FIRST POST!!!!!!11!!!! - Reviews for books from 5/14

Well, I suppose that SOMEONE is going to have to start this, and silences have always made me twitchy. So it might as well be me.

Let’s start with DC.

Green Lantern Corps #24 manages to take all the goodwill I have for these books, following on the terrific-ness of Sinestro Corps War, and squander it on an eleventh-hand iteration of a half-assed old Alan Moore story. Sort of like ... well, sort of like a lot of the other stuff going on in the Green Lantern books, to be honest, only without half of the panache or an eighth of the writing ability.

Batman #676, on the other hand, is the first issue where Grant Morrison’s run is starting to cohere as a whole for me, thanks in part to a dramatic improvement in the art. (And the fact that I consider Tony Daniel to be a dramatic improvement should let you know just how unreadable I find whichever Kubert it was that started this run off.)

I keep reading Booster Gold, currently on issue #9, largely because I’m convinced it’s good. There’s no actual evidence of its ostensible goodness, but I keep reading anyhow. This issue has roughly 2,000 too many words, and owes its entire existence to an uncomfortable mashing together of the Giffen/DeMatteis sitcom JLI with the Johns/Meltzer/Rucka dystopian nightmare of OMACs and Identity Crisis. It works marginally less well than that description would imply. Also, Dan Jurgens hasn’t changed his penciling style since 1989.

Batman Confidential #17, on the other hand, was a completely unexpected dose of fun. Kevin Maguire is one of the few artists who can make me buy a book I’m otherwise uninterested in (such as his otherwise TERRIBLE issue of Superman/Batman a year or so back), and this is one of the cases where the gamble pays off. Fun times in the DC Universe, which are all too rare these days.

Meanwhile, over at Marvel....

Captain Britain and MI13 #1 is one of two Secret Invasion books this week, the one I was most excited for. It’s a de facto sequel to the Wisdom MAX miniseries, and it’s ... okay, I suppose. A lot of the charm of the earlier mini is gone, in service of the awkward jihad-esque Secret Invasion plot. But Skrull John Lennon is a lead character, and that makes it worth buying no matter what. You should really get the collected edition of the earlier miniseries, though, because that was much better -- and it might lay some groundwork for this whole Invasion thing.

The other Secret Invasion book is Secret Invasion: Fantastic Four #1. It’s written by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa, which is significant because he wrote the vastly underrated Marvel Knights 4 series, and it’s nice to have him back on Marvel’s first family. This is a much more successful SI crossover than Captain Britain, fitting in well with the main limited series AND tying back in to a particularly strange bit of FF history. Worth reading.

newuniversal: Shockfront #1: because Warren Ellis likes compound words and hates proper capitalization. This is an improvement over the earlier newuniversal miniseries for two reasons: 1) The characters are no longer painfully obvious photoreferences, and 2) KICKERS INC. puts in an appearance! KICKERS INC.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elsewhere in the Warren Ellis-verse, Thunderbolts continues to be completely fabulous with issue #120.

The best book of the week, though, is Locke & Key #4, published by IDW. Joe Hill (aka Stephen King’s kid) continues to shine as a writer of modern horror comics, and Gabriel Rodriguez is a find on art. Seriously, so many of the creators who start in other media stumble when they get to comics -- too many words (see: Captain Britain) or awkward scene transitions (see: that Iron Man mini by Favreau from last week) or just a general frustration with the form (see: Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman run, among many others). Hill avoids all that, and is in the process of crafting a genuinely spectacular horror comic worthy of his father, while making tremendous use of the comic book form. You really should be reading this.

There. That wasn’t so bad for my first week out of the gate, was it? Let’s see how we hold up.....