I’d bet you five dollars that Rose will either be killed or leave the group by the end of the next arc, like that Russian agent from “One Small Step”. Her martial role is superfluous with 355, and while a love interest for Dr. Mann might be interesting for a while, such things never end well in stories like this. It looks like Amp’s got a mate picked out for him, though. At least one species will survive, at least.
What I’d like to see for Y is for them to tie up the loose ends (retrieve Ampersand, find out what’s up with Beth), and then to skip a head a few years in continuity. Dr. Mann has figured out a cure or innoculation, and they’ve started regrowing the human race using a combination of clones and artificial insemination from Yorick and later the astro-baby.
Now, that’s not much, and it’s all terribly hard to disribute and use, so they’ll be complications and moral quandries over which nations get access, while everyone starts getting older and more desperate. Also, how Yorick feels about being the new Adam, father to virtually every new birth on the planet.
I’m getting kinda sick of the feminist Mad Max stuff, and I wouldn’t mind moving on.
Some good points Fenris though I’ll have to disagree with you on the House of M (unless all of your spoilers are true and then…damn, then I’m never reading Bendis again).
So far I have enjoyed the development and Bendis’ neat way of populating the world. I’m also a fan of the New Avengers but more so because I love the Sentry and I am curious to see what will be done with him. I agree with you though that Wolverine is in no way the “center” of this team.
Frank Cho’s art is fantastic in Marvel Knights: SHANNA THE SHE DEVIL #6. In some ways it’s hard to imagine a better showcase for his Marvel Comics debut. As for the pace of his storytelling, I think the reason why this installment might feel a bit overlong is that the doctor’s decision and Shanna’s reaction, however dramatic, somehow didn’t come across as strongly as needed. This could be the emotional climax of the story; the moment where the young superwoman learns about self-sacrifice and perhaps, needed a shade more emphasis, visually. I was left wondering if she will emulate his example in the miniseries’ conclusion next month. I’m certainly hoping Cho manages to avoid the “part 6 letdown” I’m going describe below.
The two Wildstorm Signature Series Books seemed to suffer from the same pacing problem, one I’m finding more and more common now that many miniseries seem to be written with eventual trade collections in mindOne recurring problem is a matter of pacing. In Ellis & Sprouse’s OCEAN and Palmiotti, Gray and Santacruz’s Twilight Experiment, the emotional climax of the story takes place in issue #5, leaving the last issue, #6 feeling a bit like an overlong epilogue, however action packed. The reader is left with the unsatisfied feeling one gets at the end of many feature films these days that, there was a producer or distributor who said that script needed more guns, cars, narrow escapes and chase scenes to close out the film: with the result that however intriguing the preceding tale, the end of the story seems forced or “tacked on”. This was certainly the case in Batman’s final battle with the League of Shadows in the recent film adaptation Batman Begins, and definitely the case with OCEAN #6 and TWILIGHT EXPERIMENT #6.
The phenomenon was much more noticeable in OCEAN, in part because of the long wait between issues #5 and #6, and in part because Ellis never managed to make me care as much for his weapons inspector and the people he met along the way as I do for the primary cast of his run on The Authority or Planetary. And the fights in zero and manipulated gravity, and the “primitive” Apollo style re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere was nowhere near as exciting as they should have been at least to me, very possibly because I simply don’t know enough about the physics involved. This might have been ameliorated by some dialogue or narration explaining the situation, I’m just not sure.
In retrospect, the emotional climax of TWILIGHT EXPERIMENT really took place at the end of issue #4, where Renee and Michael’s hormones get the better of them, and they kiss, and thus, without quite realizing it, finding the strength to put aside their personal issues (well explicated in previous issues) and do what’s necessary to preserve humanity and become the heroic adults they were meant to be (though clearly, no one ever asked them, but then do any of us ever get to ask for the situations we find ourselves born into? - which may well be the point of P&G’s story.) As a result, the action of issues #5 and #6 felt a bit perfunctory, however enlivened by the presence of the Righteous (who would have felt right at home among Ellis’ Changers in * Stormwatch: Change or Die *, a story many consider a prequel to * The Authority *). Still P&G succeeded in making this reader empathize with Renee and Michael earlier on, so I was able to glean some gratification from the conclusion of their story, despite myself. Still, one detail bugs me about the end of this story. It’s not at all clear to me what happened to the Righteous when he gets sucked into the curtain. Was he killed? Or did he simply get dumped in the “parallel universe”. If so, does this mean all our young heroes really accomplished was to dump “our” problem on another world? Either way, this miniseries was a better rebuttal to the charge of writer artists like Darwyn Cooke or Joe Kelly that titles like the Authority reflect nothing more than older readers depraved, adolescent fantasies. Here’s a book about growing up and beyond such stories, while acknowledging the real personal issues that often give rise to such fantasies in the first place.
I didn’t intend to pick up DC Special: the RETURN OF DONNA TROY #2 but caved in at the prospect of Garcia Lopez and Perez’ take on the select group of 80’s Titans (Arsenal, Nightwing, Starfire, Raven and Cyborg) and a handful of the current generation of Titans and Outsiders (Shift, Kid Flash, and the new Wonder Girl), and despite myself, enjoyed the story, which brings this group of young heroes together to urge an utterly brainwashed(and mysteriously reborn) Donna Troy back to the heroic fold, even if it means betraying the mission set by her elders, the Titans of Greek Myth. So far the story has been a bit confusing. It might have helped a lot of readers if DC had pushed a reprint of the 1989 ”Who is Wonder Girl” story (from * New Titans #50-55*) sometime after Graduation Day and before the current DC Special miniseries. (Some details can be found at http://titanstower.com/source/whoswho/dtroy.html -
I hope Phil Jimenez plans on doing more to explain Nightwing’s change of heart. This story takes place after “The Insiders” Titans/Outsiders crossover concluded last week, than implying that the miracle of finding Donna alive is enough to shake him out of his “anti-teammate” frame of mind, as welcome as this development is (it never really rang true in earlier issues of Outsiders. Likewise I hope to see Garcia Lopez and Perez’ take on two of the new Outsiders: Thunder and Grace Choi, before the miniseries is over.
GOTHAM CENTRAL #33 was an intriguing enough set up issue for the Dead Robin arc to follow, and featured a wonderful suspense-building close. One cannot help but sympathize with the put upon detectives of Gotham’s special crimes unit, as they problems cops deal with in every police procedural are magnified and redoubled by their unwelcome interactions with supers and vigilantes. (I thought the throwaway joke that Batman beats Montoya and Chris to Arkham, with predictable results, hilarious. I was left really looking forward to seeing Driver, Mac, Montoya and the others reactions to questioning the Teen Titans next issue. (I was relieved to see the way new penciller Kano, previously on Pfiffer’s H-E-R-O, adjusted his drawing style to more closely match the established “look” of the book (though I wonder how much of this is due to Stephan Gaudiano’s finishes.)
It might just be a matter of the Williams and Johnson’s novel story content, or Seth Fisher’s quirky, semi-surreal illustration style, but I found BATMAN LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #193 to be the most satisfying read of the week. The idea of a young Batman recruiting a team of experts from varied fields (criminal psychology, forensics, electrical engineering, military spec-ops and crime) to help him in his endeavors, as pulp fiction characters like the Shadow and the Avenger (Justice Inc.) did in years past, and the entertaining way the story is told (which also makes it a fine counterpoint to the tragedy of Victor Fries transformation into Mr. Freeze), really captured my imagination last night. This is shaping into a fun story arc. I’m looking forward to the new teams reactions to the realities of crime fighting next issue. The only “shadow on the fun” is the very real possibility that Williams and Johnson may not be planning to have many of the new recruits survive the story arc. After all, they are going up against Mr. Freeze, one of the most casually lethal of Batrman’s foes. None of them are active today, and it may well be too much of a retcon at this late date (this is supposed to be pretty early on in Batman’s crusade) for any of them to suddenly pop up in batbooks set in the present day.
Somehow I missed my copy of Simone and Eaglesham’s VILLAINS UNITED #3 this week. (It’s still on my “pull and hold list.) Hopefully there’ll be extra copies at one of my LCS’s this weekend. Most everyone else seems to have enjoyed it so.
My apologies: I forgot to change the yellow text tags (used and accepted by other message boards) to spoiler tags for this board… (reading the yellow text is easy, just run your cursor over the text, as you would a spoiler tag).
To quote a buddy of mine “It’d be a funny ol’ world if we all agreed on everything!”
Seriously, I love much of Bendis’s work myself, but his gritty, low-powered, gacially slow Avengers just isn’t to my liking personally. .
Actually, I think that if he’d kept a similar line-up and called them “The Defenders”, I’d have had much less of a problem with it. The point (for me) is that the Avengers should be taking on Kang, or the slavering Kree hordes or Ultron or the Squadron Sinister. I want high-powered cosmic stuff from the Avengers. Luke Cage and Spider-Woman and Spider-Man and (gad!) Daredevil are too street-level for that.
BTW, fellow comics geeks: Does anyone know where or in what issues of Batman/Detective Harvey Bullock got kicked out of the Gotham PD? I’m rereading my Gotham Centrals and there’ve been a number of references to it.
Fenris, it was fallout from Officer Down. I can’t remember more specifically, although I guess it would have been in one of the core Batman books sometime between OD and Bruce Wayne: M/F.
I can spoil it for you if you want (to the best of my vague recollection).
People have been reviewing older stuff they’ve come across and TPBs, so I’ll throw down something I found at the library* today.
Fray: Wow. I was hesitant, since I knew Joss drew on some of this stuff for the last season of Buffy, and the last season of Buffy wasn’t very good. But this just worked. Tougher and grittier than Buffy, but with more heart than Faith, Mal’s a hell of a character. An excellent extension of the Buffy mythos, which was a well I thought was running pretty dry. The plot’s excellent. Whedon surprised me three times in the story. Is there any more Fray stuff, or is that it?
*A small but surprisingly good collection. They’ve got a few generic Manga and Superhero books sure, but also the essentials, Watchmen and DKR, even a Spirit Archives and Understanding Comics. Some librarian did their homework.
Leaper, I have fixed your spoiler tags way back there… because some one reported it. I would never have seen your post requesting a fix, not in a zillion years, because I generally wouldn’t have read this thread.
So, for future (and this is for everyone’s benefit): if you want to attract a moderator’s attention, please please please PLEASE do it by the REPORT POST button (the exclamation point in the little red triangle in the upper right corner of each post.) If you want to report your own post, there’s no little REPORT POST button, so report the post ahead or behind yours, and describe clearly what you’re intending. This will attract the Moderator’s attention, the report comes in email fairly quickly.
Posting a plaintive cry in the thread will only get the Moderator’s attention if he/she happens to read that thread. In Cafe Society, the odds are around 50:1 against me reading any given thread to see something like bad spoiler tags.
Well, this is the same team that once had Captain America, Quicksilver, Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch as their “power houses” so it isn’t unprecedented.
That said, the Sentry theoretically has the power of 10 PC Supermen in that he is literally invincible. So, if things get hairy then they can just whip out the Sentry to obliterate everything
