Tuesday, July 22, 2008

BUY ZOT!

Everyone go buy Zot! right now. Seriously.

Marvel 1985 #3 continues Mark Millar's enjoyable, nostalgic look at the Marvel Universe in 1985. If the payoff is half-way decent (not like Civil War, Chosen, Wanted, Ultimates 2, later Authority...that's not promising) it may make its way to an excellent series. Surprisingly, I like the art. I'm not the biggest fan of Tommy Lee Edwards (he did the worst comic ever: Speeding Bullets), but it seems appropriate for some reason.

Mighty Avengers #16 is really well done. I had lowered expectations for it (given the last couple issues like this), but it turns out really well. Plus, Elektra is a bad ass in it AND it doesn't deliberately undo anything done by Bendis or other creators (it takes place a little after Enemy of the State, or between pages, and just before the New Avengers rescue Echo, near as I can tell).

Ultimate Fantastic Four #56 was awful: terrible art and the plot just didn't make sense. Sure, you can follow it, but it's just dumb. I don't know why I do this to myself.

X-Factor #33 is fine. It seems a stretch to call it a Secret Invasion tie-in, though, because the Skrulls are just tacked on to sell more copies and cross it over with She-Hulk. It could have been any bad guy, but Skrulls are "cool" (as in "tired and a bit annoying"), so they used them.

X-Force #5 is just kinda bat#$%^ insane. So, let's talk about X-Men.
For the first time in 15 years, I'm reading all the big X-Men books (Uncanny, Legacy, X-Force, X-Factor, Young, Astonishing, Cable). This is due to the surprisingly competent "Messiah CompleX" crossover. That crossover seemed to do a few things: first, it (along with Brubaker's previous Uncanny arcs) removed pretty much all of the terrible things that happened to the X-Men in the 90s. It solved the Bishop problem, it killed Xavier AND Cable, it turned Cyclops back into a strong authority figure, took out Sinister, et cetra. It also allowed the creative teams room to stretch by breaking down the tight continuity of the books. No longer did every book with an X have to start out at Xavier mansion: there was freedom.
Now, 6 months later, what do we have? Well, Xavier didn't die, and didn't stay brain-dead for long, Sinister may or may not be back as a chromosome, Cable's back. So really, it put Cyclops in the seat as leader (which had already happened during House of M, and was going pretty well in Astonishing) and it made Bishop a crazy SOB. But, it still shedded some terrible 90s continuity threads.
And then, there's X-Force, which seems to single-handedly be attempting to revive as many god-awful 90s characters as is possible. Archangel? Bastion? Magnus? Donald Pierce (technically Young X-Men, but he was name-checked, so he's complicit)? I guess they really just wanted to clear up all the left over continuity from "X-Cutioner's Song", but anything after that was fair game. And the art careens wildly from pretty-computer-generated pictures to god-awful renderings that make the Baby Jesus cry. It's sloppy, disorganized, and far too in love with itself to be worth anyone's time. Except mine, apparently. I mean, it's still way better than Ultimate FF, and I've been buying that for over four years now.

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