Tom King appears to be going for. There’s nothing wrong with sexuality in comics, of course, but this just feels like “Hey thirteen year old, need a little time to yourself?”

That said, this is the second issue in a row to go down this odd path, so maybe it’s not really “out of character” anymore. I don’t find Harley Quinn charming, because I don’t think “Kooky homicidal person” is any more interesting than it was in the 90s when those characters were a dime-a-dozen. Same reason I find Sanity to be probably the worst act in professional wrestling. And I honestly never realized that Batgirl spoke in nonsense like Harley does. So I really don’t find the Harley half of this plot at all engaging.

On the flipside, I used to enjoy Booster Gold, and I loved the Blue Beetle. But I find their arc in this story incredibly off-putting. Ted was such a conscientious character; I feel like they’re halfway there with his loyalty to Booster, but his nonchalance in the gravity of this situation just feels misaligned to what made the character endearing in the first place.

I mean look at this opening spread — it’s beautifully rendered (and I admit I didn’t see the “Heroes In Crisis” letters until zooming out to this degree) but a bunch of heroes have just been brutally murdered and the casual nature of this just feels jarring.

And the real tire-screecher in this issue was Superman’s speech. (more…)