A Few Thoughts on Comics from The Past Couple Weeks

It's Wednesday. New Comic Day! I suppose before I get more books, I should finish reviewing the books I got last week, huh?

X-Men Second Coming #1 - Have you read an X-Men comic in the last, oh, 25 years or so? This is a lot like that, with nice art and an attempt to make this 'serious' and 'foreboding'. It's not bad, just too familiar. It doesn't feel like there's anything new here.

Punisher #15 - this continues to wallow in Universal Monsters imagery. The letters page is balanced enough to print 'what the heck did you do to Frank Castle?' notes. It remains crazy over the top fun, even when there's an acceptable fill-in artist. I guess they're actually going to change the name of the book to Franken-Castle. Wow. Trust me, I understand how this could be hated, I'm just enjoying the ride.

PvP #45 - collects more of the online strips. Funny geek jokes.

Hack/Slash #30 - as much as I enjoy this book about a girl and her ghoul that fights slashers, it has been looking for a direction of late. This starts a storyline about Public Domain superheroes from the 1940s and their sidekicks, tying their powers into the same energy that powers the slashers. Interesting idea. We'll see how this goes. Not a bad start.

Vincent Price Presents #16 - I always expect these to have a supernatural aspect to the story and they don't always. This one didn't. Not a bad story just kind of an 'oh, that's it?' story. Interesting Euro-manga type art. Acceptable but a bit flat. Actually needed a twist ending.

She-Hulk Sensational - This one-shot was supposed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of the character. There's a funny story, sort of, a story that feels like an inventory issue that they had laying around that they wanted to burn off, and a random reprint. Not actively bad but, meh. Nothing really to see. Get it for a quarter in a couple years.

Tales of the TMNT #68 - a cancer survivor (in real-life) writes a story where the Turtles get shrunk down and injected into April's sister's body in order to fight off alien cancer. They actually call it alien cancer. I won't mock it because it was clearly something important to the writer. Perfectly Acceptable Comic.

Amazing Spider-Man #627 - I'm never sure if it's a good thing or not when the story starts with a page or two of Peter remembering things from his history. With footnotes. To stories from the 80s. The twist ending works for me but a reader that just started picking this up recently would probably be lost. Instead of my 'oh wow' reaction they'd probably go 'huh?'. Enjoyable to me but might be too continuity bound.

Transformers #5 - Optimus gets a great speech that will probably turn the tide, Rodimus is the idiot we thought he was, and things get Worse. Good stuff.

Fantastic Four #577 - these single story issues feel like they have just an epic scope to them. This one actually feels like it's building to something bigger. Interesting.

Usagi Yojimbo #127 - Usagi gets into more trouble just walking around Japan. You feel bad for him sometimes. He's just walking to the next town, minding his own business, sees a swordsman outnumbered 20 to 1, is suddenly mistaken for a friend of that guy and is forced into fighting to protect himself. It always gets more complicated than that but it works.

And there we go. Caught up for a half-hour or so.