This is better than you might think, mostly because Scott Snyder knows what he's doing, even if Manuel Garcia's pencils are not well-complemented by the inks and colors on this issue.
Yes, it's time for me to get back to linking to all my reviews, so you can keep up with the most accurate and informative and exciting and sometimes typo-laden opinion in comic books.
With Tucker Stone off spelunking in the Andes, the Factual Opinion HQ assembled an all-star partial replacement squad to address the big question of the week: which comics are good, which are not, and how can they all be mocked with elegance and sophistication?
In the history of my CBR reviewery (and I've written well over 300 reviews in the past 15 months), I've only given the coveted five-star review three times. "Casanova" #14 got the perfect score. So did "All-Star Superman" #10. Now, another comic has joined that elite rank: "Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye" #3. Man, did I really like this comic.
This is a terrible comic with the single redeeming feature of Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra's story. Their "Mojoworld" might not be all that great, but it's funny, it looks different from everything else, and it has a sense of absurdity about it.
Though I use words like "tragedy" and "weighty" and "Bendis," I provide a spoiler-free review of the final issue of "Ultimate Spider-Man." But it's not very hard to connect the dots and figure out what happens, especially when I quote from the solicitations for the "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" series headed our way later this fall.
I wrote a couple of CBR review from last week that I never got around to linking to: Aliens #1 and Incredible Hercules #129.
Boy, I'm not a fan of that Jim Lee cover. It's got a bit of the Spanish architecture in the background, but it's such a generic pose otherwise. Some might call it "iconic," but I'd just call it lifeless and insipid.
I review the heck out of "Ghost Rider" #35 over at CBR. You should probably read the comic, read my review, then come back here and say, "you were right about everything! How can you be so right?"
Yes, the Mutant Messiah is still cause for a whole lot of fervor. Everyone's out to kill her or save her, because the fate of the world depends on it. It's a tired concept that doesn't seem able to evolve into anything new, and "X-Force" #15 just gives us more of it.
Here's a comic I didn't know anything about when I got the .pdf from Top Cow to review, but I was so impressed with "Impaler" #3 that I asked if I could take a look at the first two issues, and then ordered the collected edition of Volume 1 from Amazon.
I thought Paul Dini did a decent job on his "Detective Comics" run -- I enjoyed it for what it was, though it suffered in scale compared to Morrison's "Batman" -- but he was definitely responsible for some of the best Batman stories of the 1990s in "Batman: The Animated Series" and the various comic book spin-offs of that project.
When Adam Beechen moved from television writer to Johnny DC writer, I said, "great." Then when he moved from Johnny DC writer to "Teen Titans" scribe, I rooted for him. I thought he would be a great addition to the "Countdown" crew.
What movie is this from? It looks familiar, but I can't quite place it. Anyway, it's been filtered through the pencil magic of Greg Land for this week's "Uncanny X-Men" #510 which is a pretty kickass issue about the Red Queen's assault on the X-HQ.
A gorilla with a gun vs. Wolverine. That's all you really need to make a comic worth buying, right? Especially when it's as well-drawn as "Agents of Atlas" #5.
Though I was away from blogging for a bit during the last week or two (except for my fake Abrams/drilling piece and my Jason Aaron totally-improbable assumption), I was certainly not absent from the comic book internet landscape. I produced no less than seventeen (!) columns and reviews while ignoring my blog-o-responsibilities, and in case you missed any of them, I've included them here for your edutainment. Don't let me hear you say that I ever let you down by not linking to my own work!
Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Wolverine: Weapon X #1, about which I write the following sentences: "In this issue, we get the return of Maverick, Wolverine's old Weapon X colleague, and a growing mystery involving the Blackguard group and the introduction of some mysterious laser-claw wielding killers. Aaron is building some new mythology for Logan, not by telling stories from the past, but by using the legacy of the past to drive the story forward. Like most of Aaron's protagonists, Wolverine's fate is bound to into his history, but he has no choice but to boldly push forward and make amends for who he is and what he's done."
Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Haunted Tank #5, about which I write the following sentences: "It doesn't become about the racist ghost of a confederate soldier learning to accept the ways of the world today, and it doesn't become about the soldiers of today learning to live with this charming old racist codger. In other words, it's not 'Gran Torino: Iraq.'"
Recently reviewed by me at CBR: Justice Society of America #25, about which I write the following sentences: "And what makes it more than just merely fine. What makes it fine in a way that implies yeah-it-was-a-compressed-resolution-of-a-lot-of-stuff is that Jerry Ordway provides the art. Who better than Ordway -- the Platonic ideal of the 'All-Star Squadron'/'Infinity Inc.' approach to comic book nostalgia -- to work on Geoff Johns's 'Justice Society of America'? He's really the perfect artist for the kind of story being told here, a classic artist for a story drenched in old-school storytelling tropes."
Recently reviewed by me at CBR: The Destroyer #1, about which I write the following sentences: "This comic is drenched in blood, and if Val Staples had to hand-paint this issue he would have had to prepare buckets of the red stuff. Yet it's Cory Walker doing the drawing, so the extreme gore takes on a delightful absurdity. This isn't a gruesome, stomach-churning story even if blood drips from its pages. It's a ridiculous, over-the-top, post-'Nextwave' comic full of ultra-violence and explosive action. But since this comic stars a geriatric hero facing the end of his life, the extreme visual bombast contrasts sharply with Marlow's underlying sadness. He's a larger-than-life action hero, but even he doesn't have the courage to tell the ones he loves that he's been given a death sentence by his physician."