Comic Reviews (January 7th, 2015)
From worst to best, with almost everything being something I paid money for…
Miracleman #14
I say almost because I put this back on the rack at the shop. Apparently a printing error rendered key portions of the dialogue in this issue illegible. Look, I’m willing to pay $4.99 for sixteen pages of story on the grounds that it’s a high quality reproduction of a historically important comic. I think it’s a bit much, and I wish this had other formats, but it’s obviously something I’m willing to pay money for. But for fuck’s sake, Marvel. If you’re charging what you do for this book, you don’t get to have printing errors. This is properly appalling.
X-Men #23
Between frankly awful art and an overly leisurely first issue, this was quite the disappointment. G Willow Wilson on X-Men is an auto-buy for me, and I’ll stick out this arc, but man, I’d have bet on this being in the top three of any week, and certainly of a week with only six books, so this is a bit of a shocker.
Amazing Spider-Man #12
While I appreciate the “let’s do a crossover where you don’t have to buy more than the main title” to pull it off ethos of Spider-Verse, I have to say, if the way this is accomplished is having a huge swath of every issue consist of Peter Parker basically going “uhhh, fight scene, can you hang on for a moment while I take a phone call in which someone gets me up to speed on the tie-in books,” it might just be better to declare it a twenty-part crossover and tell people to buy every book.
Trees #8
If you thought the end of the first arc (and what was originally possibly to be the end of the series) was going to in some way clarify the pacing or logic of this book, you were hilariously mistaken.
Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #2
I was eating lunch while I read this comic, and the scene with Angela returning the ball nearly killed me. The rest is good fun as well – I did not expect this comic to be quite so funny, in fact, which is perhaps strange given that Gillen is co-writing it.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1
Everything I wanted from this title. Big, colorful, silly, and with tiny extra jokes printed at the bottom of most of the pages, which isn’t really a surprise given how well Ryan North uses extra punchlines over at Dinosaur Comics. A total hoot. Very much recommended.
January 7, 2015 @ 2:04 pm
Trees is total bonkers. Tho it for some reason has moved to the top of my read pile each month.
Yet there are plots that get completely ignored for entire books, the pacing is totally unpredictable, and I can't tell if there is any link between these disparate plots aside from the impending assured desctruction of every character. I hope the actual 'Tree' hook gets paid off is SOME way or else I'm going to feel more than a little duped here. Status quo for an Ellis book tho, I suppose.
January 7, 2015 @ 2:19 pm
[Comics I've been reading 4]: Trees #8: This series is one of Image's crown jewels with admirably un-Ellisian writing by Warren Ellis. Unfortunately, I think this issue is my least favorite so far. There's just too much action (Jason Howard's artwork is as great as ever) and not enough talking…The resolution of the Chinese plot thread had me gasping. I looked away from one panel in particular and dared only after the gathering of some mental strength to read on. I don't know how convincing the final conflict in the Italian segment is. It somehow seems a bit affected (one last kiss and then death) and also poorly motivated, at least on first glance.
January 8, 2015 @ 3:19 am
I wouldn't have realised the printing error in Miracleman was unintentional if it hadn't been drawn to my attention; to me, the character it affects only speaking in pure black speech balloons made complete sense in the scenes he appears. That's not meant as an excuse for the error, but an observation that it's interesting when a production mistake comes across as a deliberate stylistic choice.