Sunday, May 13, 2012

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.



No comments: