Browsing: Review

Or – “Off To Meet My Doom, Mom! See You After School!”    Comic book publishing schedules puzzle me. The Twelve hasn’t come out in what seems like a year, while Agents of Atlas is apparently on a bi-weekly status, and Spider-Man is coming out every sixteen minutes or so. Wolverine alone accounts for half the forests destroyed in the United States every month. The major publishers can’t seem to decide whether it’s a market for the celebrity auteur writer, or whether it’s the characters who sell the books regardless of creator. When Wolverine #73 came out a few weeks…

Editor’s Note: To tie in with the question we posed to readers earlier, we’re giving our very own Marlowe Lewis a chance to slip into the Marvel Editor in Chief chair and have an imagined conversation with Jeph Loeb over the latest issue of Ultimatum #4.

Or – “Spins A Web, Any Size!  The Devil Cuts His Marriage Ties!  Look Out…” …here comes the newly-single-by-editorial-caveat-’cause-change-is-bad-but-marriage-is-even-worse-and-things-were-apparently-better-in-the-Marvel-Universe-in-1973 Spiiiderrr-Maaaan! What?  Too mean?

Or – “Cheese!” Japan is one of those world cultures that has been so thorougly disseminated that most every one of us could tell you what we THINK it’s like in the land of the Rising Sun.  I suspect that there aren’t schoolgirls who appear to be well above 18 on every street corner, nor are there flying cars full of cyborgs or guys with incredibly spiky hair everywhere you turn.  For all the things Japan has given us, (Anime, Sony, every intarweb girl Stephen loves, creepy robot dogs, even a regular love life during my college years) we’re about…

Or – This Just In…Ultimate Spider-Man is Dead? For 133 issue, Brian Michael Bendis has consistently cranked out Spider-Man stories that allowed many non-Marvel readers to get into one of the biggest and most recognized heroes in the world. Sadly, we’ve reached the end of the Ultimate Spider-Man series – at least in this incarnation, and it doesn’t look good for the wall crawler.

Or – “Hey, A Wolverine Cover!  That’s Novel…” Molly Hayes, the youngest Runaway, is apparently the only mutant in the Marvel Universe who has never attended the Xavier School.  Used to be that made sense, as she was on the West Coast and the Xavier Academy was hiding in upstate New York, right down the road from the Eastland School.  (Little known fact: Mrs. Edna Garrett used to work for Chuckie X before an unfortunate accident involving Cyclops and a creampuff.)  Either way, this longitudinal disparity is no more and it’s just about time for the most effective and dangerous…

or – When G-Mo got his caps back I picked up Batman and Robin #1 today and sat down to read it with great trepidation.  I haven’t been the greatest fan of what has happened to the Batman titles over the last three years (as evident on the site), and certainly was not a fan of the person behind the curtain pulling the strings to shape the DCU to his world view. I made sure to only drink water throughout the morning to keep the body and mind pure, and ate a light lunch so as not to upset my…

There is a detective named Chu It’s extremely hard to come up with a new concept in comics but in my very long reading experience I can honestly say that I have never heard this one before. You see, there’s this homicide cop who eats the victims flesh to gain psychic information about how they died and armed with that inside knowledge; go out to try to catch their killers. If nothing else, you have to give the writer John Layman credit for coming up with this quixotic notion. Imagine yourself going into a major film studio pitch meeting in…

The Doom that Came to Robo So here we go with the second installment of the Shadow from Beyond Time story line.  If you thought the first issue didn’t have enough of the fighty-fighty, and the laughy-laughy, then you’re going to be pleased as Punch (although without the murder and infanticide), as Robo and Charles Fort attempt to bring down the monster Lovecraft with a roadster and a couple of lightning guns.

Three issues in and we’re still no closer to discovering what ultimately made The Plutonian snap and switch sides from good to bad.  We’ve learned about his love life, and her betrayal of his secret identity, which makes me wonder what Mark Waid has in store for readers next.

It’s been coming for ages — and we all knew it. This unnatural and unnerving, pacifist side of this alternate future world Wolverine was something that was crying out to be changed. Even though every faithful reader who has been following this very entertaining story over the past several issues understood the very valid reason that Logan had for being the way he is, we felt totally unsatisfied with the status quo. Large amounts of mayhem were surely going to erupt at some time in the immediate future — and we all knew it.

Or – “How You Know When You’re Old…” Several years ago, while in college (roughly the late Cretaceous Period) Bruce Otter and I used to drive halfway across the state to Salina, Kansas, to visit several hole-in-the-wall comic book shops and thrift stores for comics.  On one such outing, Bruce picked up the first issue of Knights of The Dinner Table, while I, in my wisdom chose to pick up U.N. Force (and I think we all know how well that book did.)  Over a decade late, KoDT is still going strong, and celebrated their sesquicentennial (look it up) issue,…

The return of Michael Kaluta to the character that he designed over thirty years ago is totally stunning. At several times throughout the book, this extraordinarily talented artist seems to be channeling the spirits of both Caravaggio and Bernini into his exquisitely rendered panels and the results would not look out of place, framed on any art gallery wall.

It’s not often we review action figures on this site (we really need to do more of ‘em), but when a company sends us one for possible review, we’ll go ahead and give it workout. Shocker Toys has had its Indie Spotlight series out for a while, and its Maxx series includes the SCUD: The Disposable Assassin Sol variant figure.  Since it is in our hands, and out of the protective packaging, it’s up for review today.