Wednesday, June 9, 2010 09:07 AM
The Take
 by Fëanor

Fëanor's (semi-)weekly comic book review post.

This post covers new releases from the week of 5/19. Beware spoilers!

New releases
The Avengers #1
Siege is over, and all the old Avengers books have been killed - which means it's time to relaunch the Avengers, with Brian Michael Bendis as writer and John Romita Jr. on pencils! We open far in the future with some young Avengers casually wasting a very angry villain. Then we jump back to the present where Steve Rogers is assembling his ridiculously huge Avengers team. Seriously, we're talking like 25 people here. That's out of control. One of the more interesting scenes sees the now totally dark and bad-ass Wonder Man refusing the call, and arguing that the Avengers were behind all the recent problems with the world, and it's time for them to go away. He's actually got a pretty good point. Of course, as is de rigueur at this point, as the new Avengers are assembling for the first time, a villain shows up to challenge them. But in this case he's less challenging them and more warning them that they need to stop their kids from ruining the future. ("What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?" "No, it's your kids, Marty! Something's got to be done about your kids!") The reveal that the big villain in the future is actually an old, white-haired Hulk is an intriguing surprise, but mostly this comic just feels tired and dull. Avengers assemble, blah blah blah, huge threat to the world in the future, blah blah blah, unexpected villain revealed, blah blah blah. I like Romita's art, but the sequence at Avengers headquarters where Bendis has the new team all gabbing at each other in patented Bendis-speak dialog is really pretty hard to take. I'm just tired of this guy as a writer. I don't think I need to read any more issues of this comic.
Thumbs Down

Enter the Heroic Age #1
The relaunch of the Avengers is part of a whole new wave of Marvel books called "The Heroic Age," and this is a one-shot preview sampler of all those books. First up is Avengers Academy, which is written by Christos Gage, and is thus predictably bad, with plenty of cheesy narration. Next is Jeff Parker's Atlas. I know everybody loves Jeff Parker, but for some reason I just can't get into his work, and the Agents of Atlas just don't do it for me; even with the robot and the talking monkey, I just find them boring. Black Widow I already tried and didn't like, and the few pages included here didn't change my mind. Hawkeye & Mockingbird looks like kind of a cute spy duo action book, with plenty of secrets and lies, but I don't know. It's too much like Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Last up is Jeff Parker's Thunderbolts. This looks like it's going to be about Luke Cage building a new Thunderbolts team out of the latest crop of captured supervillains, which is vaguely intriguing. But like I said, I'm not a big Parker fan, so I'll pass.

And that's it for that! Guess I'm not going to be reading anything in the Heroic Age! Another note: I feel like now that they've got Steve Rogers back they're overusing him a bit. If I'm not mistaken, he's a member of every new Avengers team, and has his fingers in the Thunderbolts and other organizations, too. When is the guy going to have time to sleep?
Thumbs Sideways

Galacta: Daughter of Galacuts #1
I'm not sure what possessed me to buy this one-shot. I guess it was just the ridiculousness of the concept: Galactus' teenage daughter, living incognito among us, protecting Earth from alien threats by eating them, and trying to avoid the temptation to eat the Earth herself. It's kind of a cute story, but good lord is this woman talky and repetitive.
Thumbs Sideways

Girl Comics #2
At the end of my review of Girl Comics #1 you'll find this sentence: "I doubt I'll pick up another issue of this book, unless something really sticks out when I flip through it in the store." Despite this claim, and despite the fact that nothing really did stick out when I flipped through #2 in the store, I bought it anyway. What can I say, it was a slow week. We open with another of Colleen Coover's cute, inspiring intros, then move on to a possibly even cuter story by Jill Thompson about Crystal of the Inhumans trying to give her teleporting dog a bath. Then Kathryn Immonen and Colleen Coover team up to give us a story about a superhero I had never heard of before named Molly Fitzgerald and her hair salon for superheroes. I know I'm overusing the word "cute," but... yeah. That one's cute, too. There's a pretty dull two-pager from Stephanie Buscema about Doctor Doom and Sue, then an amusing story about the superhero's natural temptation to do evil by Faith Erin Hicks. I particularly like the art on this one, and Cris Peter's colors. The two-pager featuring superhero classified ads is pretty unimaginative, and the Doctor Strange story is just kind of odd. Overall another anthology that's just okay. I don't know why I keep buying these!!
Thumbs Sideways

Joe the Barbarian #5
Argh! Morrison tugs my animal-loving heartstrings here, just like he did in We3, by putting Joe's pet mouse in deadly danger. He'd better be okay! Regardless, the fight between Jack and the dog, which takes place in both worlds, is really well done. Meanwhile, Joe finally gets around to calling his Mom, but unfortunately it doesn't look like help is going to come from that direction. Luckily the cavalry shows up in the last panel, although what kind of cavalry it is exactly is unclear. Another fun issue, although not as good as some others.
Thumbs Sideways
Tagged (?): Avengers (Not), Brian Michael Bendis (Not), Comic books (Not), Grant Morrison (Not), The Take (Not)



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Welcome to the blog of Jim Genzano, writer, web developer, husband, father, and enjoyer of things like the internet, movies, music, games, and books.

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