War Journal Entry number 658 - Weekly Haul 6/10/09
MARVEL
Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter #1 of 3 - Kieron Gillen + Kano. After the events of Secret Invasion Aftermath: Beta Ray Bill - The Green of Eden, good ol' BRB is sick and tired of Galactus and has made it his mission to take the big guy out, even if his best method to do say is to starve him. That means blowing up the planets Galactus plans on eating, which doesn't really put him in a much better category than the mighty G except for the fact that he helps the people evacuate before he destroys their homes. Also includes a reprint of his very first appearance, Thor #337, written and illustrated by the legendary Walter Simonson.

Dark Avengers #5 - Bendis + Deodato. Seriously "meh." I probably would have dropped this if it wasn't running into a crossover with the excellent Uncanny X-Men in a few issues.

Deadpool #11 - Daniel Way + Paco Medina. Lots more brutally hilarious DP versus Bullseye action. Sweet.

Deadpool: Suicide Kings #3 of 5 - Mike Benson/Adam GLass + Carol Barberi. Deadpool, Daredevil, and Punisher. Hijinks ensue.

Fantastic Four #567 - Millar + Hitch. It's so flashy and insubstantial that it feels more like wankerly fanfic than the real deal. I can't even point to Hitch's art as a redeeming quality this time around. Except for a handful of panels, most of the issue looks like it was done in a single day, while blindfolded. I know Hitch is better than this, so either something's going on in his personal life or he's just stopped giving a shit about the title.

Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #2 of 4 - Chris Eliopoulos + Ig Guara. Top o' the stack. This was the first thing I opened up because I was so excited to read it after the pure joy that was issue one, and I wasn't disappointed. From the Savage Land's "dinosaur debacle" to the last page's gag, it was 100% the most enjoyable thing I read the entire week.

Official Index to the Marvel Universe #6 - More nerdity for my brainity.

Skaar: Son of Hulk #11 - Greg Pak + Ron Lim/Dan Panosian. Skaar sees more of Earth and, no, sir, he doesn't like it.

Ultimatum #4 of 5 - Loeb + Finch. I just can't come up with any more creative insults for this that haven't been said elsewhere already.

Uncanny X-Men #511 - Fraction + Land/Dodson. The conculsion to the Sisterhood story is nothing more than a couple of fast and hard fight scenes, but damn if it ain't fun.

Uncanny X-Men: First Class Giant-Size Special - Jeff Parker/Scott Gray/Roger Langridge + Craig Rousseau/David Williams/Dennis Calero/Sean Galloway/Joe Infurnari/Brad Anderson/Jeff Parker. Some amusing group interaction serves as framing for some fine individual pieces. I'm most enamored with Wolverine's presentation of his origin, i.e. some completely made up shit that steals from everybody. In it he goes from being a dull kid in a dull town that gets bitten by a radioactive wolverine at a science exhibit to being a children's author, then a theater actor, and then a folk singer, before finally finding his place as the famous Agent of S.N.I.K.T. that battled zombie clowns from Budapest and the super deadly, but always fashionable, B.I.M.B.O. terrorist organization. Whoo, that was a sentence and three.

War of Kings: Savage World of Skaar one-shot - Christos N. Gage + Graham Nolan/Reilly Brown. A member of the Shi'ar Praetorian Guard and one of the Inhumans Royal Family have to team up to survive when they find themselves crashed upon the world of Sakaar (before it was destroyed, naturally). Though it doesn't stray too far from its Enemy Mine roots, it was still enjoyable.

Wolverine #74 - Jason Aaron + Adam Kubert. Daniel Way + Tommy Lee Edwards. Finishes the stories began in issue #73. I liked the interaction with Spidey in the Aaron+Kubert piece, but overall I didn't find it overly memorable.

Wolverine: Revolver one-shot - Victor Gischler + Das Pastoras. Wolverine plays Russian Roulette against someone that seems to be as unconcerned as he. The story is decent, but the art is gorgeous and well worth the purchase.

X-Factor #44 - David + Santucci/De Landro. Multiple storylines occurring in multiple timeperiods continue to barrel along. The art is pretty stiff in some scenes, and I'm not sure which artist it is. But it really hurts the seductiveness of Monet when she's in poses that look like her joints have popped out. 

X-Men Forever #1 - Chris Claremont + Tom Grummett. Was Claremont's writing always so melodramatically overwrought?

DC
Booster Gold #21 - Dan Jurgens. With the Bruce Wayne Batman dead, Booster heads to the Batcave to retrieve the evidence of BG's actual mission that Bat's kept. But the new Batman doesn't take too kindly to intruders that he has no respect for. Hijinks ensue. The issue begins a Blue Beetle back up feature by Matthew Sturges and Mike Norton; unfortunately it's on the current Blue Beetle, who I haven't really taken a liking to.

Green Lantern Corps #37 - Peter J Tomasi + Patrick Gleason. A Blackest Night prelude with more going on in it than I can describe here. 

IDW PRESS
G.I.Joe Origins #4 - Larry Hama + Mike Hawthorne. Snake Eyes makes his move, and the story, though not covering much plot ground, is still keeping me interested.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Official Movie Adaptaion #3 & #4 of 4 - Simon Furman + Alex Milne(#3)/Jon Davis-Hunt(#4). The story is stupid, the plot is sparse and loopholed, and the art is atrocious. And the humor... don't get me started on the "humor" of the movie. After reading this I no longer wanted to see the movie. I know I will eventually, I'll probably end up buying it, but right now I'm done with the Bayverse. It's not that it doesn't match what's been done before, and that I'm such a hardcore geek that I'm unwilling to accept anything other than regurgitated rehashment, it's that it fucking sucks.

TITAN BOOKS
Torchwood: Rift War - Simon Furman/Paul Grist/Ian Edginton + Paul Grist/SL Gallant/D'Israeli. Pretty standard fare of alien invaders from another dimension mucking with space and time, but it would probably have helped if I'd already seen an episode of the series. Since this was originally serialized in the Torchwood Magazine they probably didn't think there was a need to introduce the characters, but a little more effort towards characterization to actually differentiate them would have been appreciated. As it stands, Jack is still the only one I'm familiar with (due to his appearances in Doctor Who). It might work for Torchwood fans, but offers very little to people that aren't.

WILDSTORM
Authority vol.5 #11 - Dan ABnett/Andy Lanning + Simon Coleby. The issue begins with a poignant scene of Midnighter worrying about the incommunicado Apollo, and then quickly shifts to action, horror, and some further revelations about what's going on in the post-apocalyptical Wildstorm universe. I've heard that readers are dropping off this title quickly, which is yet another example of Americans having no taste.

back-issue buys
Avengers Assemble volume 5 - Kurt Busiek + Alan Davis/Ivan Reis/Manuel Garcia/Keiron Dwyer/Brent Anderson/Patrick Zircher/Yanick Paquette. Another excitingly super-fantastic hardcover steal, I got this $39.99 tome for a whopping $8. Whereas volume 4 was a hodgepodge collection of stories related only by their writer and the time of their release, this volume, collecting Avengers volume 3 #41-56, is really one big single tale. Acting as a sort-of sequel to Busiek's Avengers Forever mini-series, this is the quintessential Kang story. I don't see anybody doing a better Kang story within the next twenty years. Seriously. It also serves as a slam-bang, balls- to-the-wall finale to Busiek's Avengers saga.

Captain America #49 & 50 - Ed Brubaker + Luke Ross. #50 also contains back-up features by Marcos Martin and Fred Hembeck. I picked these up in preparation for the 600th issue of Captain America that was set to be released the following week. Both issues demonstrated Brubaker's ability to do stories concentrating on single characters that still add to and move along the overall story. Issue 49 is almost entirely just Sharon Carter on her own, a woman of action forced into retirement, as she attempts to sort out what she's done and what has been done to her. Issue 50 focuses on Bucky-Cap's history, specifically the sucktitude of his birthdays over the years, and serves to further illustrate how sometimes bringing a character back isn't just a stunt performed by lazy storytellers, but can actually been done well when someone has some quality stories to tell.

Legion of Monsters hardcover - Eh, decent. Glad I only spent $6 on it. Being a colletion of stories about different characters all done by different creative teams, it's an uneven piece. Mostly on the good side. Nothing jumps out as crap. I am confused by the choices made for the selection of reprinted stories. The Frankenstein story and the original Legion of Monsters tale from Marvel Premiere #28 both make sense, but why waste time with three tales of the Scarecrow, a character that never rose above complete obscurity. And even wasting one reprint for Manphibian was more than the lame Creature from the Black Lagoon rip-off deserved. The space would have been better used reprinting old and significant stories of the major Marvel monsters featured in the new stories.

Silver Surfer volume 3 #100 (Jan 1995) - Ron Marz + Joe Phillips. The gimmick covers of the 90s were and continue to be targets of much derision. Some justifiably so. But the gimmick covers often serve as nice bookmarks of the story arcs, looking back now it is often easy to find good representative issues of a series' status quo, or significant changes thereof, by picking up the issues with the gimmick covers. Story arcs were intentionally crafted to begin or end, or feature major events, in issues graced with snazzy, eye-catching covers. Well, mostly. This issue is an exception. It features a fight between Silver Surfer and Mephisto, but nothing much differentiates it from any other fight they've had. Mephisto thinks it does, because he finally tricked SS into giving up his soul, but the fact that SS denies the validity of the deal throughout the issue completely undercuts Mephisto boasts. Then again, being full to the brim with pretentiously preposterous prose, I guess it does represent the series at that time quite well.

Thor #474 (June 1994) - Roy Thomas + M.C. Wyman. Sporting a gorgeously painted cover by Lou Harrison that is embellished with silver foil lightning effects and some pretty good embossing, the issue itself is an ugly mess. Thor returns to Earth with the High Evolutionary and a bunch of criminals that he's "evolved" into neo-Gods. It all strikes me as the 90s-style flash-and-grit-instead-of-substance version of the Young Gods. There's a lot of posing, a lot of fighting that doesn't actually accomplish anything, and the supposed story and characterization is handle in sparse pieces of melodrama. Again, a perfect example of what Thor was like at the time. Hard to imagine that 15 issues later Warren Ellis would be writing the series.