Comics again

I've actually come up with a few plans for the blog. They'll start over the next few weeks. But first, let's talk about this week's comics.


Atomic Robo (Free Comic Book Day 2012):
This has to be the most fun you can have for free. Comic-wise anyway. Atomic Robo is a robot built by Nicola Tesla in the twenties. He's fought Nazis, Lovecraftian horrors and ghosts, met Carl Sagan and somehow pissed off Stephen Hawking. And in this special he teams up with his arch nemesis, a hyper-intelligent velociraptor who claims to be a time traveler, to save the Large Hadron Collider. It is fantastic and free. Read this book.

Batman #9:
For the last eight issues Batman has been facing off against a new threat to Gotham, the Court of Owls. They're a secret society who've been controlling the city for centuries. And now they've sent their assassins, the Talons, to kill influential members of Gotham's society. So it's mostly a fight issue.
There's also a backup strip that seems to be tying in Thomas and Martha Wayne's deaths to the Court of Owls. I'm not too sure about this, adding surprising revelations to an established character's past can come across as just trying to make your threat bigger for the sake of it, but I suppose that's why DC rebooted their universe to shake things up. I'll see how it plays out.

Invincible #91:
God. How do I summarise what's been going on in Invincible. I don't know if I can. Invincible's very continuity heavy. And I don't want to spoil it for any friends of mine reading this. Suffice it to say it's a great book (How many ways can I say this before I give up?), well written and gorgeous art. Umm... yay?

Morning Glories #18:
Another story heavy book, luckily there's only been eighteen issues of it so far. Take six teenagers, put them in an evil boarding school and add a ton of overarching mystery about everything. I'm a big fan of stories with a myth arc like Lost or Fringe. Or Stargate Universe. There can be problems with maintaining the pace of the story and doling out the answers. Give too much information and it feels unbelievable, give too little and readers get frustrated and give up on the book completely. Fortunately writer Nick Spencer has kept the balance right so far, for me at least.

Uncanny X-Force #25:
It's a big anniversary issue, although it feels like business as usual. Usually comics spend multiples of twenty five with a climax to a big story or launching a bold new direction for the book. Not here though. The team is kinda fractured after recent events and there's a lot of character focus on Psylocke and Fantomex in particular with both of them leaving the team, for now at least. But you have to have action so that falls to Deadpool infiltrating a company that make bespoke clone assassins (that's assassins who are clones, not assassins designed to kill clones). The clones are motivated to kill by having memories that their target killed a loved one. That sucks for what's left off X-Force because three clones of Omega Red are out to get them.
The issue also reprints two of Rick Remender's past works. First, a Wolverine story about Wolverine trying to reconcile his noble-warrior side with the berserker side, usual fill-in issue stuff. The second is plain weird. It's a Deadpool story where he's hired to rescue a man who was sent to a fat camp and never returned. Deadpool gets captured and is force fed food for four months until he resembles Homer Simpson when he was clinically obese. It's insane.


Wolverine and the X-Men #10:
This might be my favourite book at the moment. I've been a fan of the X-Men since the cartoon back in the nineties but in recent years the stories had seemed kind of directionless, but I heard about the relaunch a while back read the first issue of this book and jumped right back aboard. I can't stress enough how much I like fun comics and when you've got a schools whose grounds are alive and is infested with tiny Nightcrawlers from another dimension you're on to a winner.
In this issue Cyclops and his X-Men show up after leaving Utopia in last week's Avengers vs. X-Men asking for sanctuary and for Wolverine to join him against the Avengers. Wolverine doesn't go for it but some of his teachers and pupils head off with Scott. There's also a sub-plot with the new mind-wiped Angel realising he's not actually part of the Heavenly Host and Evan (or Genesis), the young clone of Apocalypse looking up this person everyone says he looks like. So it's basically filling in some side details for the big crossover and advancing its own plot. Good stuff.

Some sort of Assemble pun

So today I watched a movie. Over here it's called Avengers Assemble so we don't confuse it with Steed and Mrs Peel (like my mum and granny did, in two separate conversations). I've been waiting for this movie for a while. What did I think?

Love!

It's great. Joss Whedon can direct movies like the proverbial boss and hopefully this gives him some much needed Hollywood clout. Each member of the team gets a moment to shine and they act like a team, eventually. This is a Marvel movie after all. Stan Lee is in there, as usual. The New York public act like they always do in Marvel comics. Loki is incredibly manipulative. There are some tears and a great teaser for the inevitable followup.

I saw it with Sarah, Eoin, Aoife, Owen and Jenny. I don't know about the rest of them but for me, it was pure unadulterated joy. Go see this movie.

What to talk about? Oooh! Comics.

I've spent the last hour watching TED talks and playing Solitaire on my iPod rather than write anything. That's a bad habit. I will break it.

Yesterday was Wednesday so let's talk about comics.

Thanks to Comixology I can buy all the comics I want and not fill any space in my room (Very dangerous). Here's what I bought:

Action Comics #9:
Grant Morrison wrote a story about the Superman of Earth 23, who's black and the president of the US but not Obama. It's an idea he's had before that's he's now expanding on. At first I wasn't sure why he was focusing on another Superman in the middle of his brand new origin but I figure he's saying something about the universality of the Superman idea no matter the context. But hey, smarter people have tried to figure out Grant Morrison. I just like the stories he tells. (That sounds reductive. Maybe I'll think harder next time.)

Avengers vs X-Men #3:
This is a pretty good book considering it's a Marvel summer event and written by committee. The character motivations make sense. I'm enjoying where it's going. Yay!

Defenders #6:
This is Matt Fraction writing Iron Fist. I love Matt Fraction writing Iron Fist, especially as it delves into the history of the last Iron Fist, Orson Randall. Fraction's going for big things here with the concordance engines and those little meta-text subtitles at the bottom of the pages (the ones that aren't ads). Again I want to see where this goes.

Uncanny X-Force #lots:
The last thing here is Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force. I haven't caught up on this yet but it's now all up on Comixology and I'm making my way through it. Looks good so far.

Hmmm. Not a lot of negativity there, but then again I don't read or watch many things I don't like. I'm just weird like that.

Oh yeah. This thing.

So then. Today is the first of May. And not just that.

It also happens to have been the last day of my exams (I've been doing a course in Computer Maintenance) so I have a bit of free time. And I figure what better way to spend my new-found extra hours than to revive the blog, or at least attempt to resuscitate it.

So over the next few weeks I'll try to blog more regularly. I've a few ideas for posts but nothings coming to me today (might have something to do with those four celebratory pints of Miller I had after the last exam).

I'll work something out for tomorrow.