Chad’s Comments (group member since Mar 22, 2018)

Chad’s comments from the I Read Comic Books group.

Hickman's FF run is my favorite run on the book. I really like what he does with the Council of Reeds and the school. Lots of cool heady concepts that work really well with FF. Waid's run is good too. I also liked the Claremont/Pacheco run and of course John Byrne's is a classic. I'm hit and miss with what North has been doing.

This week's trip to the comic book store.

Thundercats / Power Puff Girls #1
Captain Planet #2
Void Rivals #21
Absolute Martian Manhunter #5
Absolute Wonder Woman #10
Blade Forger #5
Batman #161
Feral #15
Geiger #16
Hornsby & Halo #8
Rocketfellers #7
Justice League Unlimited #9
Uncanny X-Men #18
Storm #10
West Coast Avengers #9
Space Ghost Annual #1
The Sixth Gun: Battle for the Six #1

Last week's adventures in comics.

Batman Vol. 5: The Dying City ★★
This was awful. Everyone felt out of character. It also felt like Zdarsky just gave up and phoned this in. Zdarsky's a really capable writer and this is one of the worst things he's written. Just one dumb thing on top of another.

Captain America Modern Era Epic Collection, Vol. 2: Death of the Dream ★★★★★
Ed Brubaker's Cap run continues to be the defining run for the character. Even lesser arcs are better than the majority of Marvel's output today. This epic collection dips into Civil War and tackles Captain America's death that follows immediately afterwards. I remember when this originally came out and it was a big deal that even made the mainstream press. And it wasn't just a gimmick. It's a good story with terrific art by Steve Epting and Mike Perkins. If you ever plan on reading one Captain America run in your life, I'd make it this one.

Search and Destroy, vol. 2 ★★★★
The artwork is great. The story is simple at this point. The main character is trying to reclaim all of her body parts that were cut off her and given to other people. She continues to get them back but is surprised how much weaker she is, now that she is reclaiming them.

Paradise Court ★★★
Your typical slasher story that you've read before. Four college kids go to visit an old friend in a remote gated community over Spring Break. Then people start dying off. It's not bad, just not original either.

Dead Space: Salvage ★
Just completely awful. I've played the games and still couldn't tell what was happening in this. The art is terrible. Some of the worst art I've ever seen. Then someone made the decision to put all the lettering directly on the art instead of using text bubbles. I couldn't read a lot of it because the text color was too close to the color of the artwork. This whole thing was a big fucking mess.

The Michael Moorcock Library Elric: The Balance Lost Vol. 1 ★★★
All of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champions get together for this multiverse spanning adventure. It's not just Elric, Hawkmoon, Beck and Corum also get equal screen time. I'm not sure that every set of characters needs a multiverse but this one did at least exist before a lot of the others.

The Black Knight ★★
A public defender gains the same powers as Marvel's Black Knight and fights rival Russian mobs. The leader of one of them is immortal and trying to kill off all the male heirs of the other one. They keep the story pretty simple. Don't expect answers to anything. Just a lot of fighting by a girl in armor but because it's Zenescope there is no armor in the middle of her chest at all, all the way down past her belly button. It looks ridiculous and makes no sense.

Spree ★★★
The world has ended. Only the mall is left. Now it's generations later and the clans are nonstop at war. When a leader's son is framed for murder, he and a woman band together to discover the truth. Not bad. Don't think about the logistics or it all falls apart. But if you just go with the premise it's an interesting story.

Grimm Fairy Tales: Age of Camelot ★★★
This was alright. Not as good as the last volume, Legacy. The Camelot stuff was odd. Really only Merlin, Morgan Le Fay and Mordred get much screen time. Skye Matthews seems to take a backseat in this too which I found odd. For some reason when the Knights of the Round Table they get Iron Man type suits of armor instead of mystical ones. Seemed out of place for this world but whatever. Also, having King Arthur only appear as a very minor character in the return of Camelot is an interesting choice.

Daredevil, Vol. 6: Lowlife ★★★★
Daredevil continues to kick butt. He's still dealing with the media wondering if Matt is actually Daredevil or not. He gets a new love interest, a blind girl named Milla. She can tell that he's Daredevil though so that could be interesting. The main impetus of the arc is about the Owl trying to move into Hell's Kitchen selling Mutant Growth Hormone. The Owl has never been the most threatening villain but I like what his henchman are doing here trying to set him up like the Kingpin. I really like Bendis's writing here.

Daredevil, Vol. 7: Hardcore ★★★★★
The Kingpin starts making his moves to retake New York City and Daredevil's not having it. I really like how this escalates over this story. Getting the guest artists to come in and help illustrate the big fight at the end of issue #50 was a nice touch as well. Great stuff.

Green Lantern: War Journal, Vol. 1: Contagion ★★★★
John Stewart is back on Earth taking care of his mom who suffers from dementia. He's left the Green Lantern Corp after it was taken over by the United Planets (who it turns out are now a bunch of dirtbags). This Reverent Queen has come from another universe and is after John Stewart because in this other universe he kept her at bay. Good stuff so far. Montos's art isn't bad either.

Battron: Before the Chariots ★★★
It's Dec 1944. The Allies have launched a huge offensive to enter Germany but it's went poorly. A bunch of men have regrouped in a small French town with the Nazis lurking in the area. It's good stuff from one the people who worked on The 'Nam for Marvel.

The Adventures Of Spawn Complete Collection ★
Jeebus, this was awful. It's a Saturday morning cartoon version of Spawn. Spawn's still married to Wanda and Cyan is his daughter. His suit was just given to him and he teams up with Redeemer to fight, Cy-Gor, Overkill and a few others. This thing is packed with exposition for something that is supposed to be for kids. All that exposition doesn't say anything either. This was a failed webcomic and should have just stayed that way.

Hildebrand: Valkyrie ★★★
A woman in England becomes a warrior and travels to Rome with her father fighting misogyny along the way. It's a little wordy but the story was interesting.

Descent into Dread ★★★
Caliber returned with this horror anthology. It's pretty good. All of the stories are written by two people with a rotating cast of artists. It also has 4 Frankenstein stories set in an apocalyptic future.

Time Grunts - Volume One: The Monsters Within ★★★
At the end of World War II the Nazis have developed time travel leaving one platoon in the area to try and stop them from changing the past. The mutant experiments were a weird diversion. This is not half bad. We'll see how the 2nd half finishes it off.

Time Grunts - Volume Two: Last Call ★★★
Volume 2 has our troop of World War II grunts following the Nazis to the past to stop them from changing the outcome of the war. The ending feels like the book stopped before the story was over though.


Caliber Presents ★★★
It was cool to see Caliber came back with a new anthology series. Negative Burn was really good back in the day. This is a bunch of small time creators telling short stories so the quality is mixed. I think Joe Pruett was the only creator I recognized. Still, known or not, there's some good stories in this.

The Best American Comics 2008 ★★★★
I thought Lynda Berry picked a great collection of the year's comics. It's comics from the Bush era so the Iraq War does play a part in some of the stories. There's stuff in here from Alison Bechdel, Derf, Rick Geary, Matt Groening, Jaime Hernandez, Jason Lutes (Berlin is terrific. Go read it.), Seth, Chris Ware and Gene Luen Yang. Lots of good stuff to sample here and then go out and find the whole thing.

The Best American Comics 2014 ★★★★
Scott McCloud and I must be on the same wavelength. I thought this year's group of comics was terrific. I really liked how he organized everything and gave a little intro to each group of comics. Plus in addition to the usual suspects like Los Bros Hernandez, Adrian Tomine, Charles Burns, R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the like, there's also Raina Telemeier, John Lewis and Brian K. Vaughan.

Son Chasers ★
This was real bad, especially the art. It's about the son of Hitler saving the president. All of the characters look like zombies with white skin. I couldn't tell them apart unless they were wearing glasses or something. Give this a pass.

Fighters: Dark Match ★★
This was OK. It's about a guy with powers who the FBI forces to join a crimefighting ring that turns out to all be scripted like wrestling. There becomes a lot more to it with creating new powers for them and some other stuff. The double and triple crossing got so complex that I lost the thread of who was up to what about halfway through and wanted it to end.

John Carpenter's Tales of Science Fiction: Interference Pattern ★★★
This was a cool idea dealing with real world physics questions and I liked how this played out. It just got a little too out there and open-ended at the end for me.

Mississippi Zombie ★★
Little nothing stories of zombie attacks in actual Mississippi towns (not sure if that last part matters but the forward mentions it). These were not very good.

Stalag-X ★★★
This was... OK. A prison ship is attacked by the Krael and survivors are taken to their prison colony, Stalag-X. Humans are being experimented on in a VR world to infect them with the dark ripper that takes away their leadership? It didn't make any sense really. And it takes a LOOONG time to get there. Then the shit flies in the last issue and there's a cliffhanger, but I'm not sure how much I care about reading the next volume. The pacing of this is really off. The art isn't anything special. Also included is a 30 page prose story about what happened to Deacon before she appears in the story.

The Case Files of Harlan Falk ★★★
A crisis negotiator for monsters. I think I would have liked this a little better if it was lighter in tone. The main story has Falk dealing with a kid whose imaginary friend killed his parents. His negotiating with zombies at the beginning was much more fun.

White Knuckle ★★★
I didn't love the art but the story was solid. It's about an old serial killer who was never caught and keeps an eye on the kid who got away. Thirty years later he befriends the woman and her son. Things begin to spiral from there.

Dynamite is reoffering it's 20th anniversary Humble Bundle. 74 trades for $20. There's plenty of good stuff in here.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/dy...

Machiavelli wrote: "Awesome. After I finish my Fantastic Four binge before the movie next weekend I’ll grab Lock and Key"

When you finish the main series and move onto the collections of one shots and short stories, take a look to see what's in the collection. IDW has put out 6 or 7 different editions of them and almost every one is the same except for a 7 page story for instance.

That's quite the undertaking Kat. I hope you found a list to make it easy. He's had 6 gazillion different series.

There's a new Humble Bundle out for pretty much all of James Tynion's creator owned books. I'm kind of amazed they were able to put this together across so many different publishers. $24 for 42 graphic novels.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/fr...

Machiavelli wrote: "You mentioned Joe Hill - you read Locke and Key? That’s high on my list and if you say it’s good too will try and get it"

Locke and Key is fantastic. My favorite horror series of the 21st century. I've read it all through 3 or 4 times now. Hill's 2 stories he did for DC are good too, Plunder and Basketful of Heads.

Also, this may be helpful to you. It's a list of original prose novels featuring comic book characters I put together a few years ago separated by publisher. Feel free to add to it if I missed anything. Sometimes they slip by me but I have a strange fascination with them and have read a LOT of them. There are definitely both regular writers and comic book writers listed.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/3285...

If you want more, I can get you more. I've got about 100 original prose novels featuring comic book characters in my office. I guarantee there's some comic book writers in there. I know Jim Butcher wrote a Spider-Man novel and he has a bunch of original Dresden Files stories he did with Dynamite including an OGN. And I just thought of Michael Jan Friedman who wrote a bunch of Star Trek novels and wrote Darkstars for DC among others. He even wrote a prose crossover between Star Trek and the X-Men called Planet X.

Ed wrote: "Machiavelli wrote: "Prose writers trying their hand at comics can go sideways, so I wait to hear whether others like it."

It often doesn't work. I have I Was a Teenage Slasher here to read so we'll see how that goes. I think Joe Hill is someone able to do both. Same thing with Neil Gaiman before he killed his career by getting caught being a creep. Ta-Nahisi Coates's Black Panther bored me to tears. Peter David has written a ton of comics that I loved and some good books. Chris Claremont wrote some books in the 90s I dug. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison's prose is not at all good IMO. Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club 2 as a comic and it was one of the worst comics I've ever read. Duane Swierczynski is someone I enjoy in both prose and comics. Greg Rucka has written several novels I really like and his comics are terrific. Max Allan Collins has written Ms. Tree and Road to Perdition plus over 50 books and everything I've read of his has been really good. Those are all I can think of off the top of my head.

Yesterday's trip to my LCS. They finally have Dynamite comics again after Dynamite had a few months battle with Diamond where Diamond quit paying for their comics and Dynamite had to find a new distributor.

Giant-Size House of M #1
Godzilla Destroys the Marvel Universe #1
Bring on the Bad Guys: Abomination
Absolute Batman #10
Absolute Flash #5
World's Finest #41
Deadpool Wolverine #7
Detective Comics #1099
Exceptional X-Men #11
GI Joe #9
Herculoids #5
Imperial #2
The World to Come #2
Predator vs. Spider-Man #4
redcoat #13
Space Quest #2
TMNT #10
Thundercats #16
Ultimate Black Panther #18
Aquaman - Shark Week #1 - A free comic from DC and their corporate overlords at Discovery / WB

There's a new Humble Bundle Megabundle for maybe every Star Trek comic IDW has ever published. It's a lot for $24. I've read a lot of them and their two ongoing series are very good. The worst comics I saw in there were actually the John Byrne ones he did maybe 15 years ago. He just cut up stills of the original show and then pasted in new dialogue. It's weird.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/st...

This week's adventures in comics continued. (I read a lot by and in the pool in the summer.)

Captain America: Red Menace, Vol. 2 ★★★★
Cap and Agent 13 are headed to London baby. Lukin's operating in the background with the Red Skull trying to take over his mind. Meanwhile, Bucky's in the background watching over everyone. It's a cool teamup with Spitfire and Union Jack. Brubaker does a terrific job of the more quiet moments. Epting's on art so you know this book is looking terrific.

Civil War: Captain America ★★★★★
While the real events of Civil War were happening between Captain America and Iron Man over in the main book, we get some one off stories here. They are good too, just smaller. I really like the Winter Soldier one shot focusing on Bucky but all of it was what you can always expect from Ed Brubaker.

Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America ★★★★
It was pretty clever to set this up as the five stages of grief. There's plenty of good moments here as the various heroes of the Marvel Universe realize that Cap is gone. Well done.

The Death of Captain America, Vol. 1 ★★★★★
Wow, this one really packs an emotional punch. You should read Civil War first though to know why Captain America has been arrested. The title does give it away. At the time, this came out it was a big deal, up there with the death of Superman. Even the regular news picked the story up. The rest of this volume is the rest of the cast trying to figure out what really happened that day while the Red Skull and his cronies run circles around them. It's all really good spy story type stuff. I'm honestly a little surprised at this point that Brubaker hasn't tried to write a novel. That's what a lot of his stories read like.

Daredevil, Vol. 5: Out ★★★★★
Matt gets outed in the paper as Daredevil. This is just excellent writing. Bendis does dialogue so well and every scene in this is enthralling. This is one of those runs you hand to people when people say they don't get Bendis's appeal. This is peak era when he really could do no wrong.

Last week's adventures in comics.

Hulk & Doctor Strange #1 ★★
This one didn't do a whole lot for me. Bruce Banner astral projects back in time to his origin as the Hulk to see if he's a bad person or not. Then Aunt May and Agatha Harkness team up in a filler story.

Ghost Rider Vs. Galactus #1 ★
The worst one of these by a large margin. I don't think Straczynski has ever read a Ghost Rider comic because that's not how he works. Of course, Ghost Rider can't give Galactus his Penance Stare. How would that even work? This whole thing is just pure nonsense. Also, Juan Ferreyra, Ghost Rider in no way has bone eyebrows.

Captain America & Volstagg #1 ★★★★
I quite liked this other side of Volstagg and how he's not really the buffoon he's often seen as. Cap definitely takes second stage in this story.

Doctor Doom & Rocket Raccoon #1 ★★★
I expected this would be the best of these team ups Straczynski is doing but it wasn't that. It's just solid. Doom hires Rocket to help him build a time machine that can go back before the big bang. When it happens, exactly what you expected to happen, happens.

DEN Volume 4: Dreams and Alarums ★★★★★
The continuing adventures of Den as he searches for Kath. Some pieces of this are confusing as it's sometimes dreams or the like after long sequences. And Den gets fat. Along for his search for Kath though, he attacks air fighters, meets some fish people and then ghouls. There's still plenty to like. Plus, Den finally gets some clothes.

Vampirella Year One ★★★★
An expanded look at Vampirella's origin. This isn't strictly a Year One as it takes place over several years but it is an origin story of sorts ending off with Vampirella from the 70s. It's good art and I almost always like Christopher Priest's writing.

Public Domain, Volume 1: Past Mistakes ★★★★
Singular Comics has made billions off their character The Domain but it turns out they may not actually own the rights to the character. Enter the original artist and his two sons, one who is a major asshole and the other floats from job to job. Chip Zdarsky does it all in this series, both writing and drawing it. It's cool stuff filled with his humor.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Hound and Other Stories ★★★
Quick adaptations of The Hound, The Temple and The Nameless City. Tanabe's artwork is exquisite. I don't feel these stories carry the same dread though as the originals. These flew by as Tanube removed most of the text in favor of showing us what was happening. That surprisingly didn't always work as well as I expected it to.

Clodagh ★★★★★
This series is great. I can't wait for the rest. It's about a witch who terrorizes the local villages and kidnaps a little girl. Her father and stepmother both go after her separately and her stepmother used to be a badass mofo warrior.

You Have Those Wild Eyes Again, Mooch ★★
I've tried MUTTS before and I think it's just not for me. We have a dog so these should be funny, but it just reads as over the top schmaltz to me.

Grimm Fairy Tales Legacy ★★★★
This was surprisingly good considering I always thought these were nothing but an excuse for a little tna in your comics. It's about a woman who takes over as the guardian of the nexus from her mother fighting monsters from fairy tales updated to a modern bent. It follows a monster of the week format. The art was quite good too. It's good enough that I'm probably going to check more of these out on Hoopla.

Model Five Murder ★★★
Some pretty cool, noirish sci-fi. An android sees another version of itself floating in space while out on a mission and has to work backward to figure out what happened. This is only about 50 pages long so it's a tight story. If it had been fleshed out with a heftier page count who knows how good it could have been.

Lady Hel ★★
Lady Hel tries to get her mojo back after Purgatori beat the snot out of her in Vampirella vs Purgatori. She's lost most of her power and her sister Lady Demon is coming after her now. Eh, I could care less about these characters and now they've introduced a multiverse as well. Ugh!

Cretaceous ★★★
A wordless comic set in the Cretaceous Era. The story floats from dinosaur to dinosaur as they all struggle to eat or be eaten. It's a cool but quick read.

Dead Weight: Murder at Camp Bloom ★★★★
Imagine Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys put on some weight and get sent to fat camp. Four campers uncover a murder and determine they can't trust any of the counselors. Don't worry the fat camp junior detectives are on the case. A fun, all ages mystery that is inclusive and LGBTQ+. Maybe we'll see another case next summer.

Death Sentence Vol. 1 ★★★★
Definitely channeling some elements of Strikeforce: Morituri here, just without the aliens with balls on their chins. Three people get an STD that gives them superpowers along with a death sentence in 6 months. But what happens when 2 of the 3 people are a barely disguised Russell Brand and Pete Doherty? Well, we get one guy who goes completely out of control, a fuckup drug addict rockstar and an artistic girl with acid sweat. It's cool stuff. It is also very adult.

Death Sentence Vol. 2: London ★★★
Not as focused storywise as the first volume where you had three leads get the Gplus virus and ultimately go after each other while making a mess of London. Those characters fade to the background some. Verity still has a decent size role, but now the Americans have come on the scene to try and steal a cure while various random subplots ensue. The introduction to the complete edition says this was all planned but it doesn't really like that was the case.

Death Sentence: The Complete Collection ★★★
Strokes that Strikeforce Morituri itch at least in concept. People gain super powers but will die in 6 months. At least that's the idea, even though none of these people ever seem to get to that point. the first arc is pretty cool, focusing on three GPlus carriers, two of which are clearly based on Russell Brand and Pete Doherty, both are complete assholes to put it nicely. After the initial arc, the story loses focus and by the end still doesn't really have any resolutions. It's worth a read on hoopla, I will give it that. That ending just really wasn't an ending though if you ask me.

Primer: Clashing Colors ★★★
The sequel to Primer from a few years ago which I loved. This I thought was just OK. Primer really wants to join the Teen Titans from the cartoon. I actually think that was part of the reason, the writing wasn't as tight. Trying to put this more in the DC universe but also not by making changes to the Titans history puts it in kind of a no man's land. The other thing I didn't like was the change in artists part way through. Gretel Lusky's art is a lot of fun. Nicoletta Baldari's artwork left me wondering what was happening in the action sequences. I had the hardest time following them. It's still not bad. Just not the lovefest I had with the original book.

Jonna and the Unpossible Monsters Vol. 2 ★★★
This thing moves so fast you barely have time to take any of it in. Any other comic would turn a single element in this into a 6 issue arc. Here it only takes one. Jonna gets forced into an underground fighting ring battling kaiju. By the next issue she's free. The stinger at the end of issue #8 was interesting. Looking forward to reading the final trade. Good thing I have it here.

Jonna and the Unpossible Monsters Vol. 3 ★★★
This reads better straight through. Don't worry all 12 issues will probably take you 30 minutes. It seems to be written as if displaying a child's imagination. It's wordless for long passages but you do get answers on where these kaiju are from and why Jonna is different. The art is terrific.

Frankie and the Creepy Cute Critters ★★★
A nice kids comic about Frankie, a fairy with bat wings. She moves to a new town where all of the kids are traditional fairies and think she's scary. After going through the woods and seeing some of the other animals like snakes and opossums that try to be scary, she is able to fit in as well.

Frankie and the Beastly Bog Song ★★
Hmm, this seems like a redux of Frankie's first book. She and her mom head outdoors where she finds more animals she's afraid of until she finds out the truth about them. If this is all Boyle has to say, she's already said it.

Grimm Fairy Tales presents Day of the Dead ★★★
Pretty good art but the story meandered. A couple of voodoo practitioners are trying to force this woman and a man named Talisman into becoming the King and Queen of Pentacles. It gets monotonous in places.

The Idris File ★★
This was an odd one with some fugly art. It's about a kid and his mom who go to a small town in Wales where she gets a job as a housekeeper. This kid is odd and meets a ghost and Nazis but the story isn't that interesting and the art is real ugly.

Humble Bundle has a really good collection of Image comics out. 36 trades for $24.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/re...

Last week's adventures in comics, belated edition.

Blue Beetle Vol. 2: Forever Blue ★★★
The time travel issue with all the little odes to obscure Keith Giffen characters was easily the best issue in the bunch here. Nice little tribute to one of the guys who shaped DC in the 90s and wrote a ton of Blue Beetle along the way. Then Victoria Kord corrupts one of the beetles for her own end. It all feels a bit rushed as the series winds down. Gutierrez's art is interesting, if he ever drew a background he could be pretty good.

The Rabagoo Race ★
This reads more like a sketch book than a coherent story. As static images it's maybe fine. As sequential art... I guess you could call it that. The thing changes from a boat race to a bicycle race half way through and then an ode to his dog which he clearly misses.

The colors look thrown on the page like a Jackson Pollack painting. The lettering is constantly changing fonts and appears randomly on the page. I think the last 20 pages or so are extras. I'm not really sure when the story ends bu the end is back to random boats so I think it's extras. This whole thing is a mess. Has it even seen an editor?

Ghost Circus ★★★
This was alright. It's about a kid who wakes up in a circus but not just any circus, it's a circus of ghosts. He can't remember what happened to him but it's pretty obvious to anyone that has consumed media before. One of the ghosts helps him and it's all well and good. The second half of the story gets weird though when he decides to help the ghost girl and ultimately the whole circus. It feels like two unrelated stories smushed together.

Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday ★★
Going into this, I was excited. Waid's made both of these series very good. It's just too timey-wimey though. Grodd starts traveling through time when so does Superman and Batman. Soon everyone is. I couldn't keep track at what point of time everyone was or even which version of what character was which. DC is clearly planning on this to be a lead in to the their next event in the fall which is just the Omega symbol. I'm sure it'll be some kind of interaction with the Absolute universe.

Titans Vol. 3: Hard Feelings ★
I dropped this book from my pull as soon as Tom Taylor left and I am sure glad I did. This was awful. The Titans bicker constantly nonstop throughout this. Even though they are invited to be part of the new Justice League, they decide to go underground in New York City. Clock King's got some new powers that Layman can't even explain. I still have no idea what they really are. Donna's the new team leader but Dick is nonstop giving her advice. DC's been putting out some great comics lately but sure ain't one of them. The only thing it's good for is lining the bottom of a bird cage.

Small Town Spirits ★★
Some decent juvenile fiction comics about a town in Ireland where monsters visit once a year and the town throws a celebration and holds family games. One family always loses and another always wins. One of the boys decides to change their fate, leaving the doorway for all monsters to come through the gate. I'm sure you can see where this is all headed because there are no surprises.

Queen of Swords: A Barbaric Tale ★★★★
I had just as much fun with this as with the regular Barbaric comic. Yes, there's no Owen talking to his sword, but Deadheart talking to her sword is just as much fun. Corin Howell is a good substitute for Nathan Gooden while he works on the main book. I haven't seen her art in a while and it's always welcome when it does pop up.

Demon Days ★★★
Marvel characters reimagined as oni and yokai (basically Japanese trolls and demons). It's a story of Mariko finding the truth about herself while being pursued by a woman who wants to drink her blood. It's a muddled story lacking any kind of excitement.

Pavil's Mask ★★
A man crash lands into a culture living atop an ancient culture that has flooded. Now they no longer know what the artifacts they find do and can only see 10% of it as the rest is underwater. I saw someone else use the word enigmatic about this book and I think that definitely applies. Don't expect a lot of answers to what's going on. There are a lot of wordless pages full of random panels of villagers just living their lives. The coloring doesn't add anything to the pages and I wish this was just in black and white. The colors are just applied in large blocks (make this half of the panel solid green. Leave the figures uncolored, etc.). It actually distracts from and obscures the art instead of enhancing it.

The Heart Hunter ★★★
This wasn't bad. It's about a cursed kingdom that plops people's hearts out of their bodies and into indestructible jars. At that point every one becomes immortal but also fails to grow. The only way to grow is to find your soul mate but at that point the two of you have to immediately leave or will die. A woman with a broken heart is tasked by the king to take care of a man with a golden heart which is where this story kicks off. The end of this got so convoluted that it made my head hurt. But overall, not bad at all.

Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas ★★★
These shorter strips that Roca did for a weekly gig in Spain are great. The first half of this is 5 stars. The strips are self-deprecating and witty. Once we get to parts two and three though the strips turn more towards politics and social commentary and lack the same punch and humor. The strips are 9 to 12 panels and take a lot of mental oompf to stick with. At 200+ pages that's asking a lot.

Holy Lacrimony ★
I didn't get this at all. It's about the saddest person in the world getting abducted by this weird shapeshifting alien that seems to be wearing the ghost killer mask from Scream. Then he goes to therapy in an alien abduction group. I found the whole thing a waste of time with poor art.

X-Men: Hellfire Vigil #1 ★
Please don't read this and think all of the X-titles are this bad. (Although some of them were and have already been cancelled.) This was hella boring. Where the Hellfire Galas were one shots full of surprises in the Krakoan era, this was a funeral for the era and just plain snooze-inducing. It starts off as a remembrance in New York and then switches to a Dazzler concert in Chicago where she sings a lot and there are multiple pages devoted to her songs (which are absolutely nothing but filler). I think it suffers from having every creative team tackle 5 pages instead of having one writer write the whole thing. Regardless the whole thing is a waste of time and my $8.

X-Men By Jed Mackay Vol. 2: Hostile Takeover ★★★
This is alright but nothing special. Alpha Flight shows up. This new menace 3K rears its head and there's lots of fighting. But MacKay's other comics I've loved instead of just thought was OK. Maybe he's having problems juggling this large of a cast? The art is fine too. That's the best description in every way for this comic so far. It's fine.

The Weirn Books, Vol. 2: The Ghost and the Stolen Dragon ★★★★
I really like these kids comics. They're more in line with like Harry Potter or something I guess as there's a real sense of danger to them. Now this is very much a volume 2 and you want to make sure and read them in order as this bills off of that one. The villain from volume one returns to not only threaten the school but to attempt to drive the life energy of all the kids in the school. There's also a dragon involved and an ending that teases a third book. It's all really good stuff.

Free for All #1 ★★★★
A crazy little one shot from the guy behind Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. Our cast is all human this time, but just as messed up. This is set in a near future where rich people are put in a lottery where they have to give up half their earnings or fight to the death. It's good stuff. And very violent.

Nick Fury Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1 ★★★
A little story set shortly before World War II. Fury is hired to go to China and find out who is destroying the planes there that the U.S. is secretly supplying to the Chinese while they fight the Japanese. It's not bad and Casagrande's art is good.

Timeslide #1 ★★★★
A new Child of the Vault is destroying pivotal moments in mutant history leaving Bishop and Cable to team up and stop him. Along the way they get glimpses of things comic up this year, like Ms. Marvel travelling through important moments in mutant history. This Steve Foxe guy's pretty good.

Gunnerkrigg Court, Volume 3: Reason ★★★★★
The writing in this volume has gotten tighter and tighter while the Siddell's is quickly developing his own art style, a bit reminiscent of Jeff Smith or Chris Bachalo when he was drawing Death. This volume has gotten darker than the previous 2 while giving us more answers as we're pulled more and more into the mysteries of Gunnerkrigg Court.

Gunnerkrigg Court, Volume 4: Materia ★★★★★
The series begins to take a more adult tone as Antimony spends a lot of time in the forest. There's a lot of world building going on in both the forest and at the Court. We find out a lot about past events as Antimony grows apart from a lot of the other class members. This series just gets better and better.

Today's trip to the comic book store.

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees: Rite of Spring #1
Archie Meets Jay and Silent Bob #1
Ultimate Spider-Man: Incursion #2
Absolute Superman #9
Aquaman #7
Transformers #22
Uncanny X-Men #17

I feel like you may want to read some of Giffen and DeMatteis's Justice League from the 90s just because of the inclusion of Guy Gardner and the Justice League. Guy Gardner certainly seems to be the same jerk from that era. The rest of the team is different though.

I'm a software engineer. The way they fired the whole staff but then made them hang on to get their severance while Amazon very poorly brought Comixology in house, making it worse along the way really irked me. They basically pulled another GR, another software purchase that they've severely bungled and barely support. BTW, at least one IRCB staffer worked for Comixology at the time this all went down so they are just never getting my money.