Phil's Reviews — Stuff I Bought #83

Crossed #0 — Writer: Garth Ennis; Art: Jacen Burrows Avatar’s an interesting publisher — they get a lot of series from writers like Ennis and Warren Ellis, often quick-moving, B-movie-type tales, not as polished as the stuff they write for the mainstream publishers, but guilty pleasures nonetheless. This one’s no different; it’s a zombie riff, with a plague turning people into psychopaths and a small group of survivors that we follow as they struggle to fight off the murderous hordes, etc. Burrows is good at delivering the violence (a typical requirement for Ennis artists), and his gleeful, infected bad guys … Continue reading

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Phil's Reviews — Stuff I Read and Put Back #83

Wolverine: Killing Made Simple #1 (of 1) — (First story):  Writer: Christopher Yost;  Penciler: Koi Turnbull;  Inker: Sal Regla   (Second story):  Writer: Todd Dezago;  Pencils: Steve Kurth;  Inks: Serge LaPointe One of those inexplicable, occasional one-shots Marvel does with this character; here, it seems to be a couple of inventory stories they had lying around, the first involving Trance (formerly of the New X-Men) and Nanny, certainly one of the most annoying X-Family villains in the repertoire. The second story is a Wolvy-against-an-alien-virus deal, involving an Antarctic research station. None of it’s horrible, but it’s all mediocre and predictable enough … Continue reading

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Ask the Professor #15 — Current Marvel and DC Continuity

I’ve been out of comics since 2003 and want to get back in.  What major storylines do I need to catch up on in the Marvel/DC universes? nathan  Whooo… OK, Nathan, but be warned: It’s not one long story, but two, since both companies have been pushing company-wide crossovers for the last few years. Let’s start with DC; in the early 00’s, they realized that the 20th anniversary of their second-most-successful Big Event ever, Crisis on Infinite Earths, was approaching, and wanted to do something special to commemorate it. In 2004, the JLA mini-series Identity Crisis kicked things off with … Continue reading

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Phil's Reviews — Stuff I Bought #82

Thor #10 — Writer: J. Michael Straczynski;  Penciler: Olivier Coipel;  Inkers: Mark Morales, Crimelab Studios, allen Martinez and Victor Olazaba This has been agonizingly slow to build, but the current set-up offers Asgard hovering in the American Southwest, and the locals interacting with it, and an eyebrowless female Loki stirring up subtle trouble (gullibility in the face of gods of mischief apparently being an inbred Norse trait), and is a well-constructed basis for storytelling.  May its arc turn out to be less predictable than it appears:  Straczynski’s a big one for examining the serpents in the Garden of Eden, but … Continue reading

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Phil's Reviews — Stuff I Read and Put Back #82

Spider-Man: With Great Power… #5 (of 5) — Writer/Penciler: David Lapham;  Inker: Stefano Gaudiano And so ends another retelling of Spidey’s early, pre-Uncle-Ben’s-death career, this one shoehorning in encounters with a pre-superhero Marvel monster, crooked wrestling promoters, and a drunken older woman. Forgettable and dismissable: Lapham, who’s so good with his own noir creations, just doesn’t seem to have the chops for straight corporate character work like this (as he showed with that endless, incomprehensible Batman serial he did a few years ago); he has to rein in his usual effective nastiness, and when his art has to cover spandex … Continue reading

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