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We’re back with another edition of TPL. This one is thankfully on time (done with hours to spare) and things are going well so far. I’m about 7 pages into my 25 page paper and with part of it due today I thought my usual reviews would take a hit. Luckily, it hasn’t (so far!). I have this finished, I am going to finish a trade by tonight and with the smaller amount of books I find I am happier reading these. Let’s look at the rundown: 1 Dynamite book, 6 DC Books (5 being Bat-related) and 11 Marvels.
Spoiler Alert
-Dynamite-
-Black Terror #5- This picked up where the numbering of the first left off. We start in the past, with WWII and Black Terror fighting alongside the American Crusader. We go back to the present with American Crusader lurking in the national archives looking for Truman’s formula for superpowers. There’s your Project Superpowers! I don’t want to get all fanboy over this, but man, this is awesome. There’s a great underlying plot here and I’m really excited about reading the rest of the series. 1/1.
-DC-
-Batgirl #4- After Stephanie was put through the wringer by Barbara, we have her first night out as a heroine. She takes out some common thugs before defeating Livewire with a single punch. There’s a subplot of Stephanie and her mother going on here, as well as Barbara helping out another paralyzed woman. It’s decent so far; meaning it is telling a complete story in its pages, but I need something of substance to happen to keep me along for the ride. 1/1.
-Batman #693- This one is jam-packed with plotlines. Batman and Robin battle the False-Faces as Falcone and Mask jockey for position in the ongoing gangster war. Black Mask crashes a Grayson gala by impersonating Bruce and he has one of his young accomplices snooping around. She unleashes a bomb that revives the evil Riddler. Finally, Batman looks further into the woman who crashed his party and how she ties into the freaks that Black Mask is hiring. There is just so much going on in this book. Tony Daniels is cramming it full of great plots and it’s a tremendous value for the $3.00 price tag. 2/2.
-Batman and Robin #6- And now for a completely different type of Batman story! It’s Grant Morrison, y’know. His storytelling is really out there and there’s always something going on in his mind that he puts in his book for the purpose of a bigger reveal somewhere down the line. Here Batman and Robin battle Flamingo with Red Hood and Scarlet. Red Hood seemingly kills Flamingo and is then locked up by the GCPD. There is a bigger mastermind behind Flamingo named El Penitente, Scarlet runs off into the night, Robin is paralyzed and Batman is oddly detached (I guess it is a trip to the Lazarus pit?) and Batman goes to a crypt (with a familiar codeword). If you’ve been reading all of Morrison’s run you get what is going on, but I can see why you’d be lost if you picked it up from Issue #1 of this title. I am really digging it so far. 3/3.
-Batman/Doc Savage Special #1- This is an ultra-cool noir style book from the pen of Brian Azzarello. If you don’t know who Doc Savage is, well, he’s a HUGE pulp hero from the 30’s. He was a normal human but was at the peak of both intelligence and strength. This is just features a young, brash, Batman who is just beginning his vigilante work breaking into Doc’s apartment to look into a murder. The story has an open ending, possibly to jump-start the First Wave series that is coming down the road. Phil Noto’s art fit the mood of the story and as I was finishing it I just couldn’t wait to read more First Wave stuff, so this book did its job. 4/4.
-Green Lantern Corps #42- And now for our only Non-Bat book of the week! This was a massive improvement over last week, as this finally moved the story forward. There’s tons of fighting and the GLC are joined by an Indigo Lantern to fight off the Black Lantern threat. The threat grows exponentially when the Black Lanterns stop their individual battle to destroy the power source of the Green Lanterns. The GLC unleash the Red Lantern (Atrocitus, I think its name is) but he’s killed by an over-zealous GLC Alpha member. The Alpha Lantern is quickly killed, but his essence is about to go nuclear. Kyle interjects himself and sacrifices his life to stop the Black Lanterns for the time being and save the Green Lantern. This had an incredible pace to it and from page one it hit the ground running and never let up. 5/5.
-Red Robin #6- The Council of Spiders amps up their effort to undermine the League of Assassins and they are able to kill three Assassins as they were out on hits. Robin stops one but learns the game is still going on, and that Tam Fox is in serious danger. Red Robin thinks that one of the League members is working for the Council but that idea isn’t taken too well by White Ghost. This is clearly after Blackest Night (with Robin making a reference to fighting his parents) which is weird seeing that Robin had to leave between issues #’s 4 and 5 to go to Gotham. Oh well, I’m not the continuity police and the Council of Spiders/League of Assassins battle is a story I am going to stick around for. 6/6.
-Marvel-
-Amazing Spider-Man #611- This was an unusually bland issue of Spider-Man. Basically Deadpool is paid to distract Spider-Man so that Kraven can kidnap Arana. She and her mother have already kidnapped Madame Web so it looks like they want to start collecting spider-themed characters. The art was dreadful for a premiere Marvel title, the writing of Deadpool was nowhere near as good as something that Daniel Way has been doing in the Deadpool solo title and for the second week in a row we’ve had a bad Spidey issue. This is the first bump in the road for Spider-Man and I hope this won’t be an ongoing trend. 0/1.
-Cable #20- Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Cable and Hope escape from an impossible situation (in this case the Brood) and Bishop escapes from an even more impossible situation (in this case a nuclear explosion on his ship) to keep after Hope and Cable. This title was fun to start off but we’ve just had the same plot with slight modifications over and over. Let’s pick up the pace a little! 0/2.
-Daredevil #502- Daredevil reveals to White Tiger and Tarantula that Izo isn’t dead, he just slowed his heartbeat to make it seem that way. DD’s master plan is to take the Hand down from the inside. Meanwhile, Kingpin is reasserting his presence as the top guy in New York. DD, while taking out the Hand, is also doubling his efforts to stop the crooked cops and judges that are working for Osborn. It’s amazing that DD has gone through two fantastic writers (Bendis and Brubaker) and it has not lost a step transitioning to a third (Diggle). Daredevil really operates in a universe all his own and the character’s really found its niche in Marvel. 1/3.
-Dark X-Men #1- Were the Dark X-Men so great that they needed their own mini-series? This is a more rag-tag bunch than the Thunderbolts and the Dark Avengers. Basically Norman sends out Mimic, Mystique (posing as Jean Grey), Beast, and Weapon Omega to track a strange occurrence of people showing mutant powers that fade soon thereafter. They show up, their powers all go haywire (and they destroy a lot of property) before X-Man, Nate Grey himself, pops out of some dude. Well, X-Man is back. If you don’t know who X-Man is the answer is simple. He is the Age of Apocalypse version of Cable but younger and much more powerful. I’m happy he’s back. The girl called Hope back-up is really just showing Hope growing up with Cable. I don’t especially like the Dark X-Men, but having X-Man return earns this a point. 2/4.
-Deadpool #17- Now this is how you write Deadpool. Deadpool is on a trial basis as an X-Man and immediately he’s causing more trouble than he’s worth. One of the mutants, Mercury, has a father who is raising hell by claiming her daughter is imprisoned by the X-Men and held against her will. Deadpool decides to take care of this problem by killing him. While he’s live on national TV. Domino stops him but when she hears that Logan is going to take care of him she frees him. Logan wasn’t going to kill but now Deadpool is loose and he’s gunning for Mercury’s father. This was funny, it told a good story, and the tri-monologuing Deadpool was as clever as ever. Writing like this proves why he’s in 3 titles now. 3/5.
-Luke Cage: Noir #4- Luke gets his revenge, he finds out the murderer (the husband who is a light-skinned African-American looking to raise his socio-economic standards), gets revenge on all his enemies and sends his son and former lover on the way to a happy life. This was dark and gritty and Cage seemed to fit in the Noir type of story very well. His origin was done in a way that it stayed true to his 616 universe but fitting in a real-life terms. 4/6.
-Realm of Kings: Imperial Guard #1- So Gladiator is in the new leader of the Shi’ar and as a result is in charge of the Imperial Guard where he once served. He sends the men out to stop a revolution on one of the Shi’ar planets and they do. Gladiator gets his hands dirty in the melee which angers some on the Imperial Board. Gladiator promises not to interfere again. He ends up sending some of the Guard who were fighting each other to investigate the fissure in the universe that occurred as a result of the War Of Kings. Darkhawk (the bad one) is lurking in the shadows and I wonder what his role will be. I’m happy that Abnett and Lanning are continuing this epic storyline and these two are literally making Marvel’s Cosmic heroes their own. 5/7.
-X-Force #21- We get our first holy crap moment of Necrosha X in these pages. Selene meets at Genosha as some of the undead Zombies attack the X-Men. Vanisher is busy looking to Elixir (for a cure), Wolfsbane is in peril, Bastion is around wondering what is going on and all of that is just nothing compared to the ending of Selene raising ALL the dead of Genosha. The big ending was well-executed. We don’t see them rising, just the number in population of Genosha rising almost exponentially. I wondered if this was going to be a Blackest Night rip-off and although parallels could be made, this is standing on its own so far. It’s decidedly X-centric at this point which it should be. 6/8.
-Uncanny X-Men First Class #5- Xavier investigates the disturbance on the space station named by Corbeau and finds a group called the Knights of Hykon. They show up on Earth and just decimate the X-Men. These are ultra-powerful beings and the X-Men have their hands full. If I were to guess what happens here (considering this is in-continuity and it is placing us shortly before the Dark Phoenix Saga), Phoenix saves the day and this is the first part of her unraveling into the Dark Phoenix. This isn’t reinventing the wheel, but it has the same charm that the Untold Tales of Spider-Man comics had back in the day. 7/9.
-X-Babies #1- The X-Babies dance, and then escape from Planet Terry (which was really a Danger Room type place on Mojoworld) before running into Wally and Marlin (other Star Comic characters). Alpha-Bot is sent to destroy the Babies but it fails. They escape and run into Royal Roy, who I assume is another Star imprint. There’s a reprint of Planet Terry #1 which I think is just an extended ad for some Star reprints coming out down the line. Look, am I gonna kill Marvel for a story like this? This has a certain audience and it caters to it. 8/10.
-X-Men Forever #11- Shadowcat, ‘Ro and Gambit travel to Russia to find Colossus and they do find him, they find him in a relationship with Black Widow. Illyana is kidnapped at the end of the issue and this is all for a return of Magik. There’s a little bit of an inside joke about Gambit’s last name (Picard or LeBeau?) which I thought was a nice touch. The rest of the X-Men lose some steam by fighting amongst themselves, too. I thought this re-imagining of the X-Men from back in 1991 was gonna be terrible but reading this makes me think of how much I enjoyed Claremont’s run (even the tail end of it). That was the time I started reading comics and this is like reliving old memories. Will new fans appreciate it? Probably not since what the hell is this X-Men team anyway, but I think the old-time fans will love it. 9/11.
-The Bottom Line- I can’t really complain this week. Amazing Spider-Man was unusually bad both in terms of story and art which was surprising and the recent turn of two bad issues in a row is slightly disconcerting. DC was helped a lot by 5 strong books from the Bat Family while Marvel’s X-Titles are quickly rising through the ranks and could ascend into the premiere titles of Marvel.
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Questions? Comments? Shoot me an email.
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