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| Monday, September 13, 2010 03:49 PM |
| The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Fëanor's (semi-)weekly comic book review post.
This post covers new releases from the week of 9/1. Beware spoilers!
New releases
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #36
Another jump back in time, and another attempt to explain Angel's recent actions. This time they do a pretty decent job. We also get to see how Angel and Spike dropped in from the IDW comic book universe. It was a pretty sudden and violent process! Next the book sets up the upcoming storyline - which will apparently involve returning to Sunnydale, fighting the Master again (he's still around??), and digging up something called the Seed of Wonder. Then it threatens us with a future storyline involving the universe that Buffy and Angel created and then abandoned when they had ultra-sex.
Meeeeh. I just don't know about Buffy anymore. I'm still annoyed by the resolution of the previous storyline, despite their attempts to explain it away. I'll probably stick around for now, though, if only to see what this Seed of Wonder is all about.
Thumbs Sideways
Hellboy: The Storm #3
Hellboy once again rejects his destiny - he's good at that! He gives up his army and his sword. I very much like the parallel to Arthurian mythology here, where Hellboy asks his loyal retainer to throw his sword into a pond or a river, because "that seems like the thing to do." She doesn't want to at first, but finally agrees. Then there's the image of the grail on the inn's sign post. Interestingly, Hellboy says after this is all over, he wants to go back to the Bureau, and also live in America with his new girlfriend. Cool! But Hellboy's got a lot of hard work ahead of him before that can happen. He has an interesting confrontation with the guy I take to be Merlin, who again offers him the army of Hell to command - but Hellboy made his choice as far as that's concerned a long time ago. Then Baba Yaga shows up again to make him a different offer: if she can have one of his eyes, she can get him past Nimue's army so he can face her one on one. But deals with Baba Yaga are never a good idea, and this one may very well have brought about Nimue's final and most terrible transformation - the one the beast warned Hellboy about an issue or two ago. By the end of this comic, it looks like she has become - against her will, even - what Hellboy refused to be. The seven Old Ones have awoken again! That is not good news.
This has been a fantastic series, and I'm excited and a little terrified to see what comes next.
Thumbs Up
Incorruptible #9
We learn more details about Alana Patel's past, and about her connection to Max Damage. But it turns out she might be more pissed at Jailbait than at Max. Which is bad, because the new, vulnerable Jailbait just landed right in front of her. Meanwhile, it looks like the white supremacists want revenge on Max in a big way. I know I keep saying this every month, but I'm really disappointed in this book anymore. The art is poor and inappropriate, and the writing is pretty weak. It's still a must-buy in my head, but I don't know how much longer that's going to be true if it keeps on this way. Especially if the next week it comes out, there are five other books I'd rather read.
Thumbs Sideways
Wolverine #1
Jason Aaron has a new ongoing Wolverine title! Which is something I would have been way more excited about back before I read his other Wolverine title and couldn't get into it at all. I decided to give this new one a try anyway, but sadly I don't think I'm going to be able to get into it, either. I did learn a couple of interesting things in this issue: Wolverine has a love interest, and she appears to be that reporter from the other Wolverine title Aaron was writing. Also, Mystique is alive again (not that I ever really expected her latest death to stick), and despite the way Wolverine treated her last time I read about them hanging out together, she's now helping him by saving his girlfriend. Huh. I would not have expected that. Anyway, the story involves some kind of evil presence inhabiting Wolverine's body and wandering about doing mischief on Earth while his soul is tortured in Hell. I guess it's kind of a vaguely intriguing premise? But mostly I find it boring and off-putting. It seems like all the comic book heroes are going to hell lately. Really, the whole book is cliches. Wolverine's life is finally settling down, and he's got a girlfriend, and things are looking up, so of course everything's going to go horribly wrong and a gang of killers is going to try to murder his girlfriend. The problem is, it's hard to care about Wolverine, because c'mon, he'll be fine, and it's even harder to care about his girlfriend, because she's just the generic comic book reporter girlfriend and I don't care about her at all. Maybe Aaron has more exciting things planned down the line in future issues, but I'm just not sure I'm willing to hang in there and find out.
Thumbs Sideways
X-Men: Smoke and Blood - Curse of the Mutants #1
You know what nobody's telling stories about lately? Vampires! Thank goodness Marvel is here to remedy that! Ha ha ha- oh, screw it. Anyway, apparently the latest X-Drama revolves around those mystical blood-sucking entities that one hears about so rarely these days, and this awkwardly titled one-shot is writer Simon Spurrier's contribution to the story. I follow Spurrier on Twitter (@sispurrier), and I've enjoyed his work in the past, so I thought I'd pick it up. The book is... okay. The vampire portrayed here is actually more like a Xenomorph from the Alien movies than your traditional be-caped seducer, and the story proceeds like one of those movies, with a small group of people trapped in a small area with the monster, being killed off one by one in true sci-fi/horror thriller fashion, despite all their technology. I'm not sure I quite follow the solution to the mystery of how the vampire works (when Emma asked, "What the $&#% just happened?" near the end, I sympathized with her a great deal), but that's okay. The dialog is clever to the point of sometimes being too clever - it occasionally totters towards feeling contrived and over-composed. But it's also legitimately funny and smart a reasonable portion of the time. Like I said, the book is okay.
Thumbs Sideways |
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| Tagged (?): Buffy (Not), Comic books (Not), Hellboy (Not), Jason Aaron (Not), Joss Whedon (Not), Mark Waid (Not), Mike Mignola (Not), Simon Spurrier (Not), The Take (Not), Vampires (Not), Wolverine (Not), X-Men (Not) | |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
