Category: 2011
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Carey more than makes up for the previous issue’s weak cliffhanger with this one’s sublime one. The issue, with Tom trying to deal with being stuck in Moby-Dick while Lizzie breaks some bad news to him and he can’t seem to figure out what his father’s doing there. Meanwhile, Lizzie and Savoy meet up with…
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I think Carey just had his first misstep. It might not work out as a misstep… but he ends this issue like it’s “Quantum Leap” or something. It’s a terrible, terrible cliffhanger. The rest of the issue is pretty strong too. It opens with Tom and Lizzie, with Tom blathering on romantically and Lizzie sort…
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There’s a thread I thought Carey had resolved… the whole Savoy being a vampire being. Looks like I was wrong. I guess I just assumed Wilson Taylor knew stuff. That assumption is, apparently, quite wrong. This issue—kicking off the Melville arc—introduces a new villain. Or a possible new villain; she’s a doll maker and she’s…
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Damn, Daryl Gregory kills John Huston. Gregory’s got a rough task—the franchise has always had a confined setting, both in time and place (regardless of jumping around). He remedies it a little… oh, wait, it takes place before the first movie? They use the text paragraph on the indicia and title page for important facts.…
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Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown is probably the first Peanuts film I’ve seen in twenty years. In those twenty years, the Complete Peanuts newspaper strips have started coming out (the film has a scene of the first Peanuts strip, which is nice) and the voice cast has changed. Unfortunately, the new voice cast…
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As Man out of Time finishes, it’s not clear if it’s the new continuity or if Marvel just gave Waid and company the chance to retell the Cap origin again. The series suggests it might behoove them to let other writers take a crack at it, because Waid does find a lot to talk about,…
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It’s nice to read a Captain America comic where the writer isn’t afraid to be unabashedly liberal. Brubaker always keeps it on the back burner a little, like he’s not willing to alienate. Waid is willing to alienate. This issue might feature Molina’s best art so far, only because at one point I thought they…
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Once again, Waid broaches a really interesting possibility for Man out of Time—Cap going back in time to WWII via Reed Richards’s time machine prototype, but then he closes it down again. Sure, it’s kind of cool to see Cap and Tony hanging out and the Martin Luther King Jr. stuff is excellent (I imagine…
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I hate how I dull so quickly to bad art. Molina hasn’t gotten any better, but because I know what to expect (what not to expect, more like), I’m comfortable. This issue gets a lot more traditional. It’s not about Cap moving through time, it’s a retelling of him waking up; this time it’s when…
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Molina’s artwork is truly hideous. It’s goofy and bulky and… it’s indescribably awful. The crisp coloring doesn’t help either. That complaint made, Man out of Time is actually pretty interesting. Waid makes a serious goof with Cap dictating a report to his superior in his head during his first encounter with the Avengers, but otherwise……
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Brubaker goes with a simple conclusion—not out of Tom Strong, but keeping with his Moore fascination on this series, out of Watchmen—and it works. Maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. He ends the series with a lovely setup for a third Incognito and that setup works and so it just makes me want another one…
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I just noticed, this issue, Phillips is really playing up the masks this series of Incognito. Everyone’s got a mask of some kind or another (well, all the girls have Catwoman masks out of the Adam West “Batman”) so it looks like he’s keeping busy illustrating other stuff, since Brubaker’s still not giving him particularly…
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Okay, so every issue of Bad Influences so far has had a different pacing structure. Here, Brubaker splits it between his three or four main characters. Except two of the main characters are antagonists and it’s unclear how much either is going to have to do with the series overall and he gives Zoe Zeppelin…
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My Thin Man affection aside, I’m not against sobriety. However, Russell Brand movies integrate the glory of AA to the point it hurts the film (Get Him to the Greek made a similar move at a similar time). The development hurts Arthur, somewhat significantly. It’s good the film has Greta Gerwig, as she pulls it…
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The story ends before Infinite Crisis, with an OMAC showing up and attacking the narrator. The narrator’s nurse at the assisted living place ends the issue suggesting he’s full of crap, which ends Legacies on a decidedly negative note. Not because the reader would believe he’s a loon, but because it’s such a mundane thing,…
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Do the editors do anything here? They’ve got a Black Firestorm during the Day of Judgment scenes… about six years too early. Wein also covers Final Night; the two are connected, but he doesn’t do a very good job of making them flow together. This issue features some of his worst writing in a while.…
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So, if Wein knew he had to cover the whole Green Lantern goes nuts thing, why is an earthling the best narrator for the series? In fact, the earthbound narrator is now the worst possible choice in a variety of ways. It isn’t enough he wouldn’t know about the Oa stuff or Parallax (oh, Ron…
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It’s difficult to describe what Jerry Ordway inking Dan Jurgens looks like—Ordway definitely brings his sensibilities to it, but there’s the Jurgens underneath. Unfortunately, neither artist is in his best time, so the result is somewhat less than either on their own (in their prime). It’s like plastic-coated Jurgens and the last thing he needs…
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Hmm… is Edginton subtly suggesting the next Victorian Undead series will feature Frankenstein’s Monster? I hope so. Again, there are some needlessly weak pages, but this time I can’t blame it on anyone but Fabbri. Maybe he was rushed. It’s a shame it’s during the big finale with Dracula and Holmes. Edginton comes up with…
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Okay, it’s not Fabbri doing the terrible pages, it’s Guevara on his own. And they are terrible. He can’t maintain the shape of a human head. There are four or five of his pages this issue and it’s so bad, I wanted to put the comic down and stop reading it. Otherwise, again, good issue.…
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As ineffectual as I find Fabbri’s Saturday morning cartoon style, at least he usually works at it. This issue brings in Mario Guevara to ink him and there are some incredible mishaps. One section appears to either be without inks (in which case, it’s clear Fabbri does most of his work while inking) and it…
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Edginton moves the story along a lot faster than I was expecting. I imagine it’s to bring the Dracula supporting cast into it sooner; the last half of the issue is Holmes and Watson teaming up with Professor Van Helsing and company. If I thought Fabbri’s Sherlock Holmes was funny, his Van Helsing is absolutely…
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Let’s see… Edginton doesn’t just bring in Dracula, he also brings in zombie-hunting gypsies, a conspiracy involving the British throne involving vampires (which changes up the series being a straight Dracula adaptation) and London rebuilding. The interesting part of London rebuilding is how it was a facet of Scarlet Traces too. While the first Victorian…
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All writers have limits… and it’s too bad Gates’s limit is writing Cat Grant as a likable human being. He just can’t do it. He tries and tries here, but he ends up making Superwoman more likable than Cat. It’s a strange disconnect. There’s just something so hateful about her, he’s gone beyond a point…
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Gates really humanizes Cat Grant here (I didn’t know she had a dead son, for example) and it comes a little late. If he’d done it earlier, she wouldn’t have seemed so shrill. Besides that delay in characterizing, it’s a good issue. Igle does a great job with Supergirl, as usual, but something about his…
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It’s an imaginative conclusion and it’s… okay. It’s beneath Moore, sure, and I’m sorry he took such a—there’s no other word for it—fan-fic way out. But it’s okay. It doesn’t quite make having reread The Courtyard worth it but he comes really close with it. Moore kind of takes something one might think is completely…
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Wow… it ends even worse than I could have possibly imagined. I like how in Morrison’s reality, a gang of roaming thugs (who bring a vicious dog with them to attack kids) are scared off by a woman in a crappy old car. I guess he needed that one to work for the ending to…
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Okay, the comic is at least a sequel to the first and second movies. I’ve seen some of the other ones, but I can’t remember what happens in them. What’s going on here (if I understand correctly… Barker and Monfette’s attempts at giving the cenobites—if you don’t already know, don’t ask—formal speech is somewhat painful)…
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Now… I know I’m not the target audience (though I do love Leonardo Manco from some of his nineties work), but even so… I wish Boom! had gotten someone better than Christopher Monfette to clean up Clive Barker’s dialogue. It’s unclear how Barker and Monfette split the duties, but something about the lame dialogue makes…
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Seeing Kev Walker draw Iron Man is frightening. I think he based the armor off a toaster. But, once again, Walker’s able to integrate Parker’s odd fantasy elements—this issue, the majority of the action takes place in some idyllic countryside with talking frogs and such—and the issue works. Parker shows his cards here—he plots well…
The Stop Button 