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| Wednesday, February 24, 2010 01:26 PM |
| The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Fëanor's (semi-)weekly comic book review post.
This post covers new releases from the week of 2/17. Beware spoilers!
New releases
Captain America #603
The image of crazy Cap smiling over his shoulder with Bucky's old uniform on a dummy in the background is a very disturbing one. Meanwhile, the real Cap's poor planning gets both him and Falcon in trouble. Pretty fun stuff. Unfortunately, the Nomad backup story is still terrible. Really poor, melodramatic, unsubtle writing.
Thumbs Sideways
Dark Avengers #14
Bendis' clumsy, confusing Sentry-as-angry-God-or-maybe-something-else-entirely storyline continues and gets, if possible, even worse. We open with Osborn and Hand having a lengthy and mostly boring and repetitive conversation about Osborn's mental health, where they do a lot of posturing and all that really changes is that Osborn agrees to see a therapist (although whether he actually will is still in question). Also, Hand shoots Moonstone with a laser gun for having too much sex. Then suddenly Bendis remembers that the Sentry was destroying the world, and we get back to that whole thing. But all Osborn has to do to stop him is to mention that various big Marvel heroes would probably kill him if he tried to destroy the world, so he agrees not to. Um, what? The Sentry/The Void/Galactus/junkie wacko/the God of Abraham just backs down after a feeble death threat? Can you say ridiculous? Can you say anticlimax? After all that back and forth about what the Sentry really is and what his true origin really is, basically the only thing that changed is that now Osborn wants Bullseye to be ready to kill Lindy. Which, admittedly, is kind of an interesting threat to have hanging over the rest of the story. But what a dumb story! What terrible dialog! What atrocious misuse of characters! What a waste of pages!
Thumbs Down
Green Lantern #51
The crazy, over-the-top, multi-colored back-and-forth that is Blackest Night continues. Johns' dialog here leaves something to be desired, as usual. It feels like he's trying to cram too much into each line, as if every sentence has to state (and restate, over and over) in relatively obvious fashion everything he wants to say about that character and his relationship with whatever character he's talking to. Larfleeze is greedy, so every line he says has to be about that! And so on.
In a rather unlikely twist, Jordan's gambit works perfectly and Parallax does indeed de-Black Lantern the Spectre. But the non-zombie Spectre isn't terribly helpful to the good guys, and it sounds like the now-freed Parallax has been taken over by some other power and will cause more trouble later. So maybe not such a great plan after all. There's an interesting and slightly silly moment where Atrocitus nearly succeeds in recruiting the Spectre to his Corps (is everybody going to be turned every different color possible before this thing is over?). Then the Spectre reveals that there is indeed some embodiment of the force of Rage somewhere in the universe, but that he's not it. Hmm. Food for thought! The final page is pretty impressive and ominous, but Blackest Night as a whole continues to not really do it for me. Which is not to say I'm likely to be able to resist buying the books, but still.
Thumbs Sideways
Incorruptible #3
I've been waiting for Incorruptible to step things up and really grab me the way Irredeemable did, and in this issue it happened. Awesome!
The opening image is of a mad scientist dangling a woman over a bucket full of slime and tentacles and saying, "Now, you might feel a pinch." That's hilarious right there. As the comic goes on, the bickering, dysfunctional trio of Max Damage, Jailbait, and Lieutenant Armadale really starts to gel as a group of characters. Jailbait in particular is really starting to come into her own. "You let me fight the Hentai Brothers in a cage match because you said it was hot! And I won! And it was hot!" Ha! There are plenty of intriguing references like that to the mysterious backgrounds of these characters - like Dr. Origin's line about Max being his "only success." The next page is priceless: Max and Jailbait walking away from a huge explosion as Jailbait asks, "Where's Origin?" and Max answers, "You ask an awful lot of questions." I also love Jailbait trying to grab the TV remote control from Max; the sad peak into Armadale's past; and the deeply disturbing look at the event that made Max change sides. He was actually tired of life and of other people enjoying it, and was about to kill a bunch of people when the Plutonian showed up and did it for him! Wow. Excellent stuff.
Thumbs Up
Joe the Barbarian #2
This is a wildly imaginative story, weaving drunkenly along the edge between reality and fantasy. We continue to stumble back and forth between Joe's "real" world and a dangerous, explosive, frenetic fantasy world populated by fantastic, large-as-life, animated versions of his toys and his pet mouse. There's a war going on there between good and evil - between Lord Arc and the forces of light and King Death and the forces of darkness. It might be that Joe is the prophesied savior, and that the mouse-warrior Jack is protecting him from the Nazgul-like servants of an ultimate evil. Or it might be that Joe just really needs to get to the kitchen and have some soda. It's pretty amazing stuff, and Sean Murphy's insanely creative art is just as important to the story as Grant Morrison's wonderful, carefully portioned, bombastic-in-just-the-right-way dialog, which is constantly referencing the weird jargon and history of this fantasy world in a clever and subtle way that draws us in, and is more intriguing and entertaining than confusing or off-putting. I'm hooked!
Thumbs Up |
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| Tagged (?): Avengers (Not), Blackest Night (Not), Brian Michael Bendis (Not), Captain America (Not), Comic books (Not), Ed Brubaker (Not), Geoff Johns (Not), Grant Morrison (Not), Green Lantern (Not), Mark Waid (Not), Siege (Not), The Take (Not) | |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
