Friday, December 12, 2008

Almost as late as FC #6: Paul reads books from 12/10

Wow, it's been almost five months since anyone's posted on here and that is ridiculous. So here goes:

I only read six books this week. In alphabetical order:

Amazing Spider-Man #580 was a nice little done-in-one by Roger Stern and Lee Weeks, two vets of the eighties and nineties. And that's how it reads. It's Okay but does little to further any larger story and, coming after a great two issues by Mark Waid and Marcos Martin, it left me wanting.

Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes #1 and 2 are nice short stories that shoot off from the current Astonishing storyline and offer brief glimpses into "What If...?" stories, all done by Warren Ellis with four A-list illustrators. And they are Good. Completists, or those looking for really pretty pictures, should check them out. For casual fans, though, they are a bit pricey at $4 for 16 pages of story. Granted, you get Clayton Crain, Kaare Andrews, Alan Davis, and Adi Granov. It helps that Ellis is in top form.

Captain Britain and MI13 #8 is an odd book. While the first arc on this book was a tie-in to Marvel's Secret Invasion, the second arc has yet to really gel into something. I'm cautiously optimistic about this book, and it stands as an Okay book in it's own right, but there's not much "there" there.

DMZ #37 is the start of a new arc, this time with parralels to Nazi Gold/Sadaam's Palaces. I keep think DMZ is going to start to decline soon, that writer Brian Wood cannot push his "Iraq War in New York" metaphor any further, but between the last full arc (Blood in the Game) and the one starting here, it's still a Very Good book.

Final Crisis #5 came out this week, along with word that #6 would be delayed until January 14, 2009. For those keeping score, issue 1 came out May 28th, 2008. It's actually Very Good, too. Worth the wait? I don't know, but definitely worth $4. The art is a bit uneven (what with three pencillers on this issue, eah with a different style), but it's good fun. Morrison is gleefully unpackaging all of the Kirby toys from the 70's with his nods not only to the Fourth World books, but Kamandi, Anthro, and heavy references to the original OMAC (with a pseudo-people factory and faceless global security agents). Plus it has the Seven Soldiers own Frankenstein riding a motorcycle and quoting Milton. So there's that.

Wolverine Flies to a Spider is another one of these Wolverine one-shots that should really just be called an anthology series by now. I'm a pretty big fan of Wolverine, and I like the kick ass and take names version seen here over, say, Origins, but what I don't like is this pervasive notion that Wolverine can't just kill people, he has to right a wrong by killing people. This issue is particularly hard to swallow. If I read it correctly, he reads in the Daily Bugle (a New York paper) about a little girl killed a couple years ago and travels to the American southwest to kill everyone involved in her death. It would have read better as "Wolverine up and heads to Nevada and kills a motorcycle gang", though, because then there would not be the logical ramifications (and just bear with me). Wolverine has no link to the dead girl. While it is a tragedy, he does not race around avenging other girls who are killed, though; he hasn't off'd the Marvel equivalent of Kasey Anthony yet. So why her? And why is she on the front page of the Bugle? In big letters? Still an Okay issue (and far better than last year's holiday offering), but more and more these one-shots feel tired.