Review: Deadpool the musical (#49.1)

If you want to get into Deadpool and are afraid of jumping in blind – well this is the perfect starting point for you.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 19

Between work, delayed comic deliveries, an understandably demanding five-week-old daughter and my almost three-year-old son thinking my tablet PC (on which I read the comics I don’t collect in hard copy) is exclusively his for the purpose of playing Angry Birds – my New 52 One Sentence Reviews are becoming increasingly late.

I apologise, but am stubbornly committed to continuing my series and I know that, because of the leaderboard, dropping the ball just once means the whole thing is over red rover.

So, better late than never (like Justice League #5, I guess) … here are last week’s reviews.

Each comic is scored out of five and at the end I have a cumulative leaderboard to show which are consistently excellent, which are on the rise, and which are circling the drain.

I have also reviewed the mini-series issues but they aren’t included in the leaderboard.

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead (although I try to avoid them).

Review: Voodoo #5

Voodoo #5

I’ve been enjoying Voodoo for the most part.  And I feel the same way about the New 52 in general.  Sure, they each have their problems – Voodoo danced (unsatisfactorily, so far) with some tricky sexual politics; the New 52 has had some major writing shake-ups and PR slip-ups – but they started off as ambitious, interesting ideas, something unpredictable in a market that desperately loves the smell of stagnation.  But lately, I’ve been having trouble with both as their flaws became more and more evident.  What does that mean for Voodoo #5?

Review: Wonder Woman #5

Wonder Woman #5, cover by Cliff Chiang

Wonder Woman is too many things to too many people.  Inevitably, any attempt to do a bold declaration of “This is what Wonder Woman stands for” turns out to be fairly divisive.  She is an ambassador of peace, but she is also a great warrior and military strategist.  She is chosen by the goddess of love, but no love interest will ever be worthy of her in the eyes of her fans. The contradictions continue, and help explain (I believe) why there is no one definitive Wonder Woman story for her fans.  Perhaps my favorite part about Brian Azzarello’s current run on Wonder Woman is that he doesn’t delve deep into Diana’s character and lose himself in that particular hall of mirrors.  No, under Azzarello’s pen, Wonder Woman is a supremely confident action heroine fighting massive, horrific enemies who see humans more as ants than people, a superhero trying to beat back the tide of a horror film.  It probably shouldn’t work.  It so does.

Top 10 Best Superhero Actors

Top ten best superhero actors.

Review: Batman #5

Batman #5

I haven’t reviewed Scott Snyder’s Batman in awhile.  It’s not because I haven’t been reading, or because it hasn’t been worth discussing.  By and large, I don’t review it on a monthly basis because openly gushing month after month would grow embarrassing pretty quickly — and this is a book worth gushing about.  Batman #5 continues Snyder’s winning streak, telling a chilling story that pits Batman against a truly worthy foe in a creepy, surreal, issue-long manhunt.

Review: DC Universe Presents #5

DC Universe Presents: Deadman #5

I have mixed feelings about my relationship with DC Universe Presents, particularly with the opening arc focusing on everyone’s favorite undead acrobat, Deadman.  That sounds really stupid. Let me explain. No, there’s too much – let me sum up.  On the one hand, I really like that writer Paul Jenkins had an ambitious idea for a self-contained story, with little by way of action and absolutely no big-name characters.  On the other hand, the plotting was fairly haphazard, the stakes were never properly established and the story’s fumbling reach for profundity fell short.  All of which makes this a tough book to review, but an interesting book to contemplate.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 18

Once again – with gusto – here are my New 52 One Sentence Reviews.

Each comic is scored out of five and at the end I have a cumulative leader board (averaging the scores of each title) to show which are consistently excellent, which are on the rise, and which are circling the drain.

I have also reviewed the mini-series issues but they aren’t included in the leaderboard.

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead (although I try to avoid them).

Review: Catwoman #5

Catwoman #5, Cover by Guillem March

Catwoman #1 was not an easy book to support.  The cheesecake was excessive, the sex was gratuitous, and the take on Selina seemed, at first, to be incredibly reductive and simplistic.  But I enjoyed it anyway.  The pacing was propulsive, the action was non-stop, and there was a wit, a sense of fun, that many books in the New 52 lacked.  Those were the qualities that kept me interested in the book, and I’m glad I stuck by it: though Winick and March’s Catwoman is still fairly flawed, it’s also a ceaselessly exciting read, a hyper-active take on a classic character that magnifies all her best and worst traits to a cartoonish degree and then sets her loose to wreak havoc in DC’s grimmest city.

A New DC Digital Initiative

 

I’ve already spoken at some length about what I see as the flaws of the recent push into digital made by DC, Marvel, Image and other major comics companies.  Like the music industry, they tried for a long time to treat digital products exactly like their hard-copy counterparts, a strategy that failed miserably.  People WANT digital – easy to find, cheap to buy digital – but comics companies have been reluctant to fully make that shift.

Now, I’m not here to talk about the pros and cons of digital comics.  I love my local comic shop, and when I moved to Atlanta, before I found a place to live, before I found a grocery store, I made sure to find a good comic shop – go Oxford Comics! – but there needs to be a balance between digital and print, between new and old.  And, according to this report on The Beat and this post on The Source blog, DC may have just made a very, very smart push towards finding that balance.

Review: Legion Lost #5

It’ll sound like a bad pun, but I’ll say it anyways.  Legion Lost, you have lost me.

The Lowdown on Conan Movies

The Lowdown on Conan Movies.

 

The Next Three New 52 Cancellations?

Rob Liefeld joins three ongoing series

Can DC honestly not understand that Rob Liefeld’s contribution to Hawk and Dove was the worst thing about it and – I have no doubt – one of the primary reasons it didn’t sell particularly well?

Their next step after canning the low-selling Hawk and Dove – GIVE LIEFELD THREE OTHER TITLES TO F@#$ UP!!!

Every so often I can look at a single Liefeld drawing and find something slightly appealing about it (I didn’t mind him on Deadpool Corps just from a historical perspective), but he is an AWFUL visual storyteller.

And as bad and lazy as a visual storyteller he is, he’s an even worse writer – from Youngblood (cough Teen Titans cough) to Agent America (ahem … no further comment necessary) his work is first and foremost derivative and unoriginal.  Let’s not even discuss the obvious links between Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Deathstroke/Slade Wilson (especially in the beginning before Deadpool’s character was developed in a way that differentiated him significantly from the DC villain).

Once again, DC are making decisions that make the New 52 feel less like a “bold, new direction for the future of comics” and more like Image Comics circa 1992.

The Unread Canon 13: Ultimate Spiderman #1-13

Ultimate Spider-man #1

When Marvel’s Ultimate line first launched, I hated it with the passion that only a fanboy can muster to hate something they’ve never read.  I eventually got around to sampling many of the titles, and what I read, I hated.  That tarred my opinion of the entire line for a good long while.  From the crass big-screen action of The Ultimates (which I never finished but plan to soon) to the cartoony retreads of Ultimate X-Men, it just seemed like a waste.  Here we had a major publisher, probably the biggest monthly comics publisher in the world, and they were wasting their time and money doing gritty reboots of old stories rather than doing something interesting and innovative.

I similarly dismissed Ultimate Spider-Man, though, unlike the other core books of the Ultimate Universe, I’d never actually read a page of it.  But I knew everything I needed to know – Spider-Man hasn’t grown and changed enough that I felt he really needed to have his entire mythos retold bit by excruciatingly slow, decompressed bit.  But then, something happened.  General interest for the Ultimates waned.  Same thing with Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four and a variety of other titles.  But Ultimate Spider-Man grew more and more respectable as the years passed until it became essentially the centerpiece of the Ultimate line and, this past year, made our list of the Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2011.

Last year was the year I caught up with Ultimate Spider-Man.  This year is the year I write about it.

Review: Batgirl #5

So I’ve been a bit quiet lately in my review writing.  Not that I don’t have the time right now, just that not much I’ve been reading has really striked me as worth the time to review.  First page of Batgirl 5 (pictured above) and more so the first few lines of the second page immediately made me want to write about this issue.

New 52: The First 6 Cancellations (and their replacements)

Anyone who has been paying attention to comic sales has doubtless seen countless reports on the performance of the New 52.  And while DC’s ambitious relaunch has done a lot of good for their market share (with Justice League routinely topping the charts and four books selling over 100k copies per month), the sales for a number of their books started lower than they hoped and dropped fast to pre-relaunch levels.  Cancellations were imminent, and today, DC made the announcement, naming six books that will be concluding with issue number eight.

Review: The Punisher #7

The Punisher #7

I’ll admit, part of the reason you haven’t seen too many reviews of The Punisher popping up lately is, I lost interest.  Though the book opened strong, a detour featuring the Vulture was too campy to keep up the tone of the book, and a tightening financial situation made me decide to drop it.  But I like Rucka and Lark too much to stay away for long, and with sales on the title dropping like a rock and a bit of Christmas cash in my pocket, I decided to dive back in and see where things stood while I still could.

Review: The Shade #4

The Shade #4, cover by Tony Harris

One staple of James Robinson’s legendary Starman was “Times Past,” a set of stand-alone stories diving into the history of the Starman legacy and Opal City.  It was a way to tell a fun adventure story, introduce some fascinating character traits, or deepen the mythology he was patiently building without using too much tedious exposition.  So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened this month’s The Shade #4 and found myself enthralled by the Shade’s fantastic adventures in 1944, an excellent stand-alone adventure that deepens our understanding of the main plot while telling its own story and welcoming new readers.

Review: The Ray #2

The Ray #2, cover by Jamal Igle

In part because of the holidays, I did not review the first issue of DC’s new mini-series, The Ray.  This is a problem for me.  Now, sure, there are plenty of books that go unreviewed.  Ideally, I’d like to buy every new #1 I see on the comics shelves each week, but with the rising cost of comics and the ever-diminishing amount in my bank account, that isn’t realistic.  I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of you – sure, I firmly believe that almost everyone who gives Animal Man or Mystic or any of a dozen of other awesome books a shot will like it… but that’s an investment we can’t all make.

DC New 52 – One Sentence Reviews, Part 17

So, I’m soldiering on with my One Sentence Reviews, in which I read every DC New 52 comic for the week and sum each of them up in badly constructed single sentence reviews. Despite the arrival of a new baby and the fact that some titles are a real chore to get through, I’m too hard-headed to quit at this stage and will keep it up as long as I can.  I can’t promise, however, that sleep deprivation hasn’t affected my ability to be fair or rational in my reviews.

Each comic is scored out of five and at the end I have a cumulative leader board (averaging the scores of each title) to show which are consistently excellent, which are on the rise, and which are circling the drain.

I have also reviewed the mini-series issues from the week but, as usual, they aren’t included in the leaderboard.

Warning, there could be spoilers ahead (although I try to avoid them).