I just saw an add on the Fox television station for the Super Bowl. They said they would have somebody out on the red carpet interviewing people. There's a red carpet at the Super Bowl???? Things sure have changed since the last time I watched. (I think they were actually referring to the Pre-Game Show, although I still think it's strange that this is a red carpet affair.)
I read a really wonderful poem sequence at the beginning of a collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics I have, and I've been trying to find the book so I can reread it, and maybe post part of the poem. But it seems to be lost in the wilds of my bedroom. It occurred to me that what I really need is a Search Window for my bedroom. I could type in "Calvin Hobbes", and it would give a list of several locations in my room where I have Calvin and Hobbes books, or anything containing both words. Better yet, it could produce a glowing circle around the physical location of the search results.
Oh yes. The future will be cool.
So I thought I would start a new agenda for this blog, or at least for when I feel like using the new agenda. I am a huge comic book fan, by which I mean that I really love comic books, and that I am a comic book fan who is kind of a physically large person. But mostly the former.
I mostly read comics in the form of Trade Paperbacks, which are usually collections of some number of individual comic books collected together in one volume. I thought an interesting thing for me to do might be to give a review of new comics that I read. I won't offer a detailed summary, but just give my thoughts and feelings about the story, and whether or not it is worth the price on the cover. More details about the stories and characters can almost certainly be found on Wikipedia, or elsewhere on the internet.
(If anyone reading this is interested in reading some comics, I would be happy to recommend something that you might like, based on your personal fiction interests.)
Let us begin.
Wetworks
Writer: Mike Carey
Penciller: Whilce Portacio
Price: $14.99
Purchased at: Borders, Ithaca, NY
Publisher: Wildstorm
This was a restart of the original Wetworks series, which apparently ended with the deaths or disappearances of most of the original characters. I never read the original series, and I'm beginning to regret it. I always assumed the book was about a military-type strike team that performed especially nasty missions. But it seems I was wrong. Instead, it is about a military-type strike team whose members have been enhanced by golden alien symbiotic armor, and who fight supernatural threats such as vampires and werewolves. Now that is pretty cool.
The new team contains only a couple of the original characters, and adds a vampire woman and a werewolf man. The latter is a detective from an alternate universe where the supernatural creepies have destroyed most of humanity, except for small pockets safeguarded by the few paranormal beings who fight on the side of the angels. These apparently include werewolves and some demons and ghosts. This alternate universe seems to be where a lot of the current and upcoming story will take place. There is a weapon, or something, which is a box containing the spirits of vampires who were executed by the werewolf police, and this seems to be what everyone is scrambling to get.
It's pretty cool. There's also a good bit of military and governmental intrigue and betrayal and hidden agendas thrown in, which was apparently a large part of the original series as well.
There aren't a lot of interesting super-powers floating around, but I think that's ok. This book is worth reading, and worth the price.
Uncanny X-Men: The Extremists
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Salvador Larroca
Price: $13.99
Purchased at: Borders, Ithaca, NY
Publisher: Marvel
This was a very good book too. Ed Brubaker has garnered an impressive reputation, and I think it is largely well-deserved. He has written several stories recently which fall under the category of, "What you thought was true wasn't really true. Here's what really happened, and has been happening all along." I'm thinking of his resurrection of Captain America's old sidekick, Bucky, who was long thought deceased but was actually brainwashed into being an assassin called the Winter Soldier for a Russian mastermind, kept in suspended animation and only thawed out for missions. And I am also thinking of X-Men: Deadly Genesis, where he revealed that the team of X-Men gathered in Giant-Size X-men #1 formed to rescue the original team from the living island, Krakoa, was actually the second such team formed and sent in, and that the original team was slaughtered, and that Professor Xavier telepathically erased all memory of any of this from everyone. This original team contained Cyclop's and Havok's brother, who they didn't know existed, and who somehow survived all this and eventually woke up and then went off to destroy an intergalactic empire, and ended up becoming it's ruler instead. (This second part happened in X-Men: The Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire.)
I know how all of this sounds. But the fact that such stories were actually wonderfully written and completely believable, modulo comic book fiction, is tremendous testament to Brubaker's talents.
This book did not especially fall into that category. There was a new character introduced who was supposed to have been around all along, but it wasn't a major character, so no big deal. The story was mostly a continuation of the effects from and reactions to M-Day, an event where most of the mutants in the Marvel universe suddenly lost their powers. Specifically, it is about how many of the Morlocks dealt with this. The Morlocks were a group of mutants whose mutations were too obvious for them to live with everybody else, so they hung out underground in caves and sewers.
It's a good story, featuring Xavier, Storm, Warpath, Nightcrawler, and Hepzibah. I love the recent use of Warpath. This is a nice, odd little collection of characters. Xavier has his powers back, and he is not shy about using them to manipulate and investigate and deceive, all in the name of protecting the people he has sworn to protect. It's nice to see him back in action like this. The character has gotten a lot of slack for misusing his powers like that, but I think it makes for interesting reading. There's a good reason that mutants are hated and feared. They are damn powerful. And there are many good reasons that you don't mess with the X-Men, and Xavier is reason number one.
One of the main things coming out of Deadly Genesis, as well as Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous, is that most of the X-Men simply do not trust the Professor anymore. And I can't really blame them. This group is led by Cyclops, (who is recently back to being the canny and experienced tactical genius he's supposed to be). In counterpoint, we have people like Nightcrawler. When asked to accompany Xavier on a mission into space, putting aside recent disagreements, Nightcrawler simply replies, "You are and always will be the man who saved my life. Of course I'll go." (This may not be the exact quote.) Of course, you have to wonder whether Xavier somehow manipulated this situation, in order to obtain exactly this gratitude. He couldn't have, could he? No, surely not. But maybe. But no. Hmmm......
Larroca's artwork was wonderful. His style has always been attractive. I first saw his work in Excaliber, long long ago. He has since then done amazing work on all sorts of things, mostly on the X-Men. But recently it looked like he was getting a little complacent. Things didn't look as real as they could. They were painted and pretty and smooth, but somehow not organic enough. But this book was soooo different. Fantastic work. I'm not sure exactly what it was. Maybe he had a different colorist here, or he began using more shadows, but the effect is pronounced. These are real characters, with real expressions. I want to say that Xavier especially looks interesting, but really they all look great.
The only bad thing I have to say about this is that the story has the feel of being the beginning of a much larger saga. And maybe it is. But that's not how it was advertised. As an individual instance of story, it really doesn't have enough momentum. But maybe after I read what comes next, which I think is a storyline called Messiah Complex, I'll change my mind.
At any rate, well worth reading, and definitely worth the price.
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