{"id":89,"date":"2009-11-24T23:43:26","date_gmt":"2009-11-24T23:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2009-11-25T09:18:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-25T09:18:00","slug":"last-week-in-comics-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"Last Week in Comics"},"content":{"rendered":"

After many misadventures with trying to get hold of this past week’s comics (the problem, in the very unlikely circumstance that it is interesting to you, was that I had ordered the War of Kings<\/em> hardback, and as it is the size of a modest paving slab it meant that my books had to be couriered to me and there was nobody there to get them because they were couriered to my flat while I was at work and… oy. Anyway.) they have finally turned up, and can be reviewed. Pleasingly, there is only one common point between my books of this week and Paul’s, so these reviews may be worthwhile reading should the mood take you. So! Let’s at it!<\/p>\n

PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB 5: <\/strong>Hmm. A comic with a colon in the title, when my reviews already have the format of being headed up with the title followed by a colon, thus making the whole review look like an unwieldy subtitle to the book. Could be worse, could be the Spider-Man thing I’ve reviewed below. This is the crossover point between my reading list and Paul’s, so see his review for plot details and so on. I think by now I could probably put together a macro template for reviewing Phonogram<\/em> Madlibs style. It would involve praising Gillen’s technique in weaving the protagonists’ stories together, and mention how there are no bit players in The Singles Club<\/em> (or perhaps that everyone is a bit player to each of the leads in turn). It would highlight the numerous clever variations on relating to music that allow for different varieties of phonomancy, and how each is appropriate to the spotlight character. It would then say that McKelvie’s art is spot on at portraying mood, and how he’s probably the best body language artist in comics (and is giving Kevin Maguire a run for his money in terms of facial expressions). So plug this issue’s specifics into the above and voil\u00e0! Instant review. My only issue is that going by the backmatter Gillen seems to regard Laura Heaven as the closest thing in the series to someone who could be regarded as a villain, and I come down very much on the other side of that fence – if Laura’s a villain, then everyone who’s ever done anything out of a momentary desire for control, no matter how small or petty, is a villain. I shall be writing a stern missive to your publication, Mr Gillen.<\/p>\n

DARK REIGN: THE LIST: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: <\/strong>Serious colon overload. Anyway. The List one-shots have supposedly been the first step along the path to Norman Osborn’s fall from grace, and there seems to have been an unfortunate tendency among fans online to discount their importance. I think the main problem is that these issues are definitely important to the individual characters’ books<\/em> – Clint Barton is captured, Frank Castle is dismembered, Bruce Banner is re-exposed to gamma radiation etc – but there doesn’t seem to be much of a through-line between the issues beyond the lip service paid to the concept of the list itself. As a result, the various List one-shots have just served to take milestone developments out of the eyeline of readers who only buy the relevant characters’ regular titles, thus neatly managing to glean the worst possible result – people who don’t read, say, Punisher<\/em> will skip it because there’s no continuing story between the List books, and people who just read Punisher<\/em> may decide to skip what may well be something that’s linked to Dark Reign rather than to their favourite character (because, to be honest, how likely is it that major Dark Reign developments are going to happen in the pages of Punisher<\/em> at this point?).<\/p>\n

Anyway. That aside, this is actually a pretty good issue of Amazing Spider-Man<\/em>, if one chooses to view it as such. Osborn has his first major PR disaster that he can’t hand-wave away with the aid of a good spin doctor, and it’s caused by Peter Parker. I’m sure Spidey will play a significant role in Siege<\/em>, and can I just reiterate at this point that if he doesn’t it’ll be a scandal, but even if he doesn’t then this issue can be looked at as a significant milestone in the ongoing Dark Reign saga. Dan Slott, a man for whom I have a lot of time, gives us a pretty great Spider-Man in this issue, using both his acrobatic skills and his brainbox to hand Osborn a decisive defeat. Adam Kubert’s work is typically dynamic, with some nifty Neal Adams-style panel layouts and some first-rate character work (the first double-page spread shows definite influences of some of his most talented peers, from Leinil Yu to Tim Sale and Patrick Zircher). Pretty good stuff, although I question the wisdom of reprinting the issue of the Pulse in which Luke Cage scores from Spidey’s assist, to borrow some football terminology, as it just serves to undercut Peter’s victory in the main feature.<\/p>\n

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 612: <\/strong>The Gauntlet finally kicks off, and it’s somewhat different from what I was expecting. Rather than just gather up all the classic Spider-foes and toss them at Spidey like one of those pitching machines you get in batting cages, it looks like Ma Kraven (a Boney M song waiting to happen) and her leather-bound kid are taking a more subtle approach. The sad-sack version of Electro that Spider-Man finds himself up against in this issue is the most interesting that particular villain’s been in years, and writer Mark Waid gives us sufficient insights into the antagonist’s head to have us empathising without actually sympathising with him. Artist Paul Azateca makes his ASM debut, and he’s very much in the mould of a Sean Philips or an Eduardo Risso, which in case anyone’s wondering is a good thing indeed. Increasingly over-reaching attempts to re-explain Peter and Michelle’s one night stand aside, this is definitely a promising start for The Gauntlet, going off as it does in a bunch of directions I hadn’t anticipated (although Waid is going to have to be careful that his thinly-veiled Tea Partiers don’t become straw man targets). There’s a very good backup strip by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura that looks like it would be more at home in a Popgun<\/em> anthology than an issue of Amazing<\/em>, but that’s a very welcome thing, and it sets up Black Cat’s new status quo quite neatly and positions her to be a major supporting cast member in the short term. In all, a huge step up from the Ben Reilly issues.<\/p>\n

THE AUTHORITY: THE LOST YEAR 3: <\/strong>More colons. This would likely have made it onto the podcast in place of Victorian Undead<\/em> if the books had arrived with me before Saturday morning, but c’est la vie. This is the first issue of Keith Giffen and Darick Robertson’s takeover of Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s abortive run (which was, to be fair, 100% longer than Morrison and Lee’s WildC.A.T.S.<\/em>), featuring the Authority turning up on our own Earth and discovering that there’s something decidedly odd and possibly catastrophically out of kilter about it. It’s actually a pretty decent book in its own right, and Giffen establishes his own voice on the book from the very beginning with an action sequence that would have been very out of place in Morrison’s vision. Nicely paced and with some intriguing ideas, this is the best Authority story I’ve read in a good while. Two major complaints, though – firstly, Darick Robertson is a great artist, so it’s a mystery why he’s been paired with inker Trevor Scott, who seems determined to obfuscate every line Robertson has drawn with some scritchy loose inks; and secondly it’s probably just a horrible coincidence but for one of the original architects of the Annihilation<\/em> series to unveil this book in the same week that DnA do their Realm of Kings<\/em> one-shot, both books featuring essentially the same villain, is terribly bad timing.<\/p>\n

REALM OF KINGS: <\/strong>Speaking of. This is essentially a Quasar one-shot, with Wendell Vaughn finding out what lurks at the far end of the Fault, but we also get some decent moments for the Guardians of the Galaxy and a spit and cough cameo from Nova. Leonardo Manco and Mahmud Asrar do a decent job on the art, although they’re not sufficiently different in style to necessarily justify their splitting the issue. The story works well at properly establishing the central evil at the core of the Realm of Kings stories, but the unfortunate result is that the various non-GotG<\/em> books get somewhat of a short shrift when it comes to setting up their stories to come (the Inhumans and Imperial Guard have to make do with tiny semi-previews at the back of the book). Looked at as a Quasar book, though, this will satisfy any cravings you may have on that score (and some people do have them, apparently).<\/p>\n

DR. HORRIBLE: <\/strong>Okay, let’s put this as simply as possible. If you are a fan of Dr. Horrible, I recommend this book to you, as it has some great character likenesses from Joelle Jones and a fittingly silly plot and script from Zack Whedon that is completely in keeping with the original web series. If you are not a fan of Dr. Horrible, there is nothing in this book that will enrich your life to the value of $3.50. It’s really that straightforward.<\/p>\n

TRANSFORMERS 1: <\/strong>I kind of lost track of the Transformers a while back. I was reading the various IDW series, but I didn’t know if I had to read Stormbringer<\/em> or not, and then they started putting out the Spotlight<\/em> one-shots which I thought were skippable, but then it turned out that the story had snuck in there so I was massively behind, then they skipped forward a year and destroyed the world in All Hail Megatron<\/em> and now it turns out there are 14 trade paperbacks just of the IDW stuff and AARGH AARGH AARGH. Sorry. Anyway. This series skips forward again by another two years, and gives us a pretty neat setup that we haven’t seen to any great extent since, I think, In The National Interest<\/em>, of all things, with the Autobots’ main enemy now being the humans they’re trying to protect. There are plenty of pleasing G1 cameos here, including a character death that’s very well executed (as it were), but there’s one glaring problem with it – what’s the deal with all the Bay-influenced character redesigns? Hot Rod and Bumblebee in particular have been revamped for the worse, with those awful goatee-esque pointy chins that the Noisy Movie introduced. If you can ignore that, and don’t mind that Prime’s course of action at the end of this issue seems more to do with martyring himself than actually helping the Autobots at all, then this is an issue that should prove pleasing to TF fans who were a little bored of an over-reliance on squishy human characters.<\/p>\n

So that was my week. What did you read?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After many misadventures with trying to get hold of this past week’s comics (the problem, in the very unlikely circumstance that it is interesting to you, was that I had ordered the War of Kings hardback, and as it is the size of a modest paving slab it meant that my books had to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}